Naturae pudet atque habitat sub pectore caeca
Ambitio et morbum virtutis nomine iactant.
Semper amare parum est: cupient et amare videri
(When the Bull tending downwards lifts his head with limbs bent back, he brings with him in his sixth house the sister Pleiades, his equals in brilliancy. When these are in the ascendent, there are brought forth to the light of day such as follow after Bacchus and Venus; and hearts that wanton at feast and board, and that seek to raise the merry laugh by biting wit. These will ever be giving thought to their bedizenment and becoming appearance; to curl the hair and lay it in waving ripples or else to gather in the locks with circlets and arrange them in a heavy top-knot, and to alter the head by adding false ringlets; to polish the shaggy limbs with hollow pumice-stone; yea! and to hate the very sight of a man, and long for arms without growth of hair. Women’s robes they wear; the coverings of their feet are less for use than show; and steps broken in to an effeminate gait are their delight. Nature they scorn; indeed in their breast there lies a pride they cannot avow, and they vaunt their disease (vice) under the name of virtue. Ever to love is a little thing in their eyes; their wish will be to be seen to love).
Seneca, Quaest. nat. bk. VII. ch. 31., Egenus etiam in quo morbum suum exerceat, legit. (The poor man too chooses one on whom he may practise his disease (vice).—Seneca, Epist. 114. Cum vero magis vires morbus exedit et in medullas nervosque descendere deliciae. (But when the disease (vice) has eaten deeper into a man’s vigour, and its delights penetrated to the very marrow and nerves).—Comp. Epist. 75.—Cicero, De finibus I. 18., in Verrem II. 1. 36., Tusc. quaest. IV. 11.—Wyttenbach, in Bibliothec. critic. Pt VIII. p. 73.—Horace, Sat. I. 6. 40., Ut si qui aegrotat quo morbo Barrus, haberi ut cupiat formosus. (As if one who is sick of the same disease as Barrus, as if he should long to be considered handsome.) Another passage of the same author (Odes I. 37. 9.) must be mentioned:
Contaminato cum grege turpium
Morbo virorum.
(With her (Cleopatra’s) herd of foul men stained with disease—vice). It is taken by Stark as by most of the commentators to mean castrated persons, though strictly speaking it implies nothing more than a contemptuous circumlocution for Egyptians. The boys that were kept in the brothels at Rome for purposes of paederastia were for the most part from Egypt, whence they were imported in flocks. Accordingly the poet calls the whole entourage of Cleopatra pathics. There can be no mistake, if only we translate thus: cum contaminato grege virorum, morbo turpium, (with a polluted herd of men, defiled with disease—vice). In this Horace was all the more justified, because as a matter of fact Cleopatra did keep cinaedi, as we learn from Suidas: s. v. κίναιδα καὶ κιναιδία· ἠ ἀναισχυντία· ἀπὸ τοῦ κινεῖν τὰ αἰδοῖα. Ὁ τῆς Κλεοπάτρας κίναιδος Χελιδὼν ἐκαλεῖτο. (under the words κίναιδα and κίναιδία: shameless practice; from the moving (τὸ κινεῖν of the genitals. Cleopatra’s cinaedus was called Chelidon. True Terence, Eunuch. I. 2. 87., makes Phaedria say:
Porro eunuchum dixisti velle te,
Quia solae utuntur his reginae, repperi,