Last week’s lecture on Antiquity was full of interesting relationships. For example, we talked about the relationships between men and women, magic and people, witches and males, enchantresses and males, a poet and his beloved, and love and evil. In today’s culture, love is generally thought of as a good thing, a thing that people want, but in antiquity, love is shown as an evil thing. Love is used synonymously with obsession and possessiveness, which is very different from how love is perceived today. Today love is more of a partnership, with requited and equals feelings on both sides. During antiquity, a male would become “lost in love” with a woman. This was especially true for poets, who would then wax eloquent love poems about their beloved. Interestingly enough, a poet who was in competition for a lady’s love would often pay a witch to cast a spell on his opponent. This type of magic was called agonistic magic, and it would supposedly cause the object of his love to either come to him or leave his rival. There were other types of spells that were more aggressive, known as binding spells. Of course, we now know that such magic was fake and that the spells didn’t work, but at the time of antiquity if you thought someone had cast a spell on you, you would then start to imagine the symptoms.