Quod notum est, quod et ipse non negabis:
Dixi te, Coracine, cunnilingum.
(I never called you a cinaedus, Coracinus; I am not so rash or so reckless, not being one to speak lies willingly. If I called you a cinaedus, Coracinus, may Pontia’s jar be my enemy, and Metilius’poisoned cup. I take oath by your Syrian tumours, by your Berecynthian frenzies. What I did say is a trivial, an insignificant thing, a thing well known, that you will not yourself deny,—I said, Coracinus, you were a cunnilingue).
What were these Syrii tumores (Syrian tumours) that afflicted the cunnilingue Coracinus? Beroaldus, Annotat. ch. 25., understands them as “tumores et vibices a cultris et flagris quibus sacerdotes Cybeles (quam deam Syriam esse volunt) se sauciabant.” (the swellings and weals from the knives and scourges with which the priests of Cybelé,—whom they claim to be the Syrian goddess—used to wound themselves). Farnabius on the contrary thinks only Berecynthios furores (Berecynthian frenzies) to be intended in this explanation, and makes the tumores Syrii mean “ulcera et morbos quibus credebatur irata Isis inflare peierantes,” (ulcers and maladies with which the angry Isis was supposed to afflict false swearers), appealing to the passage of Persius[84], already brought forward a few pages back (p. 254.), which reads:
Hinc grandes Galli et cum sistro lusca sacerdos,
Incussere Deos inflantes corpora, si non
Praedictum ter mane caput gustaveris alli.
(Then the tall Galli, and the one-eyed priestess with her sacred rattle, instil terror of the gods that make men’s bodies swell, unless three times at dawn you have eaten the prescribed head of garlic).
Whether this passage affords any direct proof would seem doubtful, inasmuch as the inflare corpus (to make the body swell) properly speaking only refers to the abdomen. To this also the eating of the allium (garlic), which no doubt first won its magic significance on account of its carminative properties, appears to point.
However another explanation is possible. Referring back to the passage of Porphyrius quoted above on p. 254., the tumores Coracinus had contracted in consequence of his general incontinence with women, which incontinence had at last brought him as a senex? (old man) to such a condition of weakness that nothing was left him but the vice of cunnilingere to satisfy his still unexhausted lubricity. A side light in this case may be thrown on the matter by Horace’s description of the Anus libidinosa (The lecherous old woman) in Epodes VIII. 9. 19.: