Manual of Classical Erotology (De figuris Veneris)
General
Manual of Classical Erotology (De figuris Veneris)
Erotic literature; Sex customs -- Greece; Sex customs -- Rome
The _Clazomenae_ are without a doubt the man’s buttock, limp and
cracked, as those of _patients_ will be, as those of Carinus were, whom
Martial, XI., 37 blames for “his lacerated anus.” Ausonius calls them so
from the Greek, in Latin “frango” (I break), thus playing with the name
of a city. Gonzalvo the Cordevan makes a similar pun, when, desiring to
pedicate, he says, he wishes to go to Aversa; also when he wishes to
irrumate the mouth, he says: “I go to the Orient”, or when he is about
to lick the vulva, in Latin _ligurire_, “I go to Liguria.” By calling
the Clazomenae hammered (battered) Ausonius means to imply that they
were as if polished with a hammer, by having served as an anvil. It is
as if my fellow-countrymen were to say in joke of a bald man (in German
_Kahl_), “he scratches his polished Kehl.” What could be clearer or
wittier? Forcellini is therefore wrong in saying this passage of
Ausonius has no sense. Other editors have _inclusas_ instead of
_incusas_, indicating the fissure which separates the buttocks, by the
rotundities of which it is on both sides closed in. But in the first
place the Clazomenae may well be the buttocks, they being cleft, though
not indeed themselves a cleft; in the second place, who could imagine
this miserable man depilated the cleft of the buttocks rather than the
buttocks themselves?
Some persons, by a refinement of luxury, employed women to depilate
them. Such women called themselves _ustriculae_ (from _urere_, to burn),
as they made use of a sticky plaster of boiling dropax to burn the hair
on the legs and other parts of the body. Tertullian (_De Pallio_, ch.
4), says: “So effeminate as to employ _ustriculae_”; while Salmasius,
commenting playfully on the passage, p. 284, declares: “Once upon a time
_ustriculae_ served to depilate the legs; now they serve to harass our
minds.” Augustus, who according to Suetonius, “was in the habit of
singeing his legs with burning nutshells, to make the hair grow more
silky” (_Augustus_, ch. 68), no doubt made use of the nimble hands of
these _ustriculae_.
Women likewise resorted to depilation[27], looking upon the fleece of
the pubis as something disgusting. Martial:
“... Nor yet one of your mother’s pots full of foul rosin, such as
the women of the outer suburbs use to depilate themselves withal”
(XII., 32).
As men employed women to free them of hair, so women offered their pubis
without shame to men for the same office. Pliny’s bile rises at this
(_Nat. Hist._, XXIX., 8): “Women are not afraid to show their pubis. It
is but too true, nothing corrupts manners more than the art of the
medical man.”
The emperors themselves condescended to undertake this office for their
concubines.
Suetonius, _Domitian_, ch. 22:
“It was rumoured, that he was fond of depilating his concubines
himself, and would bathe amid a crowd of the most infamous
courtesans.”
Lampridius, _Heliogabalus_, ch. 31:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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