Epigram CXXVII.:
“Eunus, when you lick the groins of your wife, she being with child; ’tis because you would be betimes in teaching the tongues to your babes yet unborn.”
You seem, he says, to send out your tongue to meet your unborn children, and fulfilling your duty as a Grammarian, to teach them lessons of tongue, and the interpretation of obscure terms.[[109]] The Manneius of Martial, whom we have spoken of above, was also in the habit of licking pregnant women’s privates.
Epigram CXXVIII., entitled On the same Eunus, the Learned Licker:
“Eunus, the little Syrian pedagogue, licker of privates, Opican doctor (’tis Phyllis he owes his knowledge to), beholds the feminine engine in fourfold different fashions: Opening it triangularly, he makes it the letter Delta (Δ); seeing the pair of folds side by side along the valley of the thighs with the line in the middle where the slit of the vagina opens, he says it is a Psi (Ⲯ); in fact its shape is triple-cloven then. Then when he has put his tongue in, it is a Lambda (Λ), and he makes out therein the true design of a Phi (Φ). Why! ignoramus, do you think you see a Rho (Ρ) written, where merely a long Iota (Ι) should be put? Contemptible doctor, foul pedant, you deserve the Tau (Τ) yourself; the crossed Theta (ϴ) should by rights be put against your name.”
Ausonius calls Eunus an Opican, because these filthy practices were, according to Festus, most common among the Osci or Opici. He then indulges in a series of jests, or rather represents Eunus as doing so, on the shape of the female organ[[110]]. He says it seems to him either quadrangular, or triangular, in the latter case corresponding to the Greek [Greek: D] (similarly Aristophanes called it a Delta,—“their delta plucked clean of hair,” Lysistrata, 151), and also likens it to the letter **, owing to the folds which surround the vulva on either side[[111]], and form the outer lips, the lane in the middle being the opening of the vulva, and so together form the trifid letter **; in the Technopaegnium, 140, he calls it a three-pronged fork, the slit being the middle and the lips the outer prongs. Then he says that Eunus is a Lambda when he is licking, on account of the first letter of the word ****. All this is clear enough, and I do not understand how the very learned Vinet can complain of its obscurity. Neither has it given me much trouble to make out what Ausonius means by the letters Rho and Iota. The solution seems to me to be as follows: “Do not tell us, Eunus, that your pike in action resembles the letter (Ρ) of the Greeks, a letter which evidently looks like a lance with balls; in your amorous diversions you use no other lance than your tongue, which, as you will not deny, looks more like a javelin without balls, something like the letter Iota; you cannot deceive me, who well know that you would rather be taken for a fornicator than for a cunnilingue, like that Gargilius, of whom Martial, III., 96, says:
“You do not enter, only lick my mistress; yet you boast yourself adulterer and copulator!”
Lastly and finally by the Tau he threatens his man with the gallows, and by the Theta with death. Of this there can be little doubt; it is a proved fact that the letter Theta, the initial of the word ****, signified with the Greeks condemnation to death[[112]]. With regard to Tau, there is room for doubt; instead of Tau some of the copies of Ausonius give (δ), and although this sign may, according to Scaliger, very well signify the rope for hanging, the difficulty I feel is this, that a composite letter, a small letter, an abbreviation of doubtful antiquity, thus placed amongst simple, capital, unabbreviated letters seems to come in very inappropriately. It may be that Ausonius originally wrote ****; then * having been left out by an inadvertence of the copyist, the ** might easily have been turned into **. The Tau, as the reader will see at once, represents a gallows. Tertullian, Adversus Maricionem: “This letter Tau of the Greeks is with us the T, a sort of cross.”
As was the case with irrumation, so with even more reason the licking of women’s privates was particularly adopted by old men, whose tool will not raise its head[[113]].
Aloysia Sigaea, Dialogue VII., says: “He (Gonzalvo of Cordova), was likewise a mighty cunnilingue by reason of his great age.”