SO much for copulation in the normal way. We will now discuss another mode of pleasure,—that due to introduction of the member into the anus. A man who exercises his member in the anus, be it of a man or a woman, pedicates; he is called a pederast, pedicon, drawk^[20], and the other party, who allows himself to be invaded in that way, is called the patient, cinaedus, catamite^[21], minion, effeminate; if adult or worn out, he is named exolete. The masculine pleasure (so called because women allowed themselves much more rarely to be pedicated than men) is appreciated equally by the active party, the pedicon, as by the passive party, the patient. The pleasure of the pedicon is easy to understand, as the enjoyment of the virile member consists in the intensity of the friction; the pleasure felt by the patient by the introduction of the member in his entrails is more difficult to make out,—at least for my feeble intelligence, for such practices are quite strange to me. Do not believe, however, that the pleasure of the patient is only secondary, nor yet that he prostitutes himself only in order to do the same afterwards himself, nor that he remedies in this way the sluggishness of his own member by the vigorous working of another man’s nerve causing a pleasurable titillation of the posterior, analogous to that which Antonius Panormitanus (Hermaphroditus, I., 20), tells us may be produced by inserting the fingers in the anus^[22], or still better, by beating the same locality with rods, according to Aloysia Sigaea:

“Amongst the men of our acquaintance, I have heard the Marquis Alfonso say that rods act as spurs to the amorous battle; without them he would be sluggish and impotent. He has his buttocks flogged with rods vigorously, his wife being present lying ready on the bed. During the flagellation his tool begins to stiffen, and the more violent the strokes are, the stronger is the tension. When he feels himself in proper condition, he precipitates himself upon his wife, works her with rapid movement, and inundates her with the heavenly gifts of Venus and wins all the delights a man may find in Love”^[23] (Dialogue V).

What else was it but this that so stirred Rousseau, the precocious genius of Geneva, and his boyish member, and brought such ideas into his head, when on one occasion Mlle. Lambercier, cracking the whip upon the buttocks of the child, inflicted that punishment, which he afterwards was longing for all the rest of his life? Hear him relate the circumstance himself in his merry way and with his habitual charm of style, in the first book of the Confessions; we only omit small matters, added by the immortal author for the amplification of the narrative:

“As Mlle. Lambercier had for us the affection of a mother, so she had the authority of one, and she carried the latter so far as to inflict upon us the punishment of children when we had deserved it. For a long time she only used threats, and such a threat of a novel punishment seemed very dreadful to me; but after the execution I found the experience less terrible than the expectation, and the oddest thing was, the punishment made me more partial to her, who had inflicted it, than I had been previously. I stood in fact in need of all this affection for her and of all my natural mildness, in order to hold back from provoking the same punishment by acting so as to deserve it, for I had found in the pain, and even in the shame, a mixed feeling, in which sensuality predominated, and which left me with more desire than apprehension of experiencing the same treatment over again from the same hand. Who would believe that this chastisement of a child eight years old by the hand of a maiden of thirty should have influenced my tastes, my longings, my passions for the remainder of my life? Tormented by I know not what, my eye feasted ardently upon good-looking females; they constantly came into my mind doing to me as Mlle. Lambercier had done. Imagining only what I had experienced, my desires did not pass beyond the sort of voluptuous feeling I had known already. In my foolish fancies, in my erotic fury, in the extravagant acts to which they incited me sometimes, I borrowed in imagination the help of the other sex, without ever dreaming it was good for any other use than that which I wanted to make of it. When in the course of time I had grown up to manhood, my old taste of childhood associated itself so much with the other, that I never could divert the desires which fired my senses; and this absurdity, joined to my natural timidity, made me always anything but enterprising with women, as I dared not say all or could not do all I wanted; the sort of enjoyment, of which the other was for me but the last stage, could neither be initiated by the one who longed for it, nor guessed by the other who might have granted it. Thus I have passed through life coveting, yet not daring to tell the persons I loved most what it was I coveted. Never bold enough to declare my inclination, I amused it as least by ideas in connection with it. One may judge what such avowals must have cost me, considering that all through my life, seized in the presence of those I loved by the fury of a passion which bereft me of voice, hearing and sense, and made me tremble all over convulsively, I never could venture to tell them my folly, and ask them to add the one familiarity which I wanted to the other ones. I only got to it once in my childhood, with another child of my age, and the proposal came from her.”

