Then there is Ovid’s idyl of Iphis and Ianthe.[38] Iphis’s mother, while carrying her child, is warned by the father that if she bears a girl it will be subjected to death by exposure. Consequently she manages to conceal the child’s sex and raise it as a boy, giving it the name Iphis “which was of common gender.” From infancy, Iphis is the inseparable companion of a neighbor’s child, Ianthe, and by the time the two reach marriageable age, a little over thirteen, they are passionately in love. The two fathers have long since arranged a marriage. Iphis and her mother exhaust every pretext for delaying the ceremony, to the sorrow and anger of everyone else, for even Ianthe does not know her beloved’s true sex. Iphis spends long days lamenting the cruelty of Nature, which “surely never before has cursed a living creature with a love so monstrous.” Conscience bids her “do only what is lawful” and confine her love strictly “within a woman’s right.” She and her mother pray frantically to Isis for aid, to the end that when the wedding day can finally no longer be postponed Iphis is transformed at the altar into a boy, her voice deepening, her color darkening, and her body growing in muscular firmness. (As treated later by Antonius Liberalis[39] the heroine of this same plot is the mother, and the suspense centers wholly about her escaping her husband’s wrath, the daughter being of only incidental interest.) In yet another of the _Metamorphoses_ Ovid describes the birth of Hermaphroditus,[40] thus indicating that he was much interested in all variant phenomena, but from the quoted passage concerning Iphis’s pangs of conscience about expressing her love, it would seem that his approval of overt lesbianism was not unqualified. Later Classical Literature All the remaining variant tales in Latin literature deal with courtesans. Probably the best known is Juvenal’s scathing sixth _Satire_,[41] generally thought to have been directed against the empress Messalina, who figures in the text as Saufeia. It describes orgiastic rites in honor of the Bona Dea during which women of the highest social rank vie with prostitutes in erotic skill and endurance, with Saufeia bearing off the palm. The performance ends with a frantic search for men, since lesbianism alone cannot satisfy the participants.