If you ask whether modern women, who have suffered the wrong of seeing their beauty slighted, actually have recourse to this leathern substitute, Aloysia Sigaea (Dialogue II) shall answer you:
“The Milesian women made for themselves imitations in leather, eight inches long and thick in proportion. Aristophanes tells us that the women of his day habitually made use of such. And to this very day Italian, Spanish and Asiatic women honor this instrument with a place in their toilet apparatus; it is their most precious possession, and one very highly appreciated.”
It is an undoubted fact that the Roman matrons cherished a species of inoffensive snake[[134]], the cold skin of which served as a refrigerator in summer, Martial, VII., 86:
“If Glacilla winds an icy serpent round her neck....”
Lucian Alexander (Works, vol. IV., p. 259):
“In that country one sees serpents of an enormous size, but so quiet and mild that they are fondled by women, sleep with the children, do not get angry on being trodden on or handled, and suck the nipples of the breast like a nursling.”
This being so, our eminent Bottiger was probably right, when he wrote page 454 of his Sabina[[135]] a profoundly scientific work in German, that very likely snakes were used as instruments to satisfy the lubricity of amorous women. You may understand now what happened, or what might have happened to Atia, the mother of Augustus, of whom Suetonius (Augustus, ch. 94) wrote:
“I read in the treatise of Asclepiades of Mendé called the Theologumena, how Atia the mother of Augustus, having gone at midnight to the temple of Apollo, to assist at a solemn sacrifice, fell asleep, and so did the other women present; how a serpent suddenly glided close to her, and after some little time withdrew again, and how on waking she purified herself, as though she had left the arms of her husband.”
There would be nothing surprising in the fact that a serpent of that sort should have investigated even without incitation on Atia’s part, a certain locality which was well known to it by the lubricity of other women, and that Atia felt on awakening the very same sensation as though she had undergone a real coitus.