However to return to our proper subject, from which we have strayed. If pleasure felt by the passive party cannot be conceived to be of a kind, which through the anus is communicated to the mentula (member), we must come to the conclusion that the patient experiences in the anus the same kind of irritation which the other party feels in his genital parts; that, therefore, the patient feels in that place a real pleasure unknown to those who have not tried it^[24]. Martial at any rate speaks out without any circumlocution of this rut of the anus:

“Of his anus, split to the naval, not a vestige is left to Carinus; for all that he is in rut to the very navel. Oh! the scurvy lot of the wretch! Bottom he has none,—but he will be a cinede” (VI., 37).

An ardour of this strange sort even affected Tullia, as she confesses herself in the pages of Aloysia Sigaea:

“Seeing resistance was in vain, I yielded to the madmen. Aloysio bends forward over my buttocks, brings his javelin to the back-door, knocks, pushes, finally with a mighty effort bursts in. I gave a groan. Instantly he withdraws his weapon from the wound, plunges it in the vulva and spurts a flood of semen into the wanton furrow of my womb. When all was over, Fabrizio attacks me in the same fashion. With one rapid thrust he introduced his spear, and in less than no time made it disappear in my entrails; for a little time he plays at come and go, and scarce credible as it may sound, I found myself invaded by a prurient fury to such an extent that I have no doubt, that I should get accustomed to it very well, if I chose” (Dialogue VI).

Coelius Rhodiginus confirms this pruriency of the anus in ch. 10. of XV. book of his Lectiones antiquae.

“We know”, he says, “that the minions experience a very great pleasure in undergoing this shameful act.”

And he gives a reason for it, whether good or bad the doctors may decide: “With people whose seminal ducts are not in normal condition, be it that those leading to the mentula are paralysed, as is the case with eunuchs and the like, or for any other reason, the seminal fluid flows back to its source. If this fluid is very abundant with them, it accumulates in great quantities, and then the part where the secretion is accumulated longs for friction. People thus situated like above everything to play the part of patients.”

Be this as it may, nothing is more certain than the fact of such enjoyment on the part of the patient. So highly did the Roman cinedes prize a stiff member between their buttocks, that they could not see a big mentula without their mouths watering; they were ready to give their last penny to enjoy the favours of a man extraordinarily gifted in that way.

Juvenal, IX., v. 32-36:

“Destiny governs man; it influences the parts, which the toga covers. If your star pales, useless will be the length and strength of your member to you,—even though Virro shall have seen you naked with lips that water.”

Martial, I., 97:

“He wants to know why I think he is a minion? We bathe together; he never raises his eyes, but gazes with devouring looks at the sodomites; and cannot behold their members without his lips trembling.”

And again, II., 51:

“Oftentimes you have no more than a single penny in your box, and that penny more worn than your anus, Hyllus; yet neither baker nor wine shop will have it, but some man who sports an enormous member. Your unfortunate belly must starve for your anus; while the latter devours, the former is famished.”

It is therefore not astonishing that the public baths resounded with plaudits, when men with extraordinary members entered them.

Martial, IX., 34:

“If you hear clapping of hands in the bathing hall, Flaccus, you may be sure some deformed person’s enormous member is there.”

Juvenal, VI., v. 373, 374:

“Far seen, pointed at by all men’s fingers, he enters the baths.”

It was not without some art that the patients performed their functions. But their business was made up of these two chief requirements: depilation and knowing how to use the haunches.

Patients took care in the first place to remove the hair carefully from all parts of their body^[25]; from the lips, arms, chest, legs, the virile parts, and in particular from the altar of passive lust, the anus: Martial, II., 62:

“Pluck out the hair from breast and legs and arms; keep your member cropped and ringed with short hair; all this, we know, you do for your mistress’ sake, Labienus. But for whom do you depilate your posteriors?”

And IX., 28:

“While you, Chrestus, appear thus with your parts all hairless, with a mentula like a vulture’s neck, and a head as shining as a prostitute’s buttocks with never a hair appearing on your leg, and with your pallid lips all shorn and bare, you talk of Curius, Camillus, Numa, Ancus, of all the hairy heroes we have ever read of in history, and spout big words and threatenings against theatres and the times. Let but some big-limbed man come into sight, you call him with a nod, and take him off....”

And he says, IX., 58:

“Nought is worse worn than Hedylus’ rags, save one thing only (he cannot deny it himself), his anus;—this is worse worn than his rags.”

In a similar way he has spoken before of the anus of Hyllus as more worn by friction than a poor man’s last penny (II., 51), and Suetonius (Life of Otho, ch. xii) speaks similarly of the body of Otho, given to the habits of a catamite, and Catullus (Carm. 33) reproaches the younger Vibennius: “You could not sell your hairy buttocks for a doit.”

