Samorium flores (Erasmus, Prov. xxiii.) alluding to the androgynic prostitutions of Samos.
Siphniassare (σιφνιάζειν, from Siphnos, hod. Sifanto Island) = digito podicem fodere ad pruriginem restinguendam, says Erasmus (see Mirabeau’s Erotika Biblion, Anoscopie).
Thrypsis = the rubbing.
Pederastía had in Greece, I have shown, its noble and ideal side: Rome, however, borrowed her malpractices, like her religion and polity, from those ultra-material Etruscans and debauched with a brazen face. Even under the Republic Plautus (Casin. ii. 21) makes one of his characters exclaim, in the utmost sang-froid, “Ultro te, amator, apage te a dorso meo!” With increased luxury the evil grew and Livy notices (xxxix. 13), at the Bacchanalia, plura virorum inter sese quam fœminarum stupra. There were individual protests; for instance, S. Q. Fabius Maximus Servilianus (Consul U.C. 612) punished his son for dubia castitas; and a private soldier, C. Plotius, killed his military Tribune, Q. Luscius, for unchaste proposals. The Lex Scantinia (Scatinia?), popularly derived from Scantinius the Tribune and of doubtful date (B.C. 226?), attempted to abate the scandal by fine and the Lex Julia by death; but they were trifling obstacles to the flood of infamy which surged in with the Empire. No class seems then to have disdained these “sterile pleasures:” l’on n’attachoit point alors à cette espèce d’amour une note d’infamie, comme en païs de chrétienté, says Bayle under “Anacreon.” The great Cæsar, the Cinædus calvus of Catullus, was the husband of all the wives and the wife of all the husbands in Rome (Suetonius, cap. lii.); and his soldiers sang in his praise Gallias Cæsar subegit, Nicomedes Cæsarem (Suet. cies. xlix.); whence his sobriquet “Fornix Birthynicus.” Of Augustus the people chaunted
Videsne ut Cinædus orbem digito temperet?
Tiberius, with his pisciculi and greges exoletorum, invented the Symplegma or nexus of Sellarii, agentes et patientes, in which the spinthriæ (lit. women’s bracelets) were connected in a chain by the bond of flesh[[379]] (Seneca Quæst. Nat.). Of this refinement, which in the earlier part of the nineteenth century was renewed by sundry Englishmen at Naples, Ausonius wrote (Epig. cxix. 1),
Tres uno in lecto: stuprum duo perpetiuntur;
And Martial had said (xii. 43)
Quo symplegmate quinque copulentur;
Qua plures teneantur a catena; etc.