(That you love to prolong the night with excess of wine, I can excuse; you have the vice, Gaurus, of Cato. That you write verses with no inspiration of Muses and Apollo, for this, you should be praised; it is a fault of Cicero’s you have. That you vomit, well! ’twas a habit of Antony’s; that you are a gourmand, ’twas Apicius’ weakness.—That you suck (as a fellator), whose vice have you here, pray tell me!) The above Epigram of Martial’s (To Sertorius) shows very clearly how the poets represented each form of unnatural indulgence of the sexual impulse as vengeance of Venus. It is a cunnilingus that is in question here, and his vice is accounted for in this way:—just as Philoctetes on account of the slaying of Paris had been punished by Venus with paederastia, so the Sicilian Sertorius probably became a cunnilingus because he had killed an inhabitant of Eryx, where was situated a famous temple of the goddess. Similarly it will not surprise us if besides paederastia Philoctetes was saddled with the vice of Onanism at a later period, as is implied in the following poem of Ausonius:[315]
Subscriptum picturae Crispae mulieris impudicae
Praeter legitimi genitalia foedera coetus,
Repperit obscoenas Veneres vitiosa libido.
Herculis haeredi quam Lemnia suasit egestas,
Quam toga facundi scenis agitavit Afrani,
Et quam Nolanis capitalis luxus inussit;
Crispa tamen cunctas exercet corpore in uno:
Deglubit, fellat, molitur per utramque cavernam,
Ne quid inexpertum frustra moritura relinquat.