Poisonous drugs were used as philtres or love-potions, and we know from Demosthenes[479] that drugs were administered in Athens to influence men to make wills in a desired manner. Women were most addicted to the crime of poisoning amongst the Greeks. They were called φαρμακίδες and φαρμακευτρίαι. By the Romans the crime of poisoning was called Veneficium; and here again, as in other times and places, it was most usually practised by women. It lent itself to the weakness of the gentler sex, who could not avenge their injuries by arms, and there is little doubt that many women were as unjustly suspected of poisoning as we know they were of witchcraft in an ignorant age when pestilence and obscure diseases filled the minds of the people with fear and suspicion. Thucydides tells us[480] the Athenians in the time of the great pestilence believed that their wells had been poisoned by their enemies. When the city of Rome was visited by a pestilence in the year 331 B.C., a slave girl informed the curule aediles that the Roman matrons had caused the deaths of many of the leading men of the State by poisoning them. On this information about twenty matrons, some of whom, as Cornelia and Sergia, belonged to patrician families, were detected in the act of preparing poisonous compounds over a fire. They protested that they were innocent concoctions; the magistrates compelling them to drink these in the Forum, they suffered the death they had prepared for others. Locusta was a celebrated female poisoner under the Roman emperors. She poisoned Claudius at the command of Agrippina, and Britannicus at that of Nero, who even provided her with pupils to be instructed in her deadly art. Tacitus tells the story,[481] Suetonius says,[482] that the poison she administered to Britannicus being too slow in its action, Nero forced her by blows and threats to make a stronger draught in his presence, which killed the victim immediately. She was executed under the emperor Galba. Clement of Alexandria refers to the Susinian ointment in use in his time, which was made from lilies, and was “warming, aperient, drawing, moistening, abstergent, antibilious, and emollient,” a truly marvellous unguent indeed if it possessed only half of these virtues. He tells of another ointment called the Myrsinian, which was made from myrtle berries, and was “a styptic, stopping effusions from the body; and that from roses is refrigerating.”[483] * * * * *