Manual of Classical Erotology (De figuris Veneris)
General
Manual of Classical Erotology (De figuris Veneris)
Erotic literature; Sex customs -- Greece; Sex customs -- Rome
Footnote 49:
_Epigr._ 44, book IX:
“Catching me with a boy, you harass me with your cries, and you
tell me, my wife, that you have posteriors too.”
Many and many a time did Juno say the same to Jupiter the
Thunderer; yet he continued to sleep with slender Ganymede.
He of Tyrius, laying his bow aside, bent Hylas under him; think
you therefore that Megara was without buttocks? Dephné, by her
flight, vexed Phœbus, but his love’s ardour found relief in the
end in the boy Oebalius. Although Briseis slept, often with her
backs turned upon him, his smooth-skinned friend Patroclus was
more to the taste of the son of Aeacus.
Cease then, wife, to call your affairs by masculine names; better
consider you have two vulvas.
His Epigram XII., 98, treats of the same matter:
“Knowing as you do the honest walk and fidelity of your husband,
and that he never misuses your bed with concubines, why, foolish
woman, torment yourself about those venal boy lovers,—brief and
fugitive is the pleasure from their complaisance!
They are more useful to you than to their master, I tell you, for
they make him think that one wife is better than they all. They
give what you will not give;—But I will, you say, so that the
volatile husband stray not from the conjugal bed.
But it is not the same thing, I want a fig not an orange, and you
must know theirs is a fig, yours an orange; Look! a matron, a
woman like you, must know what belongs to her. Leave to boys what
is theirs, and do you make the best of what is yours.”
Footnote 50:
Some prostitutes sat (Plautus, _Poenulus_, I., ii., v. 54), others
stood: “Another man will only have the harlot that stands upright in
the unclean brothel,” (Horace, _Sat._ I., ii., v. 30.)
Footnote 51:
Juvenal’s _Messalina_ (VI., v. 123) prostitutes herself “under the
fictitious name-board of Lycisca.” Petronius: “I see men gliding in
stealthily between the name-boards and the naked prostitutes; I
understood, alas, too late, that I had been introduced into a bad
place.” (_Satyr._ ch. 7.) Martial, XI., 46:
“When you pass the threshold of a chamber with name-board over the
door, whether it be a boy or a girl that greeted you with a
smile....”
That the prostitutes changed their names is apparent from a passage in
Plautus (_Poenulus_, V., iii, 20, 21):
“For to-day they were to change their names, and will lend their
bodies for infamous traffic.”
Footnote 52:
Horace, _Sat. II._, vii, 48, 49:
“... Every woman that naked beneath the bright lamplight endured
the thrusts of a swollen member.”
Juvenal, VI., 130, 131.
“Foul with the reek of the lamp, she bore to the Imperial couch
the stink of the brothel.”
Footnote 53:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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