(Inscribed beneath a Portrait of Crispa,—an immodest woman.—Over and above the natural modes of intercourse in legitimate coition, vicious lust has discovered impure ways of love: the way that his loneliness at Lemnos taught the heir of Hercules (Philoctetes), that which the comedies of eloquent Afranius displayed on the stage, and that which deadly luxury branded on the men of Nola. But Crispa practises them all in her sole person: she skins, she sucks, she works by either aperture, that she may not leave anything untried, and so have lived in vain!)
No doubt Stark, p. 19, is quite right in saying this passage has nothing to do with the θήλεια νοῦσος; but the poet has by no means, as he puts it in his note, temporum ordine lapsus,—committed an anachronism. He makes no mention whatever of any vengeance of Venus, saying nothing more than that loneliness led the inheritor (of the arrows) of Hercules to Onanism. This is not merely advancing a conjecture, as Stark does, but (to say nothing of the Lemnia egestas—Lemnian loneliness), admits of being legitimately developed from the whole sequence of thought in the Epigram. Crispa’s vices are mentioned in the order of their shamefulness. The least disgraceful is Onanism, such as Philoctetes practised, next comes the vice of the cinaedus and of the pathic, for which Afranius serves as example, and lastly fellation. Thus it shows a complete want of comprehension, when the commentators quote the scholion to Thucydides given a little above as an explanation. Had Philoctetes been referred to as a pathic, the succeeding verse would be entirely superfluous; which verse does not receive a word of notice from the expositors, presumably because they failed to understand the allusion. The true explanation is afforded by a passage in Quintilian:[316] “Togatis excellit Afranius, utinamque non inquinasset argumenta puerorum foedis amoribus, mores suos fassus.” (Afranius excels in fabulae togatae (polite comedies), and it were to be wished he had not defiled his plots by disgusting intrigues with boys, thereby discovering his own morals). Forberg, loco citato p. 283, quotes this passage indeed, but explains (both here and on p. 343) the libido (lust) of Philoctetes as being that of the pathic.
To prove that Venus manifested her wrath in the way specified, we may further cite the race of the daughters of Helios, whom she punished by the infliction of licentious love. Thus Hyginus says:[317] Soli ob indicium (concubitus cum Marte) Venus ad progeniem eius semper fuit inimica, (Because of the Sun’s revelation (of her intrigue with Mars) Venus was ever a bitter enemy of his posterity); and Seneca:[318]
Stirpem perosa Solis invisi Venus
Per nos catenas vindicat Martis sui
Suasque: probris omne Phoebeum genus
Onerat infandis.
(Venus, loathing the posterity of the hated Sun, punishes on us the fetters that bound her lover Mars and her. With abominable and disgraceful practices she afflicts the whole race of Phoebus).
An example of such vengeance is afforded by Pasiphaë, of whom the Scholiast on the passage of Lucian cited below relates how, Ἡλίου οὖσα ἐκ μήνιδος Ἀφροδίτης ταύρου ἠράσθη, (being a daughter of the Sun, she became enamoured of a bull through the influence of angry Aphrodité), a fable which might very well be explained—for ταύρος (a bull), like κένταυρος (a Centaur), occurs in the sense of paederast—as meaning that she had become a female pathic. So Theomnestus says in Lucian:[319] “So lecherous a look resides in the eyes, that compelling all beauty to its will, it can find no satiety. And often was I uncertain whether this were not some spite of Aphrodité. Yet am I none of the children of Helios, neither a natural heir of the Lemnian women, nor puffed up with the scornful insensibility of Hippolytus, that I could have provoked against me such an implacable hatred on the part of the goddess)”. Philo Judaeus[320] also represents paederastia as a punishment of such men as married a woman legally repudiated, and the like: πρὸς δὲ συμβάσεις εἴ τις ἐθέλοι χωρεῖν ἀνὴρ τῇ τοιαύτῃ γυναικὶ, μαλακίας καὶ ἀνανδρίας ἐκφερέσθω δόξαν, ὡς ἐκ τετμημένος τῆς ψυχῆς τὸ βιωφελέστατον μισοπόνηρον πάθος.... δίκην οὖν τινέτω σὺν τῇ γυναικί. (But if any man should wish to enter into contracts with such a woman, let him bear the ill-repute of softness and effeminacy, as having eradicated from his soul that sentiment of hatred for ill-doers which is most useful for life,—So let him pay his penalty along with the woman). In Athenaeus one of the speakers exclaims (Deipnos., XIII. p. 605 D.): Ὁρᾶτε οὖν καὶ ὑμεῖς, οἱ φιλόσοφοι παρὰ φύσιν τῇ Ἀφροδίτῃ χρώμενοι, καὶ ἀσεβοῦντες εἰς τὴν θεὸν, μὴ τὸν αὐτὸν διαφθαρῆτε τρόπον. (Beware then ye too, philosophers who indulge the pleasures of Aphrodité against nature, and act impiously towards the goddess, that ye be not destroyed in the same way).
According to Diodorus (V. 55) the sons of Neptune in consequence of the wrath of Venus plunged into such madness that they violated their mother. The Propontides, who had denied the godhead of Venus, were cast by her into such an amorous phrenzy that they publicly gave themselves to men, and they were subsequently turned into stones.[321] Myrrha, whose mother proclaimed herself to be fairer than Venus, was driven by the goddess into unchastity with her own father.[322]