The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
MANUAL
OF
Classical Erotology
(De figuris Veneris)
BY
FRED. CHAS. FORBERG
LITERAL ENGLISH VERSION.
MANCHESTER
One Hundred Copies
PRIVATELY PRINTED FOR VISCOUNT
JULIAN SMITHSON M. A., AND FRIENDS
1884
NOTE
One Hundred Copies only of this volume have been printed (all on the same paper and the type distributed) for Viscount Julian Smithson M. A., the Translator, and his Friends. None of these Copies are for Sale.
Foreword
It is perhaps well to state at once that the “Manual of Classical Erotology” is intended only for Students of the Classics, Lawyers, Psychologists and Medical Men. Those persons, we think, who may peruse it as a means of awakening voluptuous sensations will be severely disappointed. Never did a work more serious issue from the press. Here we have no curious erotic story born of a diseased mind, but a cold, relentless analysis of those human passions which it is ever the object of Science to wrestle with and overthrow.
As a basis also for the correct interpretation of the drama of the ancient world, Forberg’s studies are most valuable. Apart from that extraordinary book, Rosenbaum’s History of the Esoteric Habits, Beliefs and Customs of Antiquity, we know of no other compilation which casts so intense a search-light upon those Crimes, Follies and Perversions of the “Sixth Sense” which transformed the olden glory of Greece and Rome into a by-word and a reproach amongst the nations.
The present English translation now offered to Scholars is entirely new and strictly exact. No liberties have been taken with the text. It was felt that any attempt to add more colour, or to increase the effect,—involving a departure from the lines of stern simplicity laid down by Forberg,—would have detracted from the scientific value and character of the work.
The late Isidore Liseux issued in 1882 a French version with Latin text imprimé à cent exemplaires “for himself and friends.” This work is now very seldom to be met with because the whole edition was privately subscribed by Scholars and Bibliophiles before its appearance. The thieving copyists went of course immediately to work and some wretched penny-a-liner, utterly ignorant of both Latin and Greek, produced an English transcript full of faults, based only on the French text.
There is no need to add that such a book as this is of no value to the Student as a work of reference, for the faulty and forceless renderings often to be met with in Liseux’ version are reproduced with charming exactness, while the absence of the original text makes it all the more perilous to accept the work as a guide. Having said this much concerning the only two translations known to us, we proceed to give some account of good master Forberg and what is known of the inception and building up of his chef-d’œuvre.
The eminent Author of this book never became famous. His name is mentioned occasionally in connexion with the “Hermaphroditus” of Antonio Beccadelli, known by the surname of Panormitanus, which he edited. Brunet, Charles Nodier, and the Bibliographie des Ouvrages relatifs aux Femmes, à l’Amour et au Mariage, speak of him in this connexion; while a list of his works appears moreover in the Index Locupletissimus Librorum or Bücher-Lexicon (Bibliographical Lexicon) of Christian Gottlob Kayser, Leipzig, 1834. But with the exception of the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, the publication of which was commenced in 1878 by the Historical Commission of the Munich Academy, and which has devoted a short notice to him, all Dictionaries and Collections whether of Ancient or of Modern Biography are mute with respect to him. The Conversations-Lexicon and the vast Encyclopaedia of Ersch and Gruber do not contain a single line about him, while Michaud, Didot, Bachelet and Dezobry, Bouillet, Vapereau, utterly ignore his existence. For all that he well deserves a word or two.
Friedrich Karl Forberg was born in the year 1770 at Meuselwitz, in the Duchy of Saxe-Altenburg, and died in 1848 at Hildburghausen. He was a philosopher and a collaborator with Fichte, while he devoted a part of his attention to religious exegesis: but above all he was a philologian, and a humanist,—at once learned and inquisitive. He followed first the career of a University-teacher; Privat-docent in 1792, Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at Jena (1793), he was installed in 1796 as Co-Rector at Saalfeld. His inaugural thesis: “Dissertatio inauguralis de aesthetica transcendentali”, is dated 1792 (Jena, 8vo.); this was followed by a “Treatise on the Original Conditions and Formal Limitations of Free Will” in German and an “Extract from my Occasional Writings” also in German (1795). From 1796 to 1800 he wrote extensively in defence of the teachings of Fichte in Journals, Reviews, particularly in the Philosophical Magazine of Schmidt, and in sundry publications emanating from Fichte himself. He published moreover: “Animadversiones in loca selecta Novi Testamenti” (Saalfeld, 1798, 4to.), “an Apology for his pretended Atheism”, in German (Gotha, 1799, 8vo.). “Obligations of Learned Men”, in German (Gotha, 1801, 8vo.), etc.
