20.Drawk, from —, I work, execute; for dravicus, as cautus for cavitus, lautus for lavitus.

21.Catamite according to Festus, is the same thing as Ganymede, the minion of Jupiter; the Latins, by similar corruption of words, pronounced Proserpina for Persephone, Aesculapius for Asclepios, Carthago for Carchedo, Pollux for Polydeukes, Sybilla for SiobulÉ, masturbare for manu stuprare.

22.Thus Oenothea, to excite the lad’s feeble nerve, pushes a leathern mentula (member) into Eucolpius’ anus (Petronius, 138): “Oenothea fetches a leathern contrivance; this she first oiled and sprinkled with pepper and crushed nettle-seeds, and then proceeded to push little by little up my anus.” We shall have to speak in chapter VI of another use of these leathern tools.

23.According to the author of the Gynaeology (German edition, vol. III., p. 392) there are to be found at this day in the London brothels women who make it their business to flagellate customers who desire it.

24.In order to appease the ardours of the anus, the Siphnians (Siphnos, one of the Cyclades) were in the habit of introducing a finger up the anus. The Greeks called this proceeding to siphnianize. Suidas: Siphnianize,—to finger the posterior.

25.Always, however, excepting the head, for they took great care of their head of hair. Horace, Ode X., book IV., says to Ligurinus:

“When those curls are gone, that now descend to your shoulders....”

And (Epode XI., v. 40-43): “Nothing”, he says, “will take away his love for Lyciscus, save another love for a plump youth, tying up his long hair.” In the same sense Martial speaks of Capillati (III., 58; II., 57), and of Comati (XII., 99).

26.To depilate one’s armpits was, however considered as being necessary to the cleanliness of the body: “One man keeps himself tidy, another neglects himself more than is right; one man depilates his legs, another does not depilate even his armpits.” (Seneca, letter CXIV.)

27.The Greeks did not disdain this strange practice any more than the Romans. Aristophanes, in the Lysistrata (v. 89).

“My affair will be tidy with the couchgrass pluck’d off.” In the “Frogs” he speaks of dancing girls barely arrived at puberty beginning to tear off the fur” (v. 519); in the Thesmophoriazusae again there is mentioned “a mons Veneris plucked clean” (v. 719). That the Greeks preferred a bare pubis to a furred one, though we may be of a different opinion, is apparent from another passage of Aristophanes, in the Lysistrata, v. 151, 2, where a smooth pubis is represented as a chief incitement to virile ardour:

“If we were to go naked with a smooth pubis, our husband’s members would stand, and they would be fain to have us.”

As to old women, they likewise denuded their pubis of the bristles in order to appear less decrepit. Martial, X., 90.

“Ligella, do you pluck your old affair, and stir the ashes of your burnt-out fire?”

Refinements such as those are for young maidens; you are in error if you think that thing a vulva that a man’s member will no longer recognize.”

The depilation of the vulva was also used as a punishment.

Aristophanes, Thesmophoriazusae, 545, 6.

“We will pluck her pubis, and teach her so, woman as she is, not to speak ill of women.”

The same punishment was inflicted upon adulterous women taken in the act; a black radish or a mullet was introduced into her anus, which was then depilated, as well as her pubis, with burning cinders. Aristophanes, Clouds, 1079:

“What, must you suffer the empalement with the radish, and the hot cinders?”

Suetonius, under the word ——: “Thus they treated adulteresses who had been caught in the act: they took black radishes and planted them in their anus, which they rubbed with hot cinders, after having torn out the hair.”

28.To understand this, the sentence must be complete; the worthy Forberg takes his readers far too learned; Mania, in the poem of Machon, says to Demetrius, offering her buttocks: “Son of Agamemnon, it is now your turn to have them,—you who have ever been so liberal with your own.” (Note of the translator.)

29.The following is the passage from Machon, as quoted by Athenaeus; without a knowledge of it Forberg’s allusion remains obscure:

“... Demophon, Sophocles’ minion, when still a youth had Nico, already old and surnamed the she-goat; they say she had very fine buttocks. One day, he begged of her to lend them to him. ‘Very well,’ she said with a smile,—‘Take from me, dear, what you give to Sophocles.’” (Note of the translator.)

30.Secta, sect (from sequor) may also be derived from secare, to cut, and thus mean: laceration. (Note of the translator.)

31.Justinus tells the tale somewhat differently: “Pausanias had had to undergo since his puberty the violence of Attalus, who added to this indignity a crying outrage: having invited him to a feast and made him drunk, he not only satisfied upon him, when full of wine, his brutal lust, but allowed him to be used by all the guests like a vile courtesan, and made him the laughing stock of his equals. Unable to bear this infamy, Pausanias carried his complaint before Philip many and many a time, but the King always put him off with illusory promises. When Pausanias however saw Attalus elevated to the rank of the Chief of the Army, his fury turned against Philip, and the vengeance which he could not take upon his enemy, he took upon the iniquitous judge.” (IX., 6).

32.Suetonius, Julius Caesar, ch. 48: “Not content with having written in some of his letters that CÆsar was conducted by the guards to the bed-chamber of the King, slept there in a golden bed hung with purple, and that he allowed the bloom of his youth to be blighted in Bithynia, Cicero said to him one day in the midst of the Senate, where CÆsar was defending the case of Nysa, the daughter of King Nicomedes, and spoke of his obligations to that King: Pray, let us pass over all this; it is only too well known what you have received, and what you have given.”

On the day of his triumph over the Gauls, the soldiers sung the following verses, amongst those which are usually sung behind the triumphal car, and they are well known.

“CÆsar has subdued the Gauls, and Nicomedes CÆsar: this day is CÆsar triumphant for having subdued the Gauls, and Nicomedes, who subdued CÆsar, has no triumph.”

Catullus (carm. 57):

“How well they go together, those shameless cinedes, Mamurra the patient, and CÆsar.”

33.Suetonius, Julius CÆsar, ch. 51: Nor yet did he respect the conjugal bed in the provinces; this appears from the distich, also sung by the soldiers at the triumphal entry:

“Citizens mind your wives; we bring you the bald-headed adulterer. You expended gold in Gaul; here you are taking your change.”

The same author (Julius CÆsar, ch. 52) says: “Helvius Cinna, tribune of the people, admitted to many people, that he had drawn up and kept ready a law by the instructions of CÆsar, to bring it forward during his absence, by which he would be at liberty, with a view to leaving offspring, to marry whom he would and as many wives as he wished. So that nobody should be in any doubt about the notoriety of his lewdness and infamy, Curio, the elder, in one of his pleadings, calls him the husband of all women, and the wife of all husbands.”

34.“Sextus Pompeius reproached him for being effeminate, and Marc Anthony says he bought his adoption from his uncle (or rather his great-uncle) by prostituting himself to him. On a day of public games all the world understood and applied to him very demonstratively the following verses, spoken of a Priest of CybelÉ, Mother of the Gods, playing the tambourine”:

“See you how a cinede governs the world with a finger?” (Suetonius, Augustus, ch. 68.)

A picture representing Augustus playing the part of a patient, is in the Monuments de la vie privÉe des douze CÉsars, pl. VI., and another of CÆsar and Nicomedes, pl. I.

35.“It is even said, that during a sacrifice, he could not restrain himself, smitten with the pretty face of the incense-bearer; the divine service barely finished, he took the youth aside, and debauched him, and then did as much for his brother, who played the flute. Soon afterwards he ordered their legs to be broken, because they reproached each other with their infamy.” (Suetonius, Tiberius, ch. 44). The act of this madman is represented on pl. XX. in the work of d’Hancarville, cited on a previous page.

36.And also Pythagoras. “One would have thought that nothing was left for him in the way of debauchery, and that he had reached the limits of depravity, if he had not a few days later chosen out of this infamous herd a certain Pythagoras, whom he took for his husband with all the solemnity of a marriage. The flammeum was put on the Emperor’s head, the auspices were consulted, neither dowry nor nuptial torches were forgotten; all was done openly, even those things, which, if done with a woman, are hidden by the night.” (Tacitus, Annals, XV., 37). The man called Pythagoras by Tacitus, appears to be the same to whom Suetonius (Nero, ch. 29), gives the name of Doryphorus, either on account of his services, or by mistake. “He took for husband the freedman Doryphorus in the same way in which Sporus had taken him himself for husband, and he counterfeited the cries and sobbings of virgins when losing their maidenhead.” Plate XXXVIII of the above quoted work shows an illustration of this anecdote.

