Summoenianae qua pilantur uxores.
(Nor yet your mother’s jars full of foul resin, wherewith the suburban dames free themselves of hair.)
[220] Martial, bk. X. Epigr. 90.,
Quid vellis vetulum, Ligella, cunnum?
Quid busti cineres tui lacessis?
Tales munditiae decent puellas.
Erras, si tibi cunnus hic videtur,
Ad quem mentula pertinere desit.
(Why pluck you bare, Ligella, your old organ? why vex you the ashes of your tomb? Such nice allurements are for girls. You are mistaken if you think yours is of a sort that a man’s member should be fain to belong to it.) This passage, together with those quoted a little above from Aristophanes and Theopompus, will explain sufficiently what Horace (Sat. I. 2. v. 36.) meant by his “mirator cunni Cupiennius albi,” (Cupiennius admirer of a white organ), for the albus (white) here evidently stands for rasus, depilatus, nudus, (shaven, freed from hair, bare); as in Juvenal, Sat. I. 111., Nuper in hanc urbem pedibus qui venerat albis, (Who but now had arrived in this city with white, i. e. bare, feet.) The commentators have hitherto always explained it by matrona stola alba, seu candida, vestita, (a matron clad in a white, or glistening-white, robe), because, as Heindorf puts it, no other interpretation is to hand. But really there are several possible explanations on similar lines. It might be for “canus cunnus”, (hoary, aged; organ) (Martial, bk. IX. 38., bk. II. 34.), though again the meaning of depilatus (free of hair), in another sense, might equally well be at the bottom of this, as is the case with cana labra (hoary, white, lips)—IX. 28. Or albus (white) may be taken as synonymous with increta, cerussata (whitened with chalk, painted with ceruse), to which Martial supplies the explanation, when he says (III. 42.),
Lomento rugas uteri quod condere tentas,