Just to complicate things: after Theocritus's Delphis sleeps with Simaetha
and then quits visiting her, she threatens to use her magic to "bind" him
and, if that doesn't work, to poison him. The word "bind" is in Wells' and
Hines' translations. I'm not a Greek scholar and don't have the Loeb in
front of me; could one of you tell me whether the original Greek denotes
merely an enforced fidelity or whether it also denotes an
immobilization? If the latter, here again a beautiful woman, like Medusa
in Neptune's temple, is first bedded (in this case willingly), then
abandoned, and then turns into a terrible beauty who at least wishes to
astonify a man. Of course, Theocritus undercuts Simaetha's power by making
Simaetha's supposed sorcery unconvincing, suggesting by the very repetition
of her threats that those threats have little actual power of magic behind
them. Yet her male beloved's powers of immobilization, as Douglas's
quotation shows, have been quite effective.
Dorothy
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