“... The cable is rotted away, yet is it still fond of being rubbed.”
Nor is it unwelcome to men in the vigor of life, and who are fit to caress young girls, to have mistresses whose hands are not lazy in bed, and whose fingers know how to act in the dark regions where the arrow of love is hidden. Martial, XI., 105, complains about the unseemly gravity of his wife, which forbade her to render him that service:
“You will not help me on by movement or by word, nor yet with your fingers, as though you were preparing the incense and the wine for sacrifice.”[[100]]
Penelopé, on the other hand, contented Ulysses well that way, as Martial has it in the same epigram:
“Chaste though she was, when the king of Ithaca lay snoring, Penelopé liked to have her hand always on it.”
Ovid’s mistress did him the same service, but all in vain one miserable night, when a hostile divinity seemed to have smitten to death that most pitiful part of him, to use his own expression, and the girl, in order that the servants might not think that she had remained untouched, pretended to make her ablutions all the same (Amores, III., viii., 73, 74):
“My darling did not disdain even to put her hand to it and gently try to rouse it.”
This virtue of the fingers in procuring erection is alluded to by Juvenal, VI., 195, 96:
“... How well a soft and libertine voice will erect your member; it is as good as fingers!”
The author of the Priapeia was also well aware of the fact; LXXX.: