“Avoid Alpheus’ mouth, he loves Arethusa’s bosom, plunging head-first into the salty sea.”
In this epigram also the poet draws upon the ambiguity of the words mouth, bosom (bay), head-first, salt sea, which may refer to the river Alpheus in Arcadia and to Arethusa, a spring near Syracuse, but also to the mouth of a cunnilingue, that goes and plunges into the vulva of a woman; not to mention yet another idea connected with this, to which we shall return presently.
LXXVI.
“Cheilon and **** have the same letters, and why? It is because Cheilon will lick things that are like and unlike.”
This mockery is addressed to the cunnilingue Cheilon. The epigram tells him that he has somehow a right of licking, as his name, composed of the same letters as ****, announces at once the licker, whether he may lick the lips of a mouth, similar to his own, or those of a vulva, which are very dissimilar.
The distich of Meleager upon Phavorinus, published by Huschkius in his Analecta critica (p. 245), seems to bear upon the same subject:
“You doubt whether Phavorinus does the thing. Doubt no more; he told me himself he did,—with his own mouth.”
As Martial uses often very happily the word narrat (III., 84), when he speaks of the abuse of the tongue for fellation, and Horace the same, so Meleager says **** (he told) of the man, who employs his for licking the vulva.
The following epigram of Ammanius from the Analecta of Brunck, vol. II., p. 386, is somewhat more obscure:
“It is not because you suck your pen that I dislike you; ’tis because you do so,—without a pen.”