Quod nimio gaudes noctem producere vino, Ignosco: vitium, Gaure, Catonis habes. Carmina quod scribis Musis et Apolline nullo, Laudari debes: hoc Ciceronis habes. Quod vomis: Antoni, quod luxuriaris: Apici; Quod fellas—vitium dic mihi, cuius habes? (That you love to prolong the night with excess of wine, I can excuse; you have the vice, Gaurus, of Cato. That you write verses with no inspiration of Muses and Apollo, for this, you should be praised; it is a fault of Cicero’s you have. That you vomit, well! ’twas a habit of Antony’s; that you are a gourmand, ’twas Apicius’ weakness.—That you suck (as a _fellator_), whose vice have you here, pray tell me!) The above Epigram of _Martial’s_ (To Sertorius) shows very clearly how the poets represented each form of unnatural indulgence of the sexual impulse as vengeance of Venus. It is a _cunnilingus_ that is in question here, and his vice is accounted for in this way:—just as Philoctetes on account of the slaying of Paris had been punished by Venus with paederastia, so the Sicilian Sertorius probably became a _cunnilingus_ because he had killed an inhabitant of Eryx, where was situated a famous temple of the goddess. Similarly it will not surprise us if besides paederastia Philoctetes was saddled with the vice of Onanism at a later period, as is implied in the following poem of _Ausonius_:[315] SUBSCRIPTUM PICTURAE CRISPAE MULIERIS IMPUDICAE Praeter legitimi genitalia foedera coetus, Repperit obscoenas Veneres vitiosa libido. _Herculis haeredi quam Lemnia suasit egestas_, Quam toga facundi scenis agitavit Afrani, Et quam Nolanis capitalis luxus inussit; Crispa tamen cunctas exercet corpore in uno: Deglubit, fellat, molitur per utramque cavernam, Ne quid inexpertum frustra moritura relinquat. (Inscribed beneath a Portrait of Crispa,—an immodest woman.—Over and above the natural modes of intercourse in legitimate coition, vicious lust has discovered impure ways of love: the way that his loneliness at Lemnos taught the heir of Hercules (Philoctetes), that which the comedies of eloquent Afranius displayed on the stage, and that which deadly luxury branded on the men of Nola. But Crispa practises them all in her sole person: she skins, she sucks, she works by either aperture, that she may not leave anything untried, and so have lived in vain!)