Simaetha's verb is katadesomai. The noun form, katadesmos, Gow says, "is the regular expression for the constraint imposed by magic on its victims, and in literature it means little more than bewitchment." But note that the root of the noun is desmos, which can be some sort of fetter or band or, even, the bonds of imprisonment.
> 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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