See, lady Moon, where my love came from. My skin often turned as yellow as fustic, all my hair fell from my head, and only skin and bones were left. Whose house did I not go to, what old woman who knew spells did I leave out? But nothing eased it, and the time went flying by.

Her symptoms are the ones Sappho gave the lover in her most famous poem, and Cholmeley sets this line beside Sappho's "greener than grass" (fragment 31 in today's numbering, his fragment 2). Simaetha turns the color of θάψος, which LSJ explains as fustic, the wood of the smoke tree, used to dye things yellow; an ancient note on Aristophanes' Wasps, quoting this line, says thapsus is that pale. Her hair falls out and she is skin and bone. Then she does what people did: she goes round every old woman who knew a spell. Nothing helps, and the days run on.