For the same reason Galba requested Icelus to get depilated before he was to take him aside. Suetonius, Galba, ch. xxii:

“He was very much given to the intercourse between men, and amongst such he preferred men of ripe age, exolets. It is said that when Icelus, one of his old bedfellows, came to Spain, to inform him of Nero’s death, he, not content with kissing him closely before everyone present, asked him to get at once depilated, and then took him aside with him quite alone.”

Moreover even those depilated their anus, who by dint of a rough head of hair and a bristly beard, tried hard to simulate the gravity of the ancient Philosophers. Martial, IX., 48:

“Democritus and Zeno and ambiguous Plato,—all the sages whose portraits we see decked with bristling hair,—you prate of; you might well be Pythagoras’ heir and successor; while from your own chin hangs no less imposing a beard. But as bearded man it is a shame for you to receive a rigid member between your smooth posteriors.”

Juvenal, II., v. 8-13:

“Put not your trust in faces; everywhere is debauchery rampant! Thou wouldst whip the vicious; Thou! thou!—the most notorious of all Socratic minions! Hair-covered limbs and coarse hair along the arms bespeak a fiery soul; but on your smooth anus the surgeon cuts away the swollen tumours, a grin on his face the while.”

Persius, IV., v. 37, 38:

“Tell me, when you comb a scented beard upon your cheeks, why does a shaven member stand forth from your groin?”

This is why Martial, VI., 56 advised Charidemus to get his buttocks depilated, so that he might be taken for a patient rather than for a fellator:

“Because your thighs bristle with coarse hair, and your chest is shaggy, you think, Charidemus, to leave your words to posterity.”

“Take my word, and pluck out the hairs all over your body, and get it certified you depilate your buttocks. What for? you ask. You know they tell many tales about you; make them believe, Charidemus, that you are acting the patient.”

It was not patients only that had themselves depilated; men leading an idle, careless life followed the same practice^[26].

“To be depilated, to have the hair dressed in tiers of ringlets, to tipple to excess in the baths,—these practices prevail in the city; still they cannot be said to be customary, for nothing of all this is exempt from blame” (Quintilian, Instit. orat., I., 6).

It is rather surprising that the same Quintilian, whose bile is stirred by curled hair, has let it pass by patiently, that women should bathe together with men:

“If it is a sure sign of adultery for a woman to bathe with men, why! it will be adultery to dine with young friends of the male sex, to have a male friend. You might as reasonably say a depilated body, a languid gait, a womanish robe, are certain signs of effeminacy, of want of virility; for such will seem to many to reveal immorality of character” (Ibid., V., 9).

Martial, II., 39 has also noticed, and not once only, the habits of those men who practised feminine arts of the toilette, and looked just as if they had come out of a band-box:

“Rufus, see you that man there on the first benches ... whose oiled curls exhale the whole shop of Marcelianus, and whose polished arms shine without a hair to be seen?”

Again, he says, V., 62:

“... Who is this Crispulus, who has legs undisfigured by a single hair?”

Even the great Caesar did not disdain this coquetry, Suetonius, ch. 45:

“He took too much care of his appearance, to the point of not only having his beard removed with nippers, and shaved with a razor, but even of being depilated, for which things he was blamed.”

This custom is connected with those Samnite vases, filled with rosin and pitch to be heated for depilation, and for softening the pitch, found amongst the properties of Commodus, and which by the orders of Pertinax were sold by public auction. Julius Capitolinus speaks of them (Pertinax, 8). For removing the hair there were used in fact either tweezers or an unguent called dropax or psilothrum. Martial mentions the use of tweezers in the Epigram (IX., 28) quoted before; of dropax or psilothrum he speaks in Book III., 74:

“You depilate your face with psilothrum and your head with dropax.”

And again VI., 93:

“She revives her youth with psilothrum.”

And X., 65:

“You rub yourself every day with dropax.”

The dropax or psilothrum was obtained by melting rosin in oil (Pliny, Natural History, XIV. 20):

“Rosin dissolves in oil, and I am ashamed to say, that the most honest use made of this mixture is to serve people as a depilatory.”

AËtius also mentions it in Book III., ch. cxc, of his Opus Medicum:

“The simplest dropax is the one called pitchplaster. Dry pitch is diluted with oil; it is applied hot to the skin, which must first be cleanly shaved, under which circumstances it adheres closely. Before the plaster is quite cold, it is taken off, warmed again, and put on afresh; again it is removed before being cold, and this process is repeated several times.”

Hence Juvenal’s, “Youthfulness by pitch”, (VIII., 114), and

“The thighs neglected and dirty with tufts of hair” of NÆvolus, to whom he says:

“Your skin has none of the gloss, that of old the well-smeared plaster of hot pitch gave it” (Sat. IX., 13-15).

What else does Martial, mean when (III., 74), he speaks of “Gargilanus’ nails,—that cannot be trimmed with pitch?”

Persius (IV., 37-41) has, I presume, joined together both modes of depilation:

“Tell me, when you comb a scented beard upon your cheeks, why does a shaven member stand forth from your groin? Though five strong men weed your plantation and work your parboiled buttocks with the hooked tweezers, I tell you there is no plough will tame that stubborn field!”

Here forceps is the same thing as volsella (tweezers); while the “parboiled buttocks” would seem to refer to the hot dropax. After the application of such a plaster the skin could not but have a boiled look.

Ausonius (Epigr. CXXXI.) alludes to this passage of Persius:

“The reason you smooth your groin with hot dropax is that a skin soft and smooth entices the whores, plucked smooth themselves. But that you pluck out the herbage from your parboiled bottom, and polish up with pumice your battered Clazomenae, what means this,—if not that the vice of man with man works in you, and you are a woman behind, a man in front.”

The Clazomenae are without a doubt the man’s buttock, limp and cracked, as those of patients will be, as those of Carinus were, whom Martial, XI., 37 blames for “his lacerated anus.” Ausonius calls them so from the Greek, in Latin “frango” (I break), thus playing with the name of a city. Gonzalvo the Cordevan makes a similar pun, when, desiring to pedicate, he says, he wishes to go to Aversa; also when he wishes to irrumate the mouth, he says: “I go to the Orient”, or when he is about to lick the vulva, in Latin ligurire, “I go to Liguria.” By calling the Clazomenae hammered (battered) Ausonius means to imply that they were as if polished with a hammer, by having served as an anvil. It is as if my fellow-countrymen were to say in joke of a bald man (in German Kahl), “he scratches his polished Kehl.” What could be clearer or wittier? Forcellini is therefore wrong in saying this passage of Ausonius has no sense. Other editors have inclusas instead of incusas, indicating the fissure which separates the buttocks, by the rotundities of which it is on both sides closed in. But in the first place the Clazomenae may well be the buttocks, they being cleft, though not indeed themselves a cleft; in the second place, who could imagine this miserable man depilated the cleft of the buttocks rather than the buttocks themselves?

Some persons, by a refinement of luxury, employed women to depilate them. Such women called themselves ustriculae (from urere, to burn), as they made use of a sticky plaster of boiling dropax to burn the hair on the legs and other parts of the body. Tertullian (De Pallio, ch. 4), says: “So effeminate as to employ ustriculae”; while Salmasius, commenting playfully on the passage, p. 284, declares: “Once upon a time ustriculae served to depilate the legs; now they serve to harass our minds.” Augustus, who according to Suetonius, “was in the habit of singeing his legs with burning nutshells, to make the hair grow more silky” (Augustus, ch. 68), no doubt made use of the nimble hands of these ustriculae.

Women likewise resorted to depilation^[27], looking upon the fleece of the pubis as something disgusting. Martial:

“... Nor yet one of your mother’s pots full of foul rosin, such as the women of the outer suburbs use to depilate themselves withal” (XII., 32).

As men employed women to free them of hair, so women offered their pubis without shame to men for the same office. Pliny’s bile rises at this (Nat. Hist., XXIX., 8): “Women are not afraid to show their pubis. It is but too true, nothing corrupts manners more than the art of the medical man.”

The emperors themselves condescended to undertake this office for their concubines.

Suetonius, Domitian, ch. 22:

“It was rumoured, that he was fond of depilating his concubines himself, and would bathe amid a crowd of the most infamous courtesans.”

Lampridius, Heliogabalus, ch. 31:

“In his baths he was always together with the women, and he made their toilets with psilothrum: he used psilothrum likewise for his beard, and, disgusting to relate, the same which the women had just been using. With his own hand he shaved off the fleece from the virile part of his pedicons, and then shaved his own beard.”

What Lampridius finds so repugnant, is that the emperor did not hesitate to use upon his beard the same ointment, which the women had just been applying as a plaster upon the pubis, and which he used at once and before the bad smell had evaporated.

But to return to our patients, they also were not in want of illustrious lovers, who took care to depilate them; an example of this we find in the emperor Hadrian, according to Spartianus, who says, ch. 4:

“That he corrupted the freedmen of Trajan, made the toilet of his minions, and often depilated them, while he was attached to the Court, is generally believed.”

In what other way can we believe Hadrian to have made the toilet of these minions, if not in the same way in which Heliogabalus made the toilet of his females, with psilothrum, particularly as it is added that he depilated them frequently? We may take it for granted that he used that ointment, or that he rubbed their faces with moistened bread, either to improve their skin or to hinder the beard growing too soon. Suetonius, Otho, ch. 12:

“He shaved his face every day, and rubbed it with damp bread, a habit which he had contracted when the first down began to appear, so as not to get bearded.”

Juvenal, II., 107 has aimed an arrow of the same sort at Otho:

“It surely is the duty of a mighty Captain ... to keep his skin right smooth ... and knead bread with his fingers to make a plaster for his face.”

What wonder then if the women cherished similar artifices? Who can help thinking of the woman depicted with such marvellous art by Juvenal, from verse 460 to verse 472 of that Sixth Satire, to which Salmasius gave the epithet, of “divine”? “Her face is all puffy with bread crumbs, where the lips of the poor husband keep sticking”, to such an extent, that one doubts:

“... Whether her countenance, plastered and massaged with so many preparations, overlaid with poultices of boiled and moistened flour, should be called a face at all,—or a sore.... At last she peels her face, removes the outermost layers. For the first time she may be recognized for herself. Then she treats her skin with asses’ milk, for which she drags about in her train a herd of asses,—and would take them with her, if she were exiled to the North Pole.”

For painting the face it seems that a coating of chalk was used, as in the case of the Pederast mentioned in Petronius, who perspired so violently in working vainly the groin of Eucolpus:

“From his perspiring forehead flowed rivulets of acacia juice, and in the wrinkles of his cheeks there was such a mass of chalk that you might have believed you saw a wall exposed to the wind and washed by the rain” (Satyricon, ch. 23).

But let us leave all these nasty preparations, before we find ourselves stuck fast in them.

We have said that another branch of this business, on the part of the patient, consists in cevere. A patient cevet, who during the action wriggles and moves his haunches up and down, so as to enjoy more pleasure himself and give more pleasure to the pedicon. Women, doing the same in copulation, are said to crissare. Martial, III., 95:

“Nay! you pedicate finely, Naevolus; you ply your haunches right well.”

Juvenal, II., 20-23:

“... Virtue on their lips, they ply their buttocks.—‘Shall I honour you, in the act of your back-play, Sextus?’ says the infamous Varillus....”

The same author, IX., 40:

“With calculated art moves his haunches.”

Plautus, in the Pseudolus, III., 75:

“Soon as ever the fellow cowers down, ply your haunches in time to him.”

For this reason some authorities hold, I do not know whether rightly or wrongly, the word cinede to come from the fact that the wretches known by that name are in the habit of wriggling the private parts. Undoubtedly the suppleness of the thighs, the agility of the buttocks are counted amongst the particular talents of cinedes in Petronius, ch. 23:

Enter a Cinede reciting these verses:

“Hither, come hither, cinede wantons,—stretch the foot and take your course, fly with soles in the air, with supple thighs, and nimble buttocks, and libertine hands,—all ye old, emasculated minions of Delos, come!”

To this subject also refers Epigr. XXXVI of the 1st Book of the Hermaphroditus, edited by us; which consult, reader, if worth your while. As he who wriggles with his haunches does it to please somebody, people use the word cevere also to convey the meaning of sycophancy or adulation. Thus: “An, Romule, ceves” (What Romulus, you fawn too?) in Persius (I., 87); in the same way irrumate is used in the sense of an outrage, affront.

That women can be pedicated, exactly the same as men, is indicated by nature; that they have consented, is proved by numerous testimonies in Antiquity.—Apuleius, Metamorphoses, III., p. 138:

“While we were thus prattling, a mutual desire invaded our minds and roused our limbs; having undressed entirely we gave ourselves up to the transports of Venus. I soon felt tired. Fotis of her own good will offered me the catamite corollary.”

Martial, IX., 68:

“All night long I possessed a lewd young maiden, whose complaisant demeanor it were impossible to excel. Exhausted with a thousand modes of love, I asked for the puerile service, which she granted at once before I had finished my asking.”

The same, XI., 105, reproaches his wife as follows:

“You refuse to pedicate; yet Cornelia allowed it to Gracchus, Julia to Pompey, and Portia did it for Brutus. Ere the Derdanian Cupbearer served the wine, Juno herself acted Ganymede for Jupiter.”

Tullia permitted the same to Aloysio and Fabrizio, in Aloysia Sigaea; we have quoted the passage. Crispa tastes the same variety of pleasure, in Epigram LXXI of Ausonius:

“She lets herself be done in either orifice.”

