VĔNĒFĬCĬUM

the crime of poisoning, is frequently mentioned in Roman history. Women were most addicted to it: but it seems not improbable that this charge was frequently brought against females without sufficient evidence of their guilt, like that of witchcraft in Europe in the middle ages. We find females condemned to death for this crime in seasons of pestilence, when the people are always in an excited state of mind, and ready to attribute the calamities under which they suffer to the arts of evil-disposed persons. Thus the A then i ans, when the pestilence raged in their city during the Peloponnesian war, supposed the wells to have been poisoned by the Peloponnesians, and similar instances occur in the history of almost all states. Still, however, the crime of poisoning seems to have been much more frequent in ancient than in modern times; and this circumstance would lead persons to suspect it in cases when there was no real ground for the suspicion. At Athens the Pharma con Graphe was brought against poisoners. At Rome the first legislative enactment especially directed against poisoning was a law of the dictator Sulla—Lex Cornel i a de Sicariis et Venefic is—pa ed in B.C. 82, which continued in force, with some alterations, to the latest times. It contained provisions against all who made, bought, sold, po e ed, or gave poison for the purpose of poisoning. The punishment fixed by this law was the interdictio aquae et ignis.