“... Who is this Crispulus, who has legs undisfigured by a single hair?”
Even the great Caesar did not disdain this coquetry, Suetonius, ch. 45:
“He took too much care of his appearance, to the point of not only having his beard removed with nippers, and shaved with a razor, but even of being depilated, for which things he was blamed.”
This custom is connected with those Samnite vases, filled with rosin and pitch to be heated for depilation, and for softening the pitch, found amongst the properties of Commodus, and which by the orders of Pertinax were sold by public auction. Julius Capitolinus speaks of them (Pertinax, 8). For removing the hair there were used in fact either tweezers or an unguent called dropax or psilothrum. Martial mentions the use of tweezers in the Epigram (IX., 28) quoted before; of dropax or psilothrum he speaks in Book III., 74:
“You depilate your face with psilothrum and your head with dropax.”
And again VI., 93:
“She revives her youth with psilothrum.”
And X., 65:
“You rub yourself every day with dropax.”
The dropax or psilothrum was obtained by melting rosin in oil (Pliny, Natural History, XIV. 20):