Magic wheel, draw that man to my house. Three times I pour the libation, lady, and three times I say this: whether it is a woman lying beside him now or a man, may he forget them as completely as Theseus, they say, once forgot fair-haired Ariadne on the island of Dia.

Three libations, three times the words: Cholmeley notes that a triple call belonged to all ritual. Here the magic gives way to prayer and curse. Simaetha does not know who has Delphis now, a woman or a man, and she wishes him to forget either one. Forgetting could be worked by magic: Cholmeley cites Cicero on an orator who forgot his whole case in court and blamed poisons and spells (Brutus 217). Her model is Theseus, who left Ariadne on the island of Dia, later called Naxos, after she had saved him from the Labyrinth. The Odyssey tells her story another way (11.321–325); Catullus, in poem 64, follows Theocritus. Ariadne, like Medea, helped a foreign hero and was left behind.