APPENDIX. 95 



There is a well-known passage in ^^ The Art of Poetry/' written by 

 the Eoman poet Horace, in which he says, that to gain a reputation 

 as a poet, a man must be so mad that three Anticyras cannot cure 

 him, and must never have his hair cut. Multiplying by three 

 wag a common superlative figure of speech in Latin, as in any 

 other languages, and perhaps Horace meant no more than this ; 

 but, on the other hand, he may have known that there were in 

 Greece three towns named Anticyra, and possibly they were 

 all places where the drug hellebore was prepared. One Anticyra 

 was on a narrow strip of the land of the Locrians, between 

 ^tolia and the sea. Straboj an ancient writer on geography, and 

 Livy, a Roman historian, both mention it. It was taken by the 

 xtOHians in the second Punic war, and given over to their allies, the 

 Italians. We know nothing of it as connected with hellebore, 

 though Phiny tells us that iEtoIian hellebore, which was of bad 

 quality, was used to adulterate the better Parnassian kind. There 

 Was another Anticyra in the south-eastern corner of Thessaly, 

 three or four miles from the sea, near the base of Mount CEta and 

 the famous pass of Thermopylae, but we do not hear of this town as 

 producing hellebore, except on the slight authority of the 

 lexicographer, Stephanus of Byzantium, who lived in the sixth 

 eentury of our era. The third Anticyra, the oidy one which 

 ■^0 know to have been famous in classical times for the 

 nianufacture of this drug, was situated on the southern coast of 

 Pnocis, not far from the base of Mount Parnassus, and within a few 

 iiiiles of Mount Helicon. The position of it is well known, and it is 

 DOW named Aspra Spitia ; it was not an island, as PJiny and others 

 have wrongly said, and never can have been so in historic times ; 

 but it stood on a peninsula and had a good harbour. In Horace's 

 "^y it was a place of resort for insane or epileptic patients, who went 

 there to take a course of hellebore under resident physicians. Hence, 

 to say, «' You should go to Anticyra," was a polite way of telling a 

 i>ian he was a fool. Amongst others who had gone through this 

 »iedical course there, Pliny mentions the philosopher Carneades, who 

 went there for intellectual training, before publicly declaiming against 

 the dogmas of the Stoics, apparently supposing that a medicine which 



.dm 



Also 



Drusus, a famous popular leader of the Eomans, was cured there of 

 epilepsy. The same writer adds that this drug, which retained ita 



