“Catching me with a boy, you harass me with your cries, and you tell me, my wife, that you have posteriors too.”
Many and many a time did Juno say the same to Jupiter the Thunderer; yet he continued to sleep with slender Ganymede.
He of Tyrius, laying his bow aside, bent Hylas under him; think you therefore that Megara was without buttocks? Dephné, by her flight, vexed Phœbus, but his love’s ardour found relief in the end in the boy Oebalius. Although Briseis slept, often with her backs turned upon him, his smooth-skinned friend Patroclus was more to the taste of the son of Aeacus.
Cease then, wife, to call your affairs by masculine names; better consider you have two vulvas.
His Epigram XII., 98, treats of the same matter:
“Knowing as you do the honest walk and fidelity of your husband, and that he never misuses your bed with concubines, why, foolish woman, torment yourself about those venal boy lovers,—brief and fugitive is the pleasure from their complaisance!
They are more useful to you than to their master, I tell you, for they make him think that one wife is better than they all. They give what you will not give;—But I will, you say, so that the volatile husband stray not from the conjugal bed.
But it is not the same thing, I want a fig not an orange, and you must know theirs is a fig, yours an orange; Look! a matron, a woman like you, must know what belongs to her. Leave to boys what is theirs, and do you make the best of what is yours.”
[50]. Some prostitutes sat (Plautus, Poenulus, I., ii., v. 54), others stood: “Another man will only have the harlot that stands upright in the unclean brothel,” (Horace, Sat. I., ii., v. 30.)
[51]. Juvenal’s Messalina (VI., v. 123) prostitutes herself “under the fictitious name-board of Lycisca.” Petronius: “I see men gliding in stealthily between the name-boards and the naked prostitutes; I understood, alas, too late, that I had been introduced into a bad place.” (Satyr. ch. 7.) Martial, XI., 46: