Martial, IX., 34:
“If you hear clapping of hands in the bathing hall, Flaccus, you may be sure some deformed person’s enormous member is there.”
Juvenal, VI., v. 373, 374:
“Far seen, pointed at by all men’s fingers, he enters the baths.”
It was not without some art that the patients performed their functions. But their business was made up of these two chief requirements: depilation and knowing how to use the haunches.
Patients took care in the first place to remove the hair carefully from all parts of their body[[25]]; from the lips, arms, chest, legs, the virile parts, and in particular from the altar of passive lust, the anus: Martial, II., 62:
“Pluck out the hair from breast and legs and arms; keep your member cropped and ringed with short hair; all this, we know, you do for your mistress’ sake, Labienus. But for whom do you depilate your posteriors?”
And IX., 28:
“While you, Chrestus, appear thus with your parts all hairless, with a mentula like a vulture’s neck, and a head as shining as a prostitute’s buttocks with never a hair appearing on your leg, and with your pallid lips all shorn and bare, you talk of Curius, Camillus, Numa, Ancus, of all the hairy heroes we have ever read of in history, and spout big words and threatenings against theatres and the times. Let but some big-limbed man come into sight, you call him with a nod, and take him off....”
And he says, IX., 58: