There is, however, no need that the middle actor should fornicate or pedicate. He may be placed between his two companions in such a way that while he is enduring the assault of a pederast behind, he may in front irrumate, suck a member or lick a vulva. Hostius whose mind was so fertile in inventing obscenities that he was held up as an example to future ages, has tried all these postures and even added fresh variations. Seneca (_Nat. Quaest._, I., 16) has inveighed against him more vehemently than is perhaps fit for a philosopher. It seems to me as though some secret voluptuousness has been acting here on the sense of this rigid guardian of virtue; he says: “I will tell you here a story which will show you that lust will not disdain any artifice which is calculated to rouse desires, and to stimulate its own fury. The lasciviousness of Hostius was of the extremest kind. It was this rich miser, this slave of a hundred million sesterces, whose death, when he had been assassinated by his slaves, Augustus would not avenge, although he would not say that they were right to kill him. His lewdness was not contented with one sex; he was as passionate for men as for women. He had mirrors made which magnified the reflections so much that a finger appeared as big as an arm. These mirrors were placed in such a manner that when he had a man under him he could watch every movement of his accomplice, and enjoy as it were the fictitious size of his member. He chose his men carefully, the measuring tape in hand, and still had to deceive his insatiable passion. It would be too outrageous to report everything which this monster, that ought to have been torn into pieces, dared to say and do with his mouth; when surrounded on all sides by his mirrors he was the spectator of his own turpitudes, and those secret infamies which every man would deny, if accused of them, of such he took his fill not with his mouth only, but also with eyes. And, by Hercules, generally speaking crimes shun their own reflection; men who are bare of every feeling of honor and exposed to every insult, still have some sense of shame, and do not appear as they are. But he feasted his eyes on unheard of and unknown infamies, and, not content to see simply how he dishonored himself, he surrounded himself with mirrors, for the sake of multiplying and grouping his lubricities. As he could not see unaided everything distinctly when, pedicated by one man, he had his head between the thighs of another, he saw by his mirrors what he was doing and how. He saw the lewd work of his mouth, and watched himself absorbing men by every orifice. Sometimes placed between a man and a woman, playing both ways the passive part, he was able to see the greatest abominations. Darkness was not for him! So far from being afraid of the light of day, he wanted it for his monstrous