(Eunus, you lick the flabby organs of your pregnant wife; is it you are in a hurry to give learned explanations to your babes unborn?) we should explain the putria inguina not so much as rotten, ulcerous, but rather as laxata or laxa (relaxed, flabby). Similarly Horace, Epod. VIII. 7., speaks of mammae putres (the flabby dugs) of an old woman.
[82] Martial, IX. 63.,
Ad coenam invitant omnes te, Phoebe, cinaedi:
Mentula quem pascit, non, puto, purus homo est.
(All the cinaedi, Phoebus, invite you to dinner: a man the penis feeds is not, I think, a clean man).
Petronius, Sat., Non taces, nocturne percussor, qui ne tum quidem, quum fortiter faceres, cum pura muliere pugnasti. (Silence, stabber by night, who not even when you were at your best, ever faced a clean woman).
[83] Martial, Bk. IV. Epigr. 43.
[84] Persius, Satir. V. 186-188.
[85] Wendelinus Hock de Brackenau entitled his Treatise on the Venereal Disease: Mentagra, sive Tractatus de causis, praeseruatis, regimine et cura Morbi Gallici, vulgo Mala Francosz., etc., (Mentagra, or a Treatise on the Causes, Preventives, Treatment and Cure of the so called French Disease, etc.). Strasburg 1514. 4to. Sartorius Frid. praes. Conrad. Johrenio, Diss. de mentagra ad loc. Plinii Secundi hist. nat. lib. XXVI. cap. 1. (Dissertation on mentagra in connexion with the passage of Pliny Secundus’ Hist. Naturalis bk. XXVI. ch. 1.). Frankfurt-on-Oder N. D. 49 pp. 4to. Gives a sort of exegesis of the passage, speaks in first place of new diseases in general, passes on to the Venereal Disease, the antiquity of which the author upholds, and finally discusses Mentagra, which he holds to be a leprous-syphilitic affection. The work is still quite worth reading, more especially as the author quotes some passages from the Chronicle of Anhalt von Beckmann, at that time still unprinted, and which we find mentioned hardly anywhere else.
[86] Hensler, “Vom abendländischen Aussatze im Mittelalter”, (On Occidental Leprosy in the Middle Ages). Hamburg 1790. pp. 67, 206, 307.