APPENDIX. 95 
There is a well-known passage in ‘“‘ The Art of Poetry,” written by 
the Roman 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 
was 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 
fEtolia and the sea. Strabo, an ancient writer on geography, and 
Livy, a Roman historian, both mention it. It was taken by the 
/Etolians, We know nothing of it as connected with hellebore, 
though Phiny tells us that Aitolian 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 (Eta and 
the famous pass of Thermopyle, but we do not hear of this town as 
producing hellebore, except on the slight authority of the 
~exicographer, Stephanus of Byzantium, who lived in the sixth 
century of our era, The third Anticyra, the only one which 
we know to have been famous in classical times for the 
manufacture of this drug, was situated on the southern coast of 
Phocis, not far from the base of Mount Parnassus, and within a few 
miles of Mount Helicon. The position of it is well known, and it is 
now named Aspra Spitia ; it was not an island, as Pliny and others 
have wrongly said, and never can have been so in historic times ; 
but it stood ona peninsula and had a good harbour. In Horace’s 
day 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 
man he was afool. Amongst others who had gone through this 
medical 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 
could make madmen sane would make sane men still wiser. Also 
Drusus, a famous popular leader of the Romans, was cured there of 
epilepsy. The same writer adds that this drug, which retained its 
