ON PEDICATION
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.
FOOTNOTES - ON PEDICATION
-----
Footnote 20:
_Drawk_, from —, I work, execute; for _dravicus_, as _cautus_ for
_cavitus_, _lautus_ for _lavitus_.
Footnote 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_.
Footnote 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.
Footnote 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.
Footnote 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.
Footnote 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).
Footnote 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.)
Footnote 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.”
Footnote 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.)
Footnote 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.)
Footnote 30:
_Secta_, sect (from _sequor_) may also be derived from _secare_, to
cut, and thus mean: laceration. (Note of the translator.)
Footnote 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).
Footnote 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.”
Footnote 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.”
Footnote 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.
Footnote 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.
Footnote 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.
Footnote 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.
Footnote 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).
Footnote 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.”
Footnote 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.
Footnote 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!”
Footnote 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.
Footnote 43:
“No less fiercely burned the love of Anacreon of Teos, they say, for
the Samian youth Bathyllus” (Horace, _Epodes_, XIV., 9, 10).
Footnote 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?”
Footnote 45:
_Pseudolus_, IV., sc. VII., 85.
Footnote 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!”
Footnote 47:
_Art of Love_, II., 683, 684.
Footnote 48:
_Priapeia_, II.
Footnote 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 Phœbus, 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.”
Footnote 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.)
Footnote 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.”
Footnote 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.”
Footnote 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?”
Footnote 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.
Footnote 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.”
Footnote 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.
Footnote 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.).
Footnote 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.
Footnote 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.
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