Charinus dyes his skin, and still he is pale;
Charinus licks a woman’s privates, and still pale is he.”
That is to say, amongst the causes that should prevent paleness the one last enumerated is the veritable cause of his paleness. Fellators would also seem to have had pale faces, Catullus, LXXX:
“How is it, Gellius, that those rosy lips of yours grow whiter than the winter’s snow, when at morn you leave your house, and the eighth hour calls you from your long-protracted soft repose? I know not what to think. Can it be true what rumor whispers, that you devour the middle parts of men? This at any rate is evidenced by wretched Virro’s sunken flanks and your own lips masked with the milky juice sucked from him.”
The withered flanks are those of Virro, the irrumator, the lips those of Gellius; the passage is somewhat ambiguous, and only thus to be explained. One Virro, accustomed to take the passive part, has been already mentioned by us, in quoting Juvenal, IX., 35. I do not know whether it is the same:
“Though Virro has caught sight of you all naked, and the foam has come to his lips.”
Pathics, too, no less than fellators, appear to have pallid faces. Juvenal, II., 50:
“Hispo submits to young men; he is pale with either kind of infamy.”
He served as patient to young men, and was moreover a fellator, as is shown by the difference which the poet institutes between him and women, who do not lick each other’s secret parts:
“Taedia does not lick Cluvia, nor Flora Catulla.”