Jacques (2002), however, argues in his recent edition that Nicander should be viewed equally as a poet and a doctor, and notes that poison was a very real danger in antiquity, in which he is followed by Clauss (2006). To this point I would add that magic that was based on herbs or other materia, and often conflated with poisoning, was also an omnipresent concern in the ancient world. Nicander’s poetic topics, which may seem, from a modern perspective, of little interest outside of the history of toxicology, zoology, botany, and pharmacy, have far different connotations in a world where one must protect oneself from hostile pharmaka and veneficium.

Vergil also follows Nicander’s lead in imitating Theocritus; his Eclogue 8 remixes Theocritus’ Idyll 2 with a more Roman interpretation of a love spell, including references to incanting crops from others’ fields — a crime of magic in the Twelve Tablets — picking venena (and by implication, performing veneficium), and drawing the moon from the sky, a popular trope associated with witches in ancient Rome. Vergil’s depiction of both pastoral magic and practical farming topics mirrors the similar dichotomy, and convergence, of the two in Nicander’s Theriaka and Alexipharmaka.

One might be inclined to translation veneficium as “poisoning,” in the context of the two named works about venomous animals, but in the context of a defense against magic, the word’s more magical connotations are most relevant. In any case, poisoning and magic were closely linked concepts in ancient Rome; I will discuss the intersection of the two in the term veneficium in the next chapter.

Considering how widely Pliny draws on Nicander as a source in his Natural History, it appears that the veneficium of a Greek didactic poet is far more acceptable in his eyes than the veneficium of a Persian magus. To Apuleius and Pliny, highly educated Romans, Nicander and Theophrastus do not teach magic (the arts of Magi), but the skeptical and learned perspective of these men may in fact be less accurate than the insight of the common people who perceived the strands of magical didactic shot through Nicander’s work. It is no surprise that Apuleius would make such a comparison, even if he disingenuously presents it as ridiculous.