The second part of his life seems to have been devoted entirely to Literature. In 1807 he was appointed as Conservator of the Aulic Library at Coburg, and having had enough of philosophy, he turned his whole attention to the study of Latin and Greek antiquity. Previously to this his tastes had already been revealed by the publication of several pretty editions of the minor Latin erotic poets; these form a collection of six or eight volumes in 16mo., with red margin-lines, and are now very difficult to procure. The discovery he made in the Coburg library of a manuscript of the “Hermaphroditus” of Panormitanus, offering important new readings and variants from the received text, suggested the idea to him of producing a definitive edition of the work, with copious commentaries.
The said “Hermaphroditus” so called, “because”, says La Monnoye, “all the filth in connection with both sexes forms the theme of the volume”, is a collection of Latin Epigrams filled out with a patchwork of quotations from Virgil, Ovid and Martial, in which memory has a much larger share than imagination, and which has never appeared to us to possess any great literary value. But the mishaps the book has had to encounter, its having been publicly burnt in manuscript in the market places of Bologna, Ferrara and Milan, the anathemas hurled against it by some savants, and the favour with which it was received by others, who were glad to awaken by its perusal old reminiscences, have given it a kind of reputation. The Abbé Mercier de Saint-Léger was the first to publish it in Paris, together with the works of four other poets of the same sort: Ramusius de Rimini, Pacificus Maximus, Jovianus Pontanus, and Joannes Secundus[[1]]. But Forberg, whilst fully appreciating the work and particularly the courage of the learned Frenchman, found much to find fault with; the Epigrams of Panormitanus were not numbered, which made citations from them troublesome, a great number of readings were faulty, and, thanks to his manuscript, he could correct them; lastly, Mercier de Saint-Léger had omitted to give any running commentary on his author, to explain his text by means of notes and the comparison of parallel passages, whereas, according to Forberg a book of this character required notes by tens and hundreds, each verse, each hemistich, each word, offering matter for philosophical reflections and highly interesting comparisons. He therefore took the book in hand and began to collect with inquisitive care everything the Ancients had written upon the delicate subjects treated in the “Hermaphroditus.”
But having come to the end of his task, he found that his commentary would drown the book, that hardly would he be able to get in a verse of it every two or three pages, all the remainder of the book being taken up by his notes, and that the result would be chaos. Dividing his work into two parts, he left the smaller one in the shape of annotations, reduced to the merest indispensable explanations, to the “Hermaphroditus”, while of the second and more copious harvest of his erudite researches he composed a special treatise, which he had printed as a supplement under the title, “Apophoreta”, or “Second Course”; this treatise being in his eyes only a kind of dessert, following upon the substantial repast furnished by the Latin Poet of the XVIth. century. The whole forms a volume much sought after by amateurs: “Antonii Panormitae Hermaphroditus; primus in Germania edidit et Aphoreta adjecit Frider. Carol. Forbergius. Coburgi, sumtibus Meuseliorum, 1824, 8vo.”[[2]].
Forberg, good, simple man, was mistaken, owing to his too great modesty; the true feast, at once substantial, nourishing and savoury, is his own work, the work which he elaborated from his own resources, from his inexhaustible memory and from his astonishing knowledge of the Greek and Latin authors down to their minutest details. On reprinting this excellent work, which undoubtedly deserved to be translated, we have given it a new title, one that is much more suitable than the old, “The Manual of Classical Erotology.” In virtue of the charm, the abundance, the variety of the citations, it is a priceless erotic Anthology; in virtue of the methodical classification of the contents Forberg has adopted, it is a didactic work,—a veritable Manual. He began with collecting from the Greek and Latin writers the largest number possible of scattered notices, which might serve for points of comparison with the Epigrams of Beccadelli; having possessed himself of a large accumulation of these, it occurred to him to set them out in order, arranging them in conformity with the similarity of their contents, deciding finally upon a division into eight chapters, corresponding with the same number of special manifestations of the amorous fancy and its depravities:
| I. | —[Of Copulation]. |
| II. | —[Of Pedication]. |
| III. | —[Of Irrumation]. |
| IV. | —[Of Masturbation]. |
| V. | —[Of Cunnilingues]. |
| VI. | —[Of Tribads]. |
| VII. | —[Of Intercourse with Animals]. |
| VIII. | —[Of Spintrian Postures]. |
He found that he had to make subdivisions in each class according to the nature of the subject, to note particularities, individualities; and the contrast between this scientific apparatus, and the facetious matters subjected to the rigorous laws of deduction and demonstration is not the least amusing feature of the book. Probably no one but a German savant could have conceived the idea of thus classifying by categories, groups, genera, variations, species and sub-species all known forms of natural and unnatural lusts, according to the most trustworthy authors. But Forberg pursued another aim besides. In the course of his researches he had noticed how reticent the annotators and expounders generally are in clearing up matters which would seem to require it the most, some in consequence of a false reserve, others for fear of appearing too knowing, and others again from ignorance; also how many mistakes and gross blunders they have fallen into, by reason of their not understanding the language of erotics and failing to grasp its infinite shades of meaning.
