Manual of Classical Erotology (De figuris Veneris)
General
Manual of Classical Erotology (De figuris Veneris)
Erotic literature; Sex customs -- Greece; Sex customs -- Rome
Do not miss, reader, the motive of this dance, with their buttocks
wriggling the girls finally sunk to the ground, reclining on their
backs, ready for the amorous contest. Different from this was the
Lacedæmonian dance * ** * ** when the girls in their leaps touched
their buttocks with their heels. Aristophanes in the _Lysistrata_, 82:
“Naked I dance, and beat my buttocks with my heels.” Pollux, IV.,
ch. 24: “As to the * ** * **, this was a Laconian dance. There
were prizes competed for, not only amongst the young men, but also
amongst the young girls; the essence of these dances was to jump
and touch the buttocks with the heels. The jumps were counted and
credited to the dancers. They rose to a thousand in the ** *** * !
!”
Yet more difficult was that kind of dance which was called ****, in
which the feet had to touch the shoulders. Pollux, _ibid._: “The ****
were dances for women: they had to throw their feet higher than their
shoulders.”
This kind of dance is not unknown in more modern times. J. C.
Scaliger, _Poetica_, book I., p. 651: “To this day the Spaniards touch
the occiput and other parts of the body with their feet.”
Footnote 97:
Diogenes Laërtius, VI., 2, 46: “One day, whilst masturbating himself
in the middle of the market he said: “I wish to heaven that I could
prevent my stomach from being hungry by rubbing it.” Plutarch, _De
Stoicorum repugnantiis_, 1044, vol. II., of his works: “Chrysippus
praised Diogenes for masturbating himself in public, and for saying to
the bystanders: “Would to heaven by rubbing my stomach in the same
fashion, I could satisfy my hunger.”
Footnote 98:
Mark with what minuteness the Ancients scrutinized nature; with what
ingenuity they gave expression to all their sentiments! Who dares
nowadays write such a verse describing as a natural thing what might
be but a solecism of his mentula.
Footnote 99:
Bassus, who was in the habit of taking his pleasures with young
minions, longhaired and slim, set the hands of his wife to work to
excite his mentula, when he came back to the conjugal couch fatigued
and languid. Martial, XII., 99:
“You tire yourself, oh Bassus, but with minions, paying them from
the dowry of your wife; thus when you return to her side, that
member bought at the price of many million sesterces, lies
languid. In vain her tender thumb tries to excite it, vain are her
tender words, it will not stand.”
Footnote 100:
The women of Aristophanes (_Lysistrata_, v. 227) threatened their
husbands with a similar rigidity of body:
“Though you may have your way, I shall be crabbed and never move.”
Footnote 101:
He had a hand of no less experience (Juvenal, VI., 422-23), that
cunning shampooer who put his fingers to the lady’s clitoris.
“And made his mistress’s thigh resound beneath his hand high up.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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