Ausonius (Epigr. CXXXI.) alludes to this passage of Persius:
“The reason you smooth your groin with hot dropax is that a skin soft and smooth entices the whores, plucked smooth themselves. But that you pluck out the herbage from your parboiled bottom, and polish up with pumice your battered Clazomenae, what means this,—if not that the vice of man with man works in you, and you are a woman behind, a man in front.”
The Clazomenae are without a doubt the man’s buttock, limp and cracked, as those of patients will be, as those of Carinus were, whom Martial, XI., 37 blames for “his lacerated anus.” Ausonius calls them so from the Greek, in Latin “frango” (I break), thus playing with the name of a city. Gonzalvo the Cordevan makes a similar pun, when, desiring to pedicate, he says, he wishes to go to Aversa; also when he wishes to irrumate the mouth, he says: “I go to the Orient”, or when he is about to lick the vulva, in Latin ligurire, “I go to Liguria.” By calling the Clazomenae hammered (battered) Ausonius means to imply that they were as if polished with a hammer, by having served as an anvil. It is as if my fellow-countrymen were to say in joke of a bald man (in German Kahl), “he scratches his polished Kehl.” What could be clearer or wittier? Forcellini is therefore wrong in saying this passage of Ausonius has no sense. Other editors have inclusas instead of incusas, indicating the fissure which separates the buttocks, by the rotundities of which it is on both sides closed in. But in the first place the Clazomenae may well be the buttocks, they being cleft, though not indeed themselves a cleft; in the second place, who could imagine this miserable man depilated the cleft of the buttocks rather than the buttocks themselves?
Some persons, by a refinement of luxury, employed women to depilate them. Such women called themselves ustriculae (from urere, to burn), as they made use of a sticky plaster of boiling dropax to burn the hair on the legs and other parts of the body. Tertullian (De Pallio, ch. 4), says: “So effeminate as to employ ustriculae”; while Salmasius, commenting playfully on the passage, p. 284, declares: “Once upon a time ustriculae served to depilate the legs; now they serve to harass our minds.” Augustus, who according to Suetonius, “was in the habit of singeing his legs with burning nutshells, to make the hair grow more silky” (Augustus, ch. 68), no doubt made use of the nimble hands of these ustriculae.
Women likewise resorted to depilation[[27]], looking upon the fleece of the pubis as something disgusting. Martial:
“... Nor yet one of your mother’s pots full of foul rosin, such as the women of the outer suburbs use to depilate themselves withal” (XII., 32).
As men employed women to free them of hair, so women offered their pubis without shame to men for the same office. Pliny’s bile rises at this (Nat. Hist., XXIX., 8): “Women are not afraid to show their pubis. It is but too true, nothing corrupts manners more than the art of the medical man.”
The emperors themselves condescended to undertake this office for their concubines.
Suetonius, Domitian, ch. 22:
“It was rumoured, that he was fond of depilating his concubines himself, and would bathe amid a crowd of the most infamous courtesans.”