37.“He went so far as to try to change a young man into a woman; his name was Sporus, and he had him castrated; having given him a dowry, he caused him to be brought to him with the flammeum on his head, and married him with all the nuptial solemnities. There has come down to us an appropriate saying on somebody’s part, namely, whether it might not have been better for human kind if Domitian, his father, had married a woman of that sort. He made Sporus dress himself in the costume of the Empresses, and had him carried in his litter; he travelled with him in that way, taking him through the meetings and markets in Greece, and soon after in Rome, about the time of the Sigillarian festivities, kissing him from time to time.” (Suetonius, Nero, ch. 28). Plate XXXIV in the repeatedly quoted French work, gives a representation of the abominable wedding.

38.“He (Hadrian) enjoyed the affection of Trajan, but this did not save him from the malevolence of the pedagogues of the young boys Trajan loved so ardently” (Spartianus, Hadrian, ch. 2).

39.“He lost, during his navigation of the Nile, his dear Antinous, and wept for him like a woman. There are sundry allegations about this Antinous; some say he was devoted to Hadrian, others point to the beauty of his shape, and to the pleasure Hadrian experienced with him. At the instance of Hadrian the Greeks placed him in the ranks of the Gods, and affirmed that he gave oracular decisions; those oracles, it is said, were composed by Hadrian himself” (Spartianus, Hadrian, ch. 14). St. Jerome says in the Hegesippus: “Antinous, a slave of the Emperor Hadrian, after whom a circus was named the Antinoian, founded also a town bearing his name (Antinoia), and established an Oracle in the temple.”

40.“Who, indeed, could put up with a ruler who imbibed pleasure through all the cavities in his body? Not even a beast would be suffered to do so. At Rome his only care was to send out emissaries, who had to look out for and to bring to the court the best shaped men for his enjoyment. He had a performance of the comedy of “Paris” in his palace, played the part of Venus himself, and suddenly dropping his clothes, he appeared naked with one hand on his chest and the other covering his pudenda; he then knelt down and offered his raised buttocks to his pedicon” (Lampridius, Heliogabalus, ch. 5). And a little farther on: “He loved Hierocles to such a degree as to kiss his virile parts, a thing I blush to report; he said that he thus celebrated the Floralia” (Ibid., ch. 6). He did not hesitate to repeat the infamous wedding of Nero with Pythagoras: “Zoticus had such a power over him that the principal officials of the state treated him as though he really were the husband of the Emperor. He married him, and made him consummate the marriage in the presence of the giver away of the bride, telling him, “Push in, Magira!” And this was done at a time when Zoticus was ill” (Lampridius, ch. 10). Zoticus was called Magira on account of the profession of his father, who had been a cook.

41.Socrates, as is well known, has not been in want of warm defenders; Brucker (Critical History of Philosophy, I., pp. 539, 540), may stand for all of them. Undoubtedly Plato, in Symposium, brought in Alcibiades, who says he recollects, to use the expression of Cornelius Nepos (Alcibiades, ch. 2.) “to have passed a night with Socrates, but not otherwise than a son might with his father.” But Xantippe, and it is not surprising, was indignant that her husband should be on such familiar terms with a good-looking youth like Alcibiades; and Aelian (Varide Historiae, XI., 12), relates that she stamped upon a cake sent by Alcibiades, which made Socrates laugh and cry out: “What are you doing? You cannot eat it now. I do not care for it at all!” But, Socrates! good morals and such friends are incompatible. Enough to name amongst the disciples of Socrates Plato, whom Diogenes LaËrtius (III., 23), declares to have loved Aster, Phaedrus, Alexis, and before all Dion; he quotes an epigram of Plato on Dion, ending thus:

“O you, who have so fiercely burnt my heart with love, you Dion!”

42.Valerius Maximus (IX., 12) relates of Pindar: “One day, at the Gymnasium, Pindar, leaning his head against the breast of a young lad, whom he loved above all (Suidas says his name was Theoxenes), fell asleep; no sooner had the head of the establishment seen him asleep than he ordered all the doors to be closed, for fear of the poet being awakened.” Athenaeus on his part (XIII., 81) tells us of Sophocles: “Sophocles loved boys to the same degree as Euripides loved women”; and a little farther on (ch. 82) he relates the story of a youth whom Sophocles enjoyed, but at the price of his mantle, which the rogue abstracted. Euripides, having been informed of this adventure, mocked the poet for having been thus done: “I also”, he said, “have had him, but he got nothing else out of me.” I am surprised that this passage of Athenaeus should have appeared doubtful to the celebrated Casaubon, on account of the expression “got out of me” which is quite correct and applicable. Sophocles and Euripides had both lavished their white fluids upon the little rogue; but from one of them he got besides a mantle, from the other nothing else.