The ancient Greeks took great delight in the posterior Venus. One can scarcely express what fervent admirers they were of beautiful buttocks; it went so far, that young girls competed in public, before an assemblage sitting as it were in another “Judgment of Paris” to pronounce which of them was the most gifted in that respect. Athenaeus (XII., 80) informs us that in the environs of Syracuse a villager had two daughters who often quarrelled as to which of them had the finest posteriors; one day they showed them on the highway to a young man from Syracuse, who chanced to be passing, and asked him to adjudicate between them. He decided in favour of the elder sister, fell at once violently in love with her, and on his return home he told his younger brother what had befallen him. The latter went forthwith to see the two girls, and became enamoured of the younger. Soon they got married to the two youths, who were opulent, and they were called by their fellow-citizens the Callipygi, because, although of lowly birth, their posteriors served them for a dowry. Full of gratitude, they dedicated a temple to Venus, under the title of Venus Callipygos (Venus of the beauteous buttocks).

It will not surprise you, that any young girl remarkable for her beautiful posteriors amongst her companions was all the more in request for the puerile office, and all the more disposed to lend herself to it. Mania consented to it in favour of Demetrius, as testified by Machon, in Athenaeus (XIII., 42), when the king wanting to enjoy her buttocks, she accepts his gift, and says:

“Son of Agamemnon, it is now your turn to have them.^[28]”

A certain young man, Ponticus by name, exacted the same corollary in the morning from Gnathena, whom he had possessed all night; it is again Machon who tells us the story (ibid., XIII., 43). Demophon, the minion of Sophocles, asked the same favour of Nico^[29] who being famed for the beauty of her buttocks,—“she is said to have had an exceedingly beautiful bottom”—was afraid he might lend them to Sophocles (ibid., XII., 45). Gnathaenion (ibid., XIII., 44) made an ingenious excuse for having been similarly complaisant. A certain tinker having ungenerously boasted he had five times running mounted that little courtesan in that way, Andronicus, whom she preferred to everybody else, got to hear it, and reproached her bitterly for having allowed such a blackguard to enjoy her so abundantly in a posture which his prayers never obtained from her. Gnathaenion replied that, not caring to have her breasts handled by a fellow black with dirt and soot, it had appeared to her better to take that posture, so as to receive the least possible fraction of the wretched creature’s body. Plate XXVII of the Monuments du culte secret des dames romaines presents the picture of a man pedicating a woman.

It is, however, not without some inconvenience, or even danger, that one lends oneself to the passive part. Aloysia Sigaea, Past-Mistress in the Sciences of Love, enlightens us on this point:

“In the first place intolerable sufferings are inflicted upon the patient, for in most cases he is invaded by too large a stake; hence frightful infirmities, incurable by all the art of Aesculapius. The confining muscles are ruptured, and consequently the excrements cannot be held back and escape. What could be more disgusting? I have known noble ladies afflicted with cruel maladies to such a degree by eruptions and ulcers, that it took them two or three years to recover their health. I myself (Tullia) have not escaped scot free from the accursed embraces of Aloysio and Fabrizio. When they first forced their darts in, I endured atrocious pain, but soon the feeling of slight titillation consoled me.... When however I reached home again, I felt a burning pain at the place they had lacerated: I felt myself consumed by an itching as if I were on fire, and in spite of the nursing of Donna Orsini, it cost much trouble to extinguish that confounded fire. If my lacerations had been neglected, I should have died a miserable death” (Dial. VI).

You understand now why the young slave of Naevolus (Martial, III., 71) had pain at the anus; why the same Martial, VI., 37 says Carinus’ posteriors had to be cut; and where the sting lies in the following distich:

“You, who know all the reasons and weighty arguments of the sects,—come tell me, what dogma is it bids you be perforated” (IX., 48).

This effeminate philosopher, who affected to speak as though he had been the successor and heir of Pythagoras, was indeed bound, if anyone was, to know the reasons of lacerations^[30] of the anus, and the weights of men’s members. He was accustomed to the passive part, of whom Ausonius says in mockery, as we saw a little above, that his clazomenae served as an anvil.

Men preferred to be supposed pedicators rather than patients; hence Martial’s witty epigram:

“It is now many a long day, Lupus, that Charisianus has been saying he cannot pedicate. But whenever his friends asked him why, he said his bowels were relaxed” (XI., 89).

Would you see the picture of a man engaged in pedication? he is being interrupted in the midst of his business, but the drawing is not the less pleasant for that. The engraving belonging to chapter III. of the third part of FÉlicia, presents this position.

Who does not know that the Greeks and Roman were intrepid pedicons and determined cinedes? In the Greek and Latin authors, to the indignation of the pedagogues, the male Venus parades on every page:

“All burnt with the same fire”—we are quoting Aloysia Sigaea, and we could not express ourselves better or more elegantly. We are, however, going to make annotation to this extract,—“all burnt with the same fire, the common people, the higher classes, the King. This depravity cost Philip, King of Macedon, his life^[31]; he died by the hand of Pausanias, whom he had outraged.” It subjected Julius Caesar to the passion of King Nicomedes^[32],—Caesar, “wife of all men, and husband of all women”^[33].

Augustus did not escape this shame^[34], Tiberius^[35] and Nero gloried in it. Nero married Tigellinus^[36], and was himself espoused by Sporus^[37], Trajan^[38], the best of rulers, was accompanied by a paedagogium, while he marched from victory through the Orient. What he named his paegogium, while he marched from victory to victory through the Orient. What he named his paedagogium was a troop of pretty lads, well developed, whom he called day and night to come to his arms. Antinous served as mistress to Hadrian,—a rival to Plotina, but more fortunate than she was^[39]. The emperor mourned over his death, and placing the dead man amongst the Gods, he raised altars and temples in his honour. Antonius Heliogabalus, nephew of Severus, was accustomed, an old author says^[40], to have pleasures administered to him through all the orifices in his body; his contemporaries looked upon him as a monster. Before this Venus grave philosophers danced in company with pederasts. Alcibiades and Phaedo slept with Socrates^[41], when they wanted to get their tutor into good humour. It is from this kind of amours practised by the venerable man, that is derived the erotic phrase: to love Socratically. Every action and every word of Socrates were held as sacred by all sects of philosophers; they built a temple and erected an altar in his honour; all his actions had legal force, and his words the authority of an oracle. The philosophers did not turn away from the example set by their Hero (for Socrates took rank with the Heroes) and new national divinity. Lycurgus, the Spartan legislator, living some centuries before Socrates, refused the title of a good and deserving citizen to any man who had not a friend that served him as a concubine. He willed it that virgins should perform naked on the stage, so that the view of their charms freely exposed, should dull in men that sensual longing which by the aid of nature draws them to women, that they might thus reserve all their passion for their friends and companions. For what men see every day loses half its effect.

Again, why speak of the Poets?^[42] Anacreon^[43], was hotly in love with Bathyllus; almost all pleasantries of Plautus have this subject for their aim; they are of this kind:

“I shall do like the lads, I will cower down over a hamper.”^[44]

Or again:

“The soldier’s poniard did it fit your sheath?”^[45]

That grand master of the art of poetry, Maro, who won the surname of Parthenias by his ingenuousness and innate modesty, cherished a certain Alexander, whom Pollio had given to him as a present, and he has celebrated him under the name of Alexis^[46]. Ovid suffered from the same malady; he however preferred young girls to lads, because in his amusement he wanted reciprocal pleasure, and not a selfish enjoyment. He said he loved the pleasure “of the simultaneous ejaculation of both parties”^[47], and for this reason he was less given to the love of boys.

Young girls and wives finding themselves neglected, the first by those they loved, the other ones by their husbands, instead of offering their services only as females, resolved to play the part of the lads. The depravity became so great that this complaisance was actually extorted from brides, as it was before from married women; in fact the husband went at the young wife pederastically, and the two sexes were joined in one and the same body. In the facetious poems of the ancients, Priapus^[48] threatens every thief of vegetables from his garden that comes near his weapon, to make him sacrifice what in the first night the bride accords to her ardent husband, for fear that he may wound another part.

Making use of his imagination with the licence ever granted both to painters and poets, Valerius Martial^[49] pretends to hear is wife grumble that she also had buttocks, and that he had not need of boys. “Juno” she says, “also pleased Jupiter from that side.” The poet is not to be convinced, he answers her that the part taken by a boy is one thing, and that of the wife another, and that she ought to be satisfied with hers.

Under the name-boards^[50] and the lamps^[51] in the brothels sat^[52] boys as well as girls, the first dressed in the feminine stola, the latter in the manly tunic, and with their hair dressed like boys. Under the guise of one sex was found the other. Asia^[53] was the original home of this pest, then Africa got infected, and soon the scourge invaded Greece and the adjoining countries of Europe^[54]. In Thrace Orpheus was the importer and supporter of this unclean pleasure. The Thracian women, finding themselves held in contempt....

“During the sacred feasts and the nocturnal orgies of Bacchus, tore the youth to pieces, and bestrewed the wide plains with his limbs.” (Virgil, Georg. IV., 521, 522.)

It is alleged that in those ancient times the Celts^[55] ridiculed those amongst them who kept aloof from this practice; such could expect neither civil employment nor honours. Those, that preserved the purity of their morals were shunned as impure. “In a town where everyone is mad, it is not good to be alone sane, and by reason of its not being good it is not advisable.” (Dialogue VI.)

