Idyll II

[1] The speaker of the poem, Simaetha, madly in love with Delphis, who has forsaken her, endeavours to subdue him to her by magic, and by invoking the Moon, in her character of Hecate, and of Selene.

[2] This monologue consists of two parts; in the first part a Coan girl named Simaetha, assisted by her maid Thestylis, lays a fire-spell upon her neglectful lover, the young athlete Delphis; in the second, when her maid goes off to smear the ashes upon his lintel, she tells the Moon how his love was won and lost.

[1] Upon this altar, in the first part of the rite, Simaetha burns successively barley-meal, bay-leaves, a waxen puppet, and some bran; next, the coming of the Goddess having been heralded by the distant barking of dogs and welcomes with the beating of brass, amid the holy silence that betokens her presence Simaetha pours the libations and puts up her chief prayer; lastly she burns the herb hippomanes and a piece of the fringe of her lover's cloak.

[a][4] Towards the end both of the first and of the second parts of the poem there is a suggestion that Simaetha only half believes in the efficacy of her spell; for she threatens that if it fails to bring back Delphis' love to her, poison shall prevent his bestowing it elsewhere.

[4] In the Loeb edition of Herodas, Sophron, and the other mime fragments, Jeffrey Rusten and Ian Cunningham define the genre thus: "[A] popular entertainment in which one actor or a small group portrayed a situation from everyday life in the lower levels of society, concentrating on depiction of character rather than on plot.