Manual of Classical Erotology (De figuris Veneris)
General
Manual of Classical Erotology (De figuris Veneris)
Erotic literature; Sex customs -- Greece; Sex customs -- Rome
Ausonius calls Eunus an Opican, because these filthy practices were,
according to Festus, most common among the Osci or Opici. He then
indulges in a series of jests, or rather represents Eunus as doing
so, on the shape of the female organ[110]. He says it seems to him
either quadrangular, or triangular, in the latter case corresponding
to the Greek [Greek: D] (similarly Aristophanes called it a
Delta,—“their delta plucked clean of hair,” _Lysistrata_, 151), and
also likens it to the letter **, owing to the folds which surround
the vulva on either side[111], and form the outer lips, the lane in
the middle being the opening of the vulva, and so together form the
trifid letter **; in the _Technopaegnium_, 140, he calls it a
three-pronged fork, the slit being the middle and the lips the outer
prongs. Then he says that Eunus is a Lambda when he is licking, on
account of the first letter of the word ****. All this is clear
enough, and I do not understand how the very learned Vinet can
complain of its obscurity. Neither has it given me much trouble to
make out what Ausonius means by the letters Rho and Iota. The
solution seems to me to be as follows: “Do not tell us, Eunus, that
your pike in action resembles the letter (Ρ) of the Greeks, a letter
which evidently looks like a lance with balls; in your amorous
diversions you use no other lance than your tongue, which, as you
will not deny, looks more like a javelin without balls, something
like the letter Iota; you cannot deceive me, who well know that you
would rather be taken for a fornicator than for a _cunnilingue_,
like that Gargilius, of whom Martial, III., 96, says:
“You do not enter, only lick my mistress; yet you boast yourself
adulterer and copulator!”
Lastly and finally by the Tau he threatens his man with the gallows, and
by the Theta with death. Of this there can be little doubt; it is a
proved fact that the letter Theta, the initial of the word ****,
signified with the Greeks condemnation to death[112]. With regard to
Tau, there is room for doubt; instead of Tau some of the copies of
Ausonius give (δ), and although this sign may, according to Scaliger,
very well signify the rope for hanging, the difficulty I feel is this,
that a composite letter, a small letter, an abbreviation of doubtful
antiquity, thus placed amongst simple, capital, unabbreviated letters
seems to come in very inappropriately. It may be that Ausonius
originally wrote ****; then * having been left out by an inadvertence of
the copyist, the ** might easily have been turned into **. The Tau, as
the reader will see at once, represents a gallows. Tertullian, _Adversus
Maricionem_: “This letter Tau of the Greeks is with us the T, a sort of
cross.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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