(Why pluck you bare, Ligella, _your old organ_? why vex you the ashes of your tomb? Such _nice allurements_ are for girls. You are mistaken if you think yours is of a sort that a man’s member should be fain to belong to it.) This passage, together with those quoted a little above from Aristophanes and Theopompus, will explain sufficiently what _Horace_ (Sat. I. 2. v. 36.) meant by his “mirator _cunni_ Cupiennius _albi_,” (Cupiennius admirer of a _white organ_), for the _albus_ (white) here evidently stands for _rasus_, _depilatus_, _nudus_, (shaven, freed from hair, bare); as in _Juvenal_, Sat. I. 111., Nuper in hanc urbem _pedibus_ qui venerat _albis_, (Who but now had arrived in this city with white, i. e. bare, feet.) The commentators have hitherto always explained it by _matrona stola alba_, seu _candida_, _vestita_, (a matron clad in a white, or glistening-white, robe), because, as _Heindorf_ puts it, no other interpretation is to hand. But really there are several possible explanations on similar lines. It might be for “_canus_ cunnus”, (hoary, aged; organ) (_Martial_, bk. IX. 38., bk. II. 34.), though again the meaning of _depilatus_ (free of hair), in another sense, might equally well be at the bottom of this, as is the case with _cana labra_ (hoary, white, lips)—IX. 28. Or _albus_ (white) may be taken as synonymous with _increta_, _cerussata_ (whitened with chalk, painted with ceruse), to which _Martial_ supplies the explanation, when he says (III. 42.), Lomento rugas uteri quod condere tentas, Polla, tibi ventrem, non mihi labra linis; (When you endeavour to hide the wrinkles on your stomach with powder, ’tis your own belly, Polla, not my lips, you smear with the stuff),—as also bk. IX. 3., Illa _siligineis_ pinguescit adultera _cunnis_, (It—i. e. your penis—in adulterous loves, grows fat on women’s organs powdered with fine wheaten flour); [but another way of taking the line is: She, i. e. your mistress,—adulterous dame, grows fat on wheaten cakes—cakes baked in the shape of _cunni_.] The _Lomentum_, which is not derived from _lavimentum_ or _lavamentum_ (something to wash with), as Scheller, following Voss, makes it to be, but from the Greek λείωμα faba communita (_ground_ beans), was bean-meal (_Vegetius_, De re veterin. V. 62., says: in subtilissimo lomento, hoc est farina fabacea, (in the finest _lomentum_, that is bean-flour.); and at the present day the Japanese, it seems, according to _Thunberg_, use a kind of bean-meal instead of soap. Roman ladies were most careful to maintain the _aequor ventris_ (smoothness of the belly)—_Aulus Gellius_, Noctes Att. I. 2.); whence _Martial_, (III. 72.) says, addressing Laufella, who refuses to bathe with him: Aut tibi pannosae pendent a pectore mammae Aut _sulcos uteri_ prodere nuda times.