The other position, in which the woman is lying with her knees raised, is the one which Callias makes Tullia take:
“After I am lying upon your dear body”, he says, “press me fast in your arms, and hold me thus embraced. Draw your legs back as far as you can, so that your pretty feet touch your buttocks, smooth as marble” (Aloysia Sigaea, Dialogue VI.).
If you would enter the woman lying on her back with her legs in the air, it may be done in yet another way than Tullia’s mode, and one perhaps still more delicious, by placing your mistress so that she rests her legs crossed over the loins of her rider. A representation of this very pleasant posture, which would rouse the numbed tool of a Hippolytus, is to be found in part IV. of the Félicia mentioned above. There is another similar plate in ch. xxi, not without charm. Doris, in the epigram of Sosipator, vol. I. of the Analecta of Brunck (p. 584), seems also to have made a trial of this figure:
“When I stretched Doris with the rosy buttocks on the bed, I felt immortal in my youthful vigour; for she clipped me round the middle with her strong legs, and unswervingly rode out the long-course of Love.”
Doris did not bestride him; the expression, “When I stretched” shows this; she was lying on her back, and with her feet lifted up clasped her rider.
But again the feet of the woman lying on her back may also be held up by others. In this way Aloysio enjoyed Tullia with the help of Fabrizio, in the VI. Dialogue of Aloysia Sigaea, where Tullia expresses herself as follows:
“Aloysio and Fabrizio come running towards me. “Lift up your legs”, says Aloysio to me, threatening me with his cutlass. I lifted them up. Then down he lies on my bosom, and plunges his cutlass in my ever open wound. Fabrizio raised my two legs in the air, and slipping a hand under each of my hams, moves my loins for me without any trouble on my part. What a singular and pleasant mode of making you move! I declared I was on fire, but before I could end my sentence, the overflowing foam of Venus quenched the fire”[[13]].
So too was it with feet in air, whether of her own accord or seconded by another, that Leda gave herself, with her husband’s consent, to the doctors who had been called in, as Martial describes the scene:
“To her old spouse Leda had declared herself to be hysterical, and complains she must needs be f...cked; yet with tears and groans avers she will not buy health at such a price, and swears she had rather die. The husband beseeches her to live, not to die in her youth and beauty; and permits others to do what he cannot effect himself. Straightway the doctors arrive, the matrons retire; and up go the wife’s legs in air; oh! medicine grave and stern!” (XI., 72.)
Face downwards to her the man may do the woman’s business, while she is half reclining, either obliquely in bed, or on a chair, or lying sideways.