A remarkable thing is that among almost all peoples, the baths are the places where the prostitution of men by their own sex is the most common. We see in Catullus that the "cinaedi" (catamites), a noun which my chaste pen refuses to translate into French, haunted the baths incessantly to carry out their practices. Among the Orientals, of all modern peoples who have retained this taste most generally, this same fact holds good. It was at the bath that Tiberius, impotent through old age and debauchery, was made young again by the touch little children applied to his breasts; these children he called "'little fishes," they sucked his withered breasts, his infected mouth, his livid lips, and finally his virile parts. Hideous spectacle of a tyrant disgraced by nature and struggling against her maledictions! But in vain did he invent new pleasures, in vain did he take part in these scenes in which groups of young men by threes and fours assumed all sorts of lascivious postures, and were at the same time active and passive; the sight of these indulgences of the "sprintriae" (for that is the name which was given there) did not enable him to resuscitate his vigor any more than the glamor of the throne or the servile submission of the senate served to mitigate his remorse. But of all the emperors, the ones who carried their taste for young boys to the greatest lengths were, Nero, Domitian and Hadrian. The first publicly wedded the young eunuch Sporus, whom he had had operated upon so that he might serve him like a young woman. He paid court to the boy as he would to a woman and another of his favorites dressed himself up in a veil and imitated the lamentations which women were accustomed to utter on nuptial nights. The second consecrated the month of September to his favorite and the third loved Antinous passionately and caused him to be deified after death. The most ample proof of the universality of the taste for young boys among the Romans is found in the Epithalamium of Manilius and Julia, by Catullus, and it might be cause for surprise that this has escaped all the philologists, were it not a constant thing that men frequently reading about these centuries fail to perceive the most palpable facts in their authors, just as they pass over the most striking phenomena of nature without observing them. It appears, from this epithalamium, that young men, before their marriage, had a favorite selected from among their slaves and that this favorite was charged with the distribution of nuts among his comrades, on the day, they in turn, treated him with contempt and hooted him. Here follows an exact translation of this curious bit. The favorite could not refuse the nuts to the slaves when by giving them it appeared that he owned that his master had put away his love for hire.