Why on my chin a plaster clapped;
Besalved my lips, that are not chapped;
Philænis, why? The cause is this:
Philænis, thee I will not kiss.
But such artifices, however, are of very little use; no one escapes the basiatores (kissers). They prowl about the streets and market-places; not even the walls of the home, nor even the enforced solitariness of the most hidden-places served as a protection against them:
There are no means the kissing tribe to shun,
They meet you, stop you, after you they run,
Press you before, behind, to each side cleave,
No place, no time, no men, exempted leave;
A dropping nose, salved lips, can none reprieve,
Gangrenes, foul running sores, no one relieve;
They kiss you in a sweat, or starved with cold,
Lovers’ their mistress’ kisses cannot hold;
A chair is no defence, with curtains guarded,
With door and windows shut, and closely warded,
The kissers, through a chink will find a way,
Presume the tribune, consul’s self, to stay;
Nor can the awful rods, or Lictor’s mace,
His stounding voice away these kissers chase,
But they’ll ascend the Rostra, curule chair,
The judges kiss while they give sentence there.
Those laugh they kiss, and those that sigh and weep;
’Tis all the same whether you laugh or weep;
Those who do bathe, or recreate in pool,
Who are withdrawn to ease themselves at stool.
Against this plague I know no fence but this:
Make him thy friend whom thou abhorr’st to kiss.
All greet one another with kisses; every condition of life, every handicraft, found a representative amongst the basiatores. When a man, in ancient times, was afraid of meeting his tailor, it was not so much on account of the latter’s bill as by reason of his kisses.
“Rome,” says Martial, “gives, on one’s return after fifteen years’ absence, such a number of kisses as exceeds those given by Lesbia to Catullus. Every neighbour, every hairy-faced farmer, presses on you with a strongly-scented kiss. Here the weaver assails you, there the fuller and cobbler, who has just been kissing leather; here the owner of a filthy beard, and a one-eyed gentleman; there one with bleared eyes, and fellows whose mouths are defiled with all manner of abominations. It was hardly worth while to return.”
People kissed whenever they met: morning and evening, at all seasons of the year: spring and autumn, summer and winter. The winter kisses seem to have been especially unpleasant, and Martial censures them, in the strongest terms, in his epigram to Linus:
’Tis winter, and December’s horrid cold
Makes all things stark; yet, Linus, thou lay’st hold
On all thou meet’st; none can thy clutches miss;
But with thy frozen mouth all Rome dost kiss.
What could’st more spiteful do, or more severe,
Had’st thou a blow o’ th’ face, or box o’ th’ ear?
My wife, this time, to kiss me does forbear,
My daughter, too, however debonaire.
But thou more trim and sweeter art. No doubt
Th’ icicles, hanging at thy dog-like snout,
The congealed snivel dangling on thy beard,
Ranker than th’ oldest goat of all the herd.
The nastiest mouth i’ th’ town I’d rather greet,
Than with thy flowing frozen nostrils meet.
If therefore thou hast either shame or sense,
Till April comes no kisses more dispense.
That Martial’s epigrams depict the actual state of the case without any particular exaggeration it may, among other things, be inferred from the fact that the Emperor Tiberius, according to Suetonius, issued an edict against these cotidiana oscula (daily kisses).
The friendly kiss was likewise much in vogue in the Middle Ages.