It is precisely on those obscure and difficult passages of the Ancient poets, on those expressions purposely chosen for their ambiguity, which have been the torment of the critics and the puzzle of the most erudite commentators, that our learned Humanist has concentrated his most convincing observations.
The number of authors, Greek, Latin, French, German, English, Dutch, whom he has laid under contribution in order to formulate his exact and judicious classifications, mounts up to a formidable total. There are to be found in the Manual of Erotology something like five hundred passages, culled from more than one hundred and fifty works, all classified, explained, commented upon, and in most cases, enveloped in darkness as they had been, made plain as light itself by the mere fact of juxtaposition. With Forberg for a guide no one need henceforth fear to go astray,—to believe, for instance, like M. Leconte de Lisle, that the woman of whom Horace says that she changes neither dress nor place, “peccatve superne” “has not erred beyond measure”; what a mistake!—or with M. Nisard to translate Suetonius expression, “illudere caput alicuius” “to attempt some ones life”[[3]]!
Forberg, a philosopher, has treated these delicate subjects like a philosopher, namely, in a purely speculative manner, as a man quite above and beyond terrestrial matters, and particularly so with respect to the lubricities which he has made it his task to examine so closely. He declares he knows nothing of them personally, has never thought of making experimental investigations on them, but derives all his knowledge, from books. His candour is beyond suspicion. He has not escaped censure; but having a reply ready for every objection and authorities to quote on every point, he found an answer to his detractors ready made in the phrase of Justus Lipsius, who had been reproached with taking pleasure in the abominations of Petronius: “The wines you set upon the table excite the drunkard and leave the sober man perfectly calm; in the same way, these kinds of reading may very likely inflame an imagination already depraved, but they make no impression upon a mind that is chaste and disciplined.”
FOOTNOTES - FORWARD
[1]. Quinque illustrium Poetarum, Antonii Panormitae; Ramusii Ariminensis; Pacifici Maximi Asculani; Io. Joviani Pontani; Io. Secundi Hagiensis, Lusus in Venerem, partim ex codicibus manuscriptis, nunc primum editi Parisiis, prostat ad Pristrinum, in Vico suavi, (at Paris, at Molini’s, Rue Mignon), 1791, 8vo.
[2]. To certain copies are added some thirty engravings representing the principal erotic postures; these engravings are taken from the Monuments de la Vie Privée des douze Césars, and from the Monuments du Culte Secret des Dames Romaines, two works, now becoming every day rarer.
[3]. See below pp. ?? and ??? respectively.
THE
Metamorphoses of Venus
WE propose to pass in review the different metamorphoses of Venus,—though truly not all of them. For how is it possible to specify the thousand modes[[4]], the thousand forms of Love, on which the inventive satiety of pleasure ventures? But at any rate such as fall into distinct and definite kinds admit of being easily and methodically classified. Do not, inquisitive reader, hope for more than this. We are not of those who seek after a petty personal glory by unveiling the results of their own experience or by describing novel tours de force in the wrestling-school; we are not so much as raw recruits at this game. Nor yet is it our intention to reveal things we have seen or heard in this connexion. If we would, we could not,—to your satisfaction, for books are our only authorities. We are solely and entirely bookmen, and scarce frequent our fellow creatures at all.
These trifles engaged our attention first as a mere pastime. We were led to them accidentally, as we roamed from subject to subject for Philosophy, the garden we had hoped to set up our tent in for life, lies desolate. How can Philosophy flourish in times like ours, when almost every new day sees new systems sprout forth, to die down again tomorrow; when there are as many philosophers as philosophies, when schools have ceased to exist, when instead of groups only individuals are to be met with? Our second motive was to provide some satisfaction, however little, to the claims of those readers who very often find themselves disconcerted by the unconventional raciness of Ancient authors and their out-spoken witticisms, and justly complain of the prudish brevity or entire silence of the Commentators who leave their difficulties unexplained. Of course these latter wrote for the young; and no one can blame them under the circumstances for not having dwelt carefully and curiously on shameful secrets.
