FOOTNOTES - THE Metamorphoses Of Venus
[4]. Ovid, Art of Love, I., 435, 36: “To fully expose the ungodly wiles of harlots, ten mouths, and as many tongues to boot would not suffice.”
Aloysia Sigaea: “The body in sacrificing to Venus can take as many postures as there are ways in which it can bend and curve. It is equally impossible to enumerate all these, as it is to say which is best fitted to give pleasure. Each acts in this respect according to his own caprice, according to place, time, and so on, choosing the one he prefers. Love is not identical for each and all.” (Dialogue VI.)
[5]. Suidas under Astyanassa: “Astyanassa, maid of Helen the wife of Menelaus, who was the first to invent the different positions in the act of love. She wrote “Of Erotic Postures”; and was followed and imitated by Philaenis and Elephantine, who carried further the series of suchlike obscenities.”
[6]. Priapeia, LXIII: “To her a certain girl (I very nearly gave her name) is wont to come with her paramour; and if she fails to discover as many postures as Philaenis describes, she goes away again still itching with desire.”
Philaenis has found a champion of her good name in Aeschrion, who wrote an epitaph for her that is still extant in Athenaeus, bk. VIII. ch. 13: The last lines read: “I was not lustful for men nor a gad-about; but Polycrates, by race an Athenian, a mill clapper of talk, a foul-tongued sophist, wrote—what he wrote; I know nought of it all.”
Her works were familiar to Timarchus in Lucian (Apophras, p. 158,—vol. VII., of Works of Lucian, edit. J. P. Schmid): “Tell me where you find these words and expressions,—in what books? is it in the volumes of Philaenis, that are always in your hands?”
[7]. Suetonius, Tiberius, ch. 43: “He decorated his various and variously arranged sleeping-chambers with pictures and bas-reliefs of the most licentious character, and furnished them with the works of Philaenis, that no one in performing should want a model of the posture required.”
Priapeia, III: “Taking pictures from the licentious treatises of Elephantis, Lalagé presents them an offering to the stiff-standing god, and begs you prove if she performs agreeably to the pictured postures.”