43.“No less fiercely burned the love of Anacreon of Teos, they say, for the Samian youth Bathyllus” (Horace, Epodes, XIV., 9, 10).

44.The actual words of Plautus are:

“I must do the puerile service: I will cower down over a hamper” (Cistellaria IV., sc. I., v. 5),—which means, I will bend down to the hamper, raising the buttocks, and thus present them to the pedicon. This is, in fact, what is called, the “puerile office”, and which Apuleius (Metam. III., ch. 2), calls “the puerile corollary.” Martial, IX., 68 says simply, “illud puerile.” Conquinescere is according to Nonius, p. 531, Gottfried’s edition, to curve the spine, an expression designating in particular the passive posture as we have seen in the Pseudolus:

“When he curves the spine, then simultaneously wriggle your buttocks.”

Some authors have also used a still more forcible expression, “Ocquinescere,” vis., “to cower low down” (Nonius, p. 567). Pomponius, on word “Prostibulum”: “I have never forced pedication upon any citizen; I have always abstained, unless the patient had asked me and cowered down of his own free will.” And on word “Pistor”: “Unless somebody anticipated my desires, willingly crouching down so that I could do the thing securely.” This position of the patient cowering down is very rarely alluded to; the question generally turns upon his kneeling. “Thus,” says Lampridius of Heliogabalus, he offered himself with the buttocks raised to the pedicon” (ch. 5). Heliogabalus was kneeling, and not crouching. The same is the case with Timarchus in Lucian: “All that were near you remember it; they have seen you on your knees, while your accomplice did you know what” (Apophras, p. 152, vol. VII.—Works of Lucian edit. by J.-P. Schmid). If you would like to see these two postures, you will find them in the Monuments de la vie privÉe des douze CÉsars, pl. XXVII., a patient crouching, and pl. XXXVIII., a patient kneeling.

From the fact that men wanting to void their excrement when out of doors cower down, it has come about that passive pederasts were said to sh...t,—in fact to sh...t the active party’s member as it goes in and out of the anus. Hence in the Priapeia, LXX.:

“Look at me, thief, and realize the weight of the member you will have to sh...t.” Martial, IX., 70 also plays on the word:

“When you love a woman, Polycharmus, you always sh...t before you have done. Tell me, Polycharmus, what you do, when you pedicate?”

45.Pseudolus, IV., sc. VII., 85.

46.You might very well, Aloysia, have quoted Horace too (Epodes, XI):

“Now Lyciscus holds me in love-bonds, from which neither friendly advice, nor humiliating affronts avail to liberate me.”

And Satires, I., ii, v. 116-119.

“When your privates are swelling, if some maid-servant or slave-boy is at hand for you to assail forthwith, do you choose rather to burst with desire? Nay! not I!”

47.Art of Love, II., 683, 684.

48.Priapeia, II.

49.Epigr. 44, book IX:

“Catching me with a boy, you harass me with your cries, and you tell me, my wife, that you have posteriors too.”

Many and many a time did Juno say the same to Jupiter the Thunderer; yet he continued to sleep with slender Ganymede.

He of Tyrius, laying his bow aside, bent Hylas under him; think you therefore that Megara was without buttocks? DephnÉ, by her flight, vexed Phoebus, but his love’s ardour found relief in the end in the boy Oebalius. Although Briseis slept, often with her backs turned upon him, his smooth-skinned friend Patroclus was more to the taste of the son of Aeacus.

Cease then, wife, to call your affairs by masculine names; better consider you have two vulvas.

His Epigram XII., 98, treats of the same matter:

“Knowing as you do the honest walk and fidelity of your husband, and that he never misuses your bed with concubines, why, foolish woman, torment yourself about those venal boy lovers,—brief and fugitive is the pleasure from their complaisance!

They are more useful to you than to their master, I tell you, for they make him think that one wife is better than they all. They give what you will not give;—But I will, you say, so that the volatile husband stray not from the conjugal bed.

But it is not the same thing, I want a fig not an orange, and you must know theirs is a fig, yours an orange; Look! a matron, a woman like you, must know what belongs to her. Leave to boys what is theirs, and do you make the best of what is yours.”

