“Saluting raven[[90]], why do they call thee fellator? Never a mentula entered your beak.”
The fact is ignorant people believed the raven fulfilled the coitus with his beak:
Pliny says: “The vulgar herd believes that it operates the coitus and procreates with its beak. Aristotle denied this, saying that ravens merely exchange kisses in the same way, familiar to everybody, that pigeons do.” (Natural History, X., 12.)
Erasmus denies in his Adagia, under the word Lesbiari (p. 409 of the Frankfort edition, 1670), that in his time the obscene practice of irrumation was still known:
“A**** (to lick), if I am not mistaken, is with the Greeks the same thing as fellare with the Latins. The word indeed remains; but the thing itself has been, I think, long done away with.”
I fear this is not really the case. At any rate I am informed that this practice is not entirely opposed to the habits of libertines of the present day; those must decide whose opportunities take them to great cities. Plate XXI., in the Monuments de la vie privée des douze Césars represents a fellator. However the graceful picture in question really belongs more properly to the category of “spintrian postures”, of which more anon, than to the present chapter.
FOOTNOTES - OF IRRUMATION
[60]. You see we follow the same general order as in the Priapeia, VII.
“I warn you, boy, I mean to pedicate you; with you, my girl, I will copulate. The third penalty is kept for the bearded ruffian.”