“Citizens mind your wives; we bring you the bald-headed adulterer. You expended gold in Gaul; here you are taking your change.”
The same author (Julius Cæsar, ch. 52) says: “Helvius Cinna, tribune of the people, admitted to many people, that he had drawn up and kept ready a law by the instructions of Cæsar, to bring it forward during his absence, by which he would be at liberty, with a view to leaving offspring, to marry whom he would and as many wives as he wished. So that nobody should be in any doubt about the notoriety of his lewdness and infamy, Curio, the elder, in one of his pleadings, calls him the husband of all women, and the wife of all husbands.”
[34]. “Sextus Pompeius reproached him for being effeminate, and Marc Anthony says he bought his adoption from his uncle (or rather his great-uncle) by prostituting himself to him. On a day of public games all the world understood and applied to him very demonstratively the following verses, spoken of a Priest of Cybelé, Mother of the Gods, playing the tambourine”:
“See you how a cinede governs the world with a finger?” (Suetonius, Augustus, ch. 68.)
A picture representing Augustus playing the part of a patient, is in the Monuments de la vie privée des douze Césars, pl. VI., and another of Cæsar and Nicomedes, pl. I.
[35]. “It is even said, that during a sacrifice, he could not restrain himself, smitten with the pretty face of the incense-bearer; the divine service barely finished, he took the youth aside, and debauched him, and then did as much for his brother, who played the flute. Soon afterwards he ordered their legs to be broken, because they reproached each other with their infamy.” (Suetonius, Tiberius, ch. 44). The act of this madman is represented on pl. XX. in the work of d’Hancarville, cited on a previous page.
[36]. And also Pythagoras. “One would have thought that nothing was left for him in the way of debauchery, and that he had reached the limits of depravity, if he had not a few days later chosen out of this infamous herd a certain Pythagoras, whom he took for his husband with all the solemnity of a marriage. The flammeum was put on the Emperor’s head, the auspices were consulted, neither dowry nor nuptial torches were forgotten; all was done openly, even those things, which, if done with a woman, are hidden by the night.” (Tacitus, Annals, XV., 37). The man called Pythagoras by Tacitus, appears to be the same to whom Suetonius (Nero, ch. 29), gives the name of Doryphorus, either on account of his services, or by mistake. “He took for husband the freedman Doryphorus in the same way in which Sporus had taken him himself for husband, and he counterfeited the cries and sobbings of virgins when losing their maidenhead.” Plate XXXVIII of the above quoted work shows an illustration of this anecdote.
[37]. “He went so far as to try to change a young man into a woman; his name was Sporus, and he had him castrated; having given him a dowry, he caused him to be brought to him with the flammeum on his head, and married him with all the nuptial solemnities. There has come down to us an appropriate saying on somebody’s part, namely, whether it might not have been better for human kind if Domitian, his father, had married a woman of that sort. He made Sporus dress himself in the costume of the Empresses, and had him carried in his litter; he travelled with him in that way, taking him through the meetings and markets in Greece, and soon after in Rome, about the time of the Sigillarian festivities, kissing him from time to time.” (Suetonius, Nero, ch. 28). Plate XXXIV in the repeatedly quoted French work, gives a representation of the abominable wedding.
[38]. “He (Hadrian) enjoyed the affection of Trajan, but this did not save him from the malevolence of the pedagogues of the young boys Trajan loved so ardently” (Spartianus, Hadrian, ch. 2).
[39]. “He lost, during his navigation of the Nile, his dear Antinous, and wept for him like a woman. There are sundry allegations about this Antinous; some say he was devoted to Hadrian, others point to the beauty of his shape, and to the pleasure Hadrian experienced with him. At the instance of Hadrian the Greeks placed him in the ranks of the Gods, and affirmed that he gave oracular decisions; those oracles, it is said, were composed by Hadrian himself” (Spartianus, Hadrian, ch. 14). St. Jerome says in the Hegesippus: “Antinous, a slave of the Emperor Hadrian, after whom a circus was named the Antinoian, founded also a town bearing his name (Antinoia), and established an Oracle in the temple.”