This ends our brilliant extract from Aloysia Sigaea.

Even in our own days^[56] the taste for the male Venus has not disappeared, witness the Persians, who are very much addicted to this kind of pleasure, as is related by those who have travelled in their country. Amongst others there is Adam Lhuilier, chapter 15, book V., of his Itinerary. If we may trust to Aloysia Sigaea, the Italians and Spaniards did it; also the Dutchmen, with whom towards the middle of the XVIIIth. Century, as J. David MichaËlides tells us in his Treatise on the Law of Moses (in Dutch), §258, this habit was so much in vogue, that the punishment of death was hardly of avail against it; also the Parisians, according to the Author of the Gynaeology (in German, vol. II., p. 427), a fully competent authority, who adds that in almost all the great cities of Europe there are to be found plenty of people who, either being satiated with the ordinary pleasure, or afraid of infectious diseases, prefer the posterior to the anterior Venus,—the English always excepted, who abominate this practice. Not to be for ever talking generalities and never giving definite instances, the cases of Gonzalvo of Cordova^[57] and of VendÔme^[58], both of them excellent Generals, have been made notorious enough by historical documents; to these we could add other still more illustrious examples, taken from our own time and made known by a heedless fame; that of a great author, of a great king, the father of his country, and of a man, who during his life gained general admiration by the penetration of his intellect, and the splendour of his language, and whose knowledge embraces all branches of knowledge, not only the ordinary ones, but the profoundest and most abstruse^[59],—a man that might well propose the riddle of the Sphinx to his eminent confrÈre in whom we delight to admire the power of a truly Ciceronian eloquence, unknown in Germany since the death of the great Ernesti. These examples, I say, we could easily allege, were we not apprehensive of raising, quite contrary to our purpose and intention, a feeling of odium against the pious memory of most distinguished men.

Do you wish for any more? Pacificus Maximus offers a goodly number, both of the active and the passive parties. Elegy I., p. 107. of the Paris edition:

“The sole cause of my badness was my master,—the man my father and mother incautiously entrusted me to. He was the king of pedicons; not one escaped his lust, so artful and winning was he. Many a thing I learned, I had better have left unknown; much did I absorb through my rectum, much through my lips.”

Elegy II., to Ptolemy (p. 110):

“For you, ungrateful boy, I keep my treasures all, and no one shall enjoy them but yourself; my mentula is growing: while it used to measure seven inches, now it measures ten.”

Elegy IV., to Marcus (p. 113):

“You could not, Marcus, find a better, a more convenient, place, in which to meet me; not a spy is here nor witness, neither man nor woman can tell tales. Let’s do it under the willows in this verdant meadow; the drooping boughs will hide us with their foliage. The rivulet will lull us to sleep with its pleasant murmur, and the bird that warbles mid the boughs. Hither come, and glide into my lap, thou that art torment at once and remedy of my desires!”

Elegy XIV (p. 128):

“One day Etruscus brought to me a youth, so fair as is seldom seen at Jupiter’s board: “I give him up to you”, he said, “lay hold of him, that he may cling to you both day and night. May the gods grant you love him well; he will be wise if you but pedicate him.”

And I: “I like this liberty conceded to my passion; I shall always be obliged to you. Be sure this child, good as he is, will be better still in future; he will suck my wisdom in through many places.”

Joyful he goes, joyful I seize hold of my prey; delay, however short, seems long to me. Oh, father proved in virtue! the one blameless man, the one sage in this great town! The master lays hands upon the lad’s posteriors, the lad grasps the master’s member. Think you, ye unlearned, he will learn in this fashion? Oh, lucky boy, to have me for a teacher! oh lucky fate, that gave you such a father!”

Elegy XV (p. 131):

“If the member is dead, the voluptuous wish is still alive; if the old man can no longer pedicate, he still wants to.”

Elegy XX (p. 139):

“My member is so little, this part of me so dwindled, I almost think I never had one, or that it has disappeared; my finger cannot feel, my eye cannot see it,—fate has been but niggardly to me. I could be your attendant, CybelÉ, without operation, I need no shard of glass, I am a castrated priest already. And still—it is a shame, but must be confessed; there is no worser lad than I in all the world. As soon as ever I could, I served the filthy Venus, for the hand of Pederasts had drawn me to it; a thousand members and big ones, churned in my inside, and day and night my anus was in quest. If only my passive action could have profited my member, when erect it would have touched my head, when limp my feet; but nothing did it good, it never grew. And what I did, perhaps only made it worse. Every boy likes to see his member grow, get big enough to amply fill his hand.”

But enough of pedication; irrumation is our next business.