“When you pass the threshold of a chamber with name-board over the door, whether it be a boy or a girl that greeted you with a smile....”
That the prostitutes changed their names is apparent from a passage in Plautus (Poenulus, V., iii, 20, 21):
“For to-day they were to change their names, and will lend their bodies for infamous traffic.”
[52]. Horace, Sat. II., vii, 48, 49:
“... Every woman that naked beneath the bright lamplight endured the thrusts of a swollen member.”
Juvenal, VI., 130, 131.
“Foul with the reek of the lamp, she bore to the Imperial couch the stink of the brothel.”
[53]. Authors vary on this point. Herodotus: “The Persians pollute young boys; they have learned it from the Greeks,” (I., 135). Plutarch refutes the assertion: “How can the Persians be indebted to the Greeks for these impurities, when all historians are agreed upon the fact that they had eunuchs before they had ever come near to the Grecian seas?” (Of the Maliciousness of Herodotus, p. 857, vol. II of Frankfort edition of 1620). Athenaeus: “Pederastia was first introduced in Greece by the Cretans, as is related by Timaeus; other authors however have asserted that the man who first imported that sort of love was Laius, who, having been hospitably received by Pelops, fell in love with Chrysippus, the son of his host, carried him off in his chariot, and fled to Thebes.” (XIII., 79.) And who has not heard of the incontinence of the inhabitants of Sodom?”
[54]. Particularly in Euboea, whence the expression, “Chalcidize”, meaning, according to Hesychius, to pedicate, because masculine loves flourished among the Chalcidians. “Phicidize” is another expression for the same thing from the name of a town now unknown; Suidas: “Phicidize, to be a Pederast”, and similarly, “Siphnianize” from Siphnos, an island in the Ægean; Hesychius says: “Siphnianize, that is to finger the anus; the inhabitants of Siphnos are, in fact, given to the practice of pederastia.” We have seen above that the meaning of Siphnianize has been perverted.
[55]. Athenaeus, XIII., 79: “Of all the barbarians the Celts, although their women are most beautiful—it is, therefore, not surprising that an ardent amateur of “fine women,” such as Julius Caesar is described to us, should in the Gallic Provinces have been not over respectful to the conjugal bed—the Celts take more pleasure in pederastia than any other Nation, to such a degree that amongst them it is no rarity to find a man lying between two minions.”