The wax she melts to soften a man is the same wax Scot's readers pricked to injure one, seventeen centuries later.
What this is
Everything else in the Archive is early modern and English. This is Greek, written for performance around 270 BC, and it is the oldest working here by a wide margin.
It is also the only one with a named speaker. Simaetha has been left by Delphis, who has not knocked at her door for twelve days. She works through the night with her servant Thestylis, talking to the moon, and the poem lets us hear what the operator was thinking while the charm was made. No grimoire does that.
A note on what it is doing in a collection of baneful magic. A charm to bring a lover back is not usually filed under harm. This one ends with a threat to kill him, and the threat is in the same breath as the charm.
What the text was understood to do
To compel a man who has left to return, and to poison him if the compulsion fails.
A note before the text. What follows is a historical document and a reading of it. It is recorded, not recommended.
The text, the reading of it, and where to find it.
The passage as Theocritus printed it in 1889, quoted in full and unaltered; the same passage in modern English; how the working was put together and what each part of it was for; the commentary; and the book, chapter and page it stands on.
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