The Natural History of Pliny, Volume 5 (of 6)

We will now resume the order originally proposed.2558 For stings inflicted by serpents fresh sheeps’-dung, boiled in wine, is considered a very useful application: as also mice split asunder and applied to the wound. Indeed, these last animals are possessed of certain properties by no means to be despised, at the ascension of the planets more particularly, as already2559 stated; the lobes increasing or decreasing in number, with the age of the moon, as the case may be. The magicians have a story that swine will follow any person who gives them a mouse’s liver to eat, enclosed in a fig: they say, too, that it has a similar effect upon man, but that the spell may be destroyed by swallowing a cyathus of oil.