Tormenting women’s privates, licking the dews, staining the beard, there you have the man whom humid vulvas do not disgust! there you have a beard like that of the Ravola of Juvenal, IX., 4, “when he with beard all moist was rubbing against the groin of Rhodopé.” However, not to be dogmatic, it may be admitted that Ravola’s moist beard may have been intended merely the wet hair of a fornicator’s pubis. From the above passage of Aristophanes we may deduce surely enough that the expression “working with the tongue,” which he also uses, rather ambiguously, with respect to the same Ariphrades, applies to a _cunnilingue_ rather than to a _fellator_, _Wasps_, 1847-77: “Then Ariphrades, the best endowed of all, of whom his father said once, he never had a teacher, but prompted by nature, of his own free will, learned how to work his tongue, visiting every brothel!” The same personage re-appears in the _Peace_, 885, where he is described without any circumlocution as imbibing the feminine secretion by way of a sauce: “And throwing himself on her he will drink up all her juice.” The Greeks, however, had in this kind of voluptuousness a host of imitators amongst the Romans. Mamercus Scaurus is known to us through Seneca (_De Beneficiis_, IV., ch. 31), in this light: “Did you not know when you appointed Mamercus Scaurus as Consul, that he swallowed the menses of his servant girls by the mouthful? Did he make a secret of it? Did he pretend to be a blameless man?” Similarly with Natalis, letter LXXXVII.: “Lately Natalis, that man with a tongue as malicious as it is impure, in whose mouth women used to eject their monthly purgation....” Both of them were consequently “imbibers of menses,” an appellation which, as we have seen in chapter III., Galen applies to _cunnilingues_. Now too we can clearly understand the meaning of Nicharchus’ epigram against Demonax, vol. III., p. 334 of Brunck’s _Analecta_: “Do not, Demonax, regard all things with downcast head, and do not spoil your tongue with over-gratification; the sow has threatening bristles. You live amongst us, but you sleep in Phœnicia, and though no son of Semelé, you are thigh-reared.” He never looks up, exactly like the Cinede Maternus of Martial, I., 97; he gratifies his tongue, which likes erection; whether the vulva be covered with hair or depilated, he does not mind; during the day he lives in Greece, but sleeps in Phœnicia, because he stains his mouth with the monthly flux, which is, as every one knows, of the Phœnician dye, viz., purplish red[103]; like another Bacchus, he draws his nourishment from a thigh.[104] This scarcely needs an explanation. You can picture the _cunnilingue_, with his mouth glued between the thighs, at work.