“Take my word, and pluck out the hairs all over your body, and get it certified you depilate your buttocks. What for? you ask. You know they tell many tales about you; make them believe, Charidemus, that you are acting the _patient_.” It was not _patients_ only that had themselves depilated; men leading an idle, careless life followed the same practice[26]. “To be depilated, to have the hair dressed in tiers of ringlets, to tipple to excess in the baths,—these practices prevail in the city; still they cannot be said to be customary, for nothing of all this is exempt from blame” (Quintilian, _Instit. orat._, I., 6). It is rather surprising that the same Quintilian, whose bile is stirred by curled hair, has let it pass by patiently, that women should bathe together with men: “If it is a sure sign of adultery for a woman to bathe with men, why! it will be adultery to dine with young friends of the male sex, to have a male friend. You might as reasonably say a depilated body, a languid gait, a womanish robe, are certain signs of effeminacy, of want of virility; for such will seem to many to reveal immorality of character” (_Ibid._, V., 9). Martial, II., 39 has also noticed, and not once only, the habits of those men who practised feminine arts of the toilette, and looked just as if they had come out of a band-box: “Rufus, see you that man there on the first benches ... whose oiled curls exhale the whole shop of Marcelianus, and whose polished arms shine without a hair to be seen?” Again, he says, V., 62: “... Who is this Crispulus, who has legs undisfigured by a single hair?” Even the great Caesar did not disdain this coquetry, Suetonius, ch. 45: “He took too much care of his appearance, to the point of not only having his beard removed with nippers, and shaved with a razor, but even of being depilated, for which things he was blamed.” This custom is connected with those Samnite vases, filled with rosin and pitch to be heated for depilation, and for softening the pitch, found amongst the properties of Commodus, and which by the orders of Pertinax were sold by public auction. Julius Capitolinus speaks of them (_Pertinax_, 8). For removing the hair there were used in fact either tweezers or an unguent called dropax or psilothrum. Martial mentions the use of tweezers in the Epigram (IX., 28) quoted before; of dropax or psilothrum he speaks in Book III., 74: “You depilate your face with psilothrum and your head with dropax.” And again VI., 93: “She revives her youth with psilothrum.” And X., 65: “You rub yourself every day with dropax.” The dropax or psilothrum was obtained by melting rosin in oil (Pliny, _Natural History_, XIV. 20): “Rosin dissolves in oil, and I am ashamed to say, that the most honest use made of this mixture is to serve people as a depilatory.”