It is not clear how she was doing it, and it certainly is a mystery why that debauched monarch should have been so severe upon her.
No one can read Juvenal without being convinced that in Martial's time tribadism flourished in Rome. His descriptions of the feasts of the Bona Dea leave no doubt of it.
If he did leave any doubt Martial clears it up by the pointedness of some of his epigrams. It flourished even to women with enlarged clitorises (hermaphrodites) having boys.
This is perfectly rational. Sodomy and tribadism go hand in hand. Where one reigns the other flourishes, and in their development they are nearly identical vices. Boys debarred from women frig themselves, frig each other, and then have each other, and are fortunate if they do not grow up to be sodomites. Girls debarred from men do the same with their own sex, and bloom into perfect tribades by a gamahuche.
This is one end of the stick; the other is as when a man, having plunged into all the possible debauchery with females, at last resorts to sodomy, or where a woman, say a prostitute of good position with many friends, gets satiated and tired when she has exhausted every letch of the male fancy; then she turns to her own sex for a new and piquant pleasure.
It is not long since we were sitting in a café in the Haymarket when a Frenchwoman of about thirty walked across the room to a young English girl and offered her ten shillings to be allowed to kiss her cunt.
THE END