50.Some prostitutes sat (Plautus, Poenulus, I., ii., v. 54), others stood: “Another man will only have the harlot that stands upright in the unclean brothel,” (Horace, Sat. I., ii., v. 30.)

51.Juvenal’s Messalina (VI., v. 123) prostitutes herself “under the fictitious name-board of Lycisca.” Petronius: “I see men gliding in stealthily between the name-boards and the naked prostitutes; I understood, alas, too late, that I had been introduced into a bad place.” (Satyr. ch. 7.) Martial, XI., 46:

“When you pass the threshold of a chamber with name-board over the door, whether it be a boy or a girl that greeted you with a smile....”

That the prostitutes changed their names is apparent from a passage in Plautus (Poenulus, V., iii, 20, 21):

“For to-day they were to change their names, and will lend their bodies for infamous traffic.”

52.Horace, Sat. II., vii, 48, 49:

“... Every woman that naked beneath the bright lamplight endured the thrusts of a swollen member.”

Juvenal, VI., 130, 131.

“Foul with the reek of the lamp, she bore to the Imperial couch the stink of the brothel.”

53.Authors vary on this point. Herodotus: “The Persians pollute young boys; they have learned it from the Greeks,” (I., 135). Plutarch refutes the assertion: “How can the Persians be indebted to the Greeks for these impurities, when all historians are agreed upon the fact that they had eunuchs before they had ever come near to the Grecian seas?” (Of the Maliciousness of Herodotus, p. 857, vol. II of Frankfort edition of 1620). Athenaeus: “Pederastia was first introduced in Greece by the Cretans, as is related by Timaeus; other authors however have asserted that the man who first imported that sort of love was Laius, who, having been hospitably received by Pelops, fell in love with Chrysippus, the son of his host, carried him off in his chariot, and fled to Thebes.” (XIII., 79.) And who has not heard of the incontinence of the inhabitants of Sodom?”

54.Particularly in Euboea, whence the expression, “Chalcidize”, meaning, according to Hesychius, to pedicate, because masculine loves flourished among the Chalcidians. “Phicidize” is another expression for the same thing from the name of a town now unknown; Suidas: “Phicidize, to be a Pederast”, and similarly, “Siphnianize” from Siphnos, an island in the Ægean; Hesychius says: “Siphnianize, that is to finger the anus; the inhabitants of Siphnos are, in fact, given to the practice of pederastia.” We have seen above that the meaning of Siphnianize has been perverted.

55.Athenaeus, XIII., 79: “Of all the barbarians the Celts, although their women are most beautiful—it is, therefore, not surprising that an ardent amateur of “fine women,” such as Julius Caesar is described to us, should in the Gallic Provinces have been not over respectful to the conjugal bed—the Celts take more pleasure in pederastia than any other Nation, to such a degree that amongst them it is no rarity to find a man lying between two minions.”

56.Pardon me, illustrious Marcus Pullarius, for having almost forgotten you. Ausonius, Epigr. LXX.:

“Which Marcus? The one they call the “cat that catches boys”, he who tarnishes all the purity of childhood, who plies with his back-door tool the rearward Venus, the poet Lucilius’ subulo, his pullipremo.”

Ausonius calls him the pullarian cat, because he hunted after young lads (puelli) as the cat gives chase to birds; he calls him, applying to him the same epithets as “Lucilius, who Satires he had the opportunity of reading,—more fortunate in this than we,—a subulo” (from subula, an awl), wanting to make it understood that with his member he transfixed, like a cobbler with his awl, the anus of cinedes; and pullipremo, from his compressing in his work young lads.

57.“Menacing with his couched lance some youth (he was a determined pedicon), he would say he intended to go to Aversa, a famous town” (Aloysia Sigaea, Dialogue VII.).

58.See the “History of the Eighteenth Century”, by Christ. Dan. Voss (in German, Part V., p. 364). As to pedicons of less exalted position, of whom mention is made by the widow of Philip, first Duke of Orleans, (in her amusing letters, pp. 74, 284, 350), which appeared about thirty years ago, there are: the Cardinal de Bouillon, the Chevalier de Lorraine, the Comte de Marsan, FranÇois Louis, Prince de Conti. These together with the Comte de Varmandois, a cinede this last, must rest content to appear in a mere foot-note.

59.Do not misunderstand what I say. It is not for an honest man to sharpen his wits at the expense of another’s book.