If we have fallen into any mistakes, lay the fault, we beg, first on our insufficient intellectual furniture, secondly on our ignorance as to the more uncommon forms of lust, an ignorance prevalent in small towns, and lastly, if you please, put it down to the honest simplicity of our Coburg citizens’ members.
We only follow others’ example. We have predecessors in Astyanassa, who according to Suidas[[5]] first wrote “of Erotic Postures”; and in Philaenis of Samos[[6]], or rather, to deprive no one of his due, Polycrates, an Athenian sophist, who brought out under the name of an honourable matron a book “On the various Postures of Love.” Then there was Elephantis[[7]] or Elephantiné, a Greek girl, whose licentious writings Tiberius is said to have furnished his sleeping-room with; also Paxamus[[8]] who composed the Dodecatechnon on lascivious postures; and Sotades[[9]] of Maroneia, surnamed the Cinaedologue, from whose name a whole class of literature, remarkable for its excessive lubricity, is known as the Sotadic; and Sabellus, of whom Martial speaks: “Copious verses, only too copious, on scandalous subjects you have read me, O Sabellus, such as neither the maids of Didymus[[10]] know, nor yet the wanton treatises of Elephantis. Therein are new postures of Love that the desperate fornicator tries, and what debauchees use, but never tell of,—how grouped in a series five copulate at once, how a greater number still can make a chain. It was hardly worth the pains to be erudite.”
Moreover amongst our predecessors was the famous Pietro Aretino[[11]], a man of an almost divine genius, whom ill-natured report represents as having illustrated sixteen plates painted by Julio Romano and engraved on copper by Marc-Antonio with verses indecent beyond all expression; Lorenzo Veniero again[[12]], a Venetian nobleman, author of a little work in Italian, bearing the title La Puttana Errante (The Wandering Whore), in which he has undertaken to specify no less than thirty-five modes of loving. Lastly there was Nicolas Chorier, a French lawyer, who under the name of Aloysia Sigaea, a young Spanish lady, has given us the Satirae Sotadicae de arcanis Amoris et Veneris (Sotadic Satires on the Secret Rites of Love and Venus); though the book also appears under the name of Joannes Meursius with the title Elegantiae Latini Sermonis (Graces of Latin Prose). In this book you do not know which to admire most, the style at once elegant, correct and careful, yet free from pedantry, the wit equally gay and graceful, the brilliant sparks of Latin erudition that glitter everywhere, the rich and copious eloquence graced as with jewels by polished and luminous words and phrases of a pleasant antique flavour, or lastly the pre-eminent skill displayed in varying with such manifold versatility one simple theme. The others we need not mention further.
Our predecessors, whether the more modern, or those of Antiquity whom we have cited, and all whose works alas! envious time has robbed us of, did not lack severe critics, nor yet studious readers. And our own treatise will no doubt in its turn meet with both these classes. It is a man’s book; we have written it, fearless of censure, for men,—not for such as are wont with growning brow “to pitchfork nature out of doors”, but rather for such as have once for all dared to live their lives, who neither wish to lurk in darkness nor yet to defy the open day with effrontery, in one word for those who think that in Love as in all else the golden mean is the course to choose. Let others go their way, and arrogate to themselves the title of sages!
THE work of Venus may be accomplished with or without the help of the mentula (virile member). If with the mentula, the friction of this organ, in which friction the whole pleasure consists, can be effected either in the vulva (female organ), in the anus (arse-hole), in the mouth, by the hand or in any cavity of the body. If without the mentula, the vulva may be worked either with the tongue, with the clitoris, or with any object resembling the virile organ.
FOOTNOTES - THE Metamorphoses Of Venus
[4]. Ovid, Art of Love, I., 435, 36: “To fully expose the ungodly wiles of harlots, ten mouths, and as many tongues to boot would not suffice.”
Aloysia Sigaea: “The body in sacrificing to Venus can take as many postures as there are ways in which it can bend and curve. It is equally impossible to enumerate all these, as it is to say which is best fitted to give pleasure. Each acts in this respect according to his own caprice, according to place, time, and so on, choosing the one he prefers. Love is not identical for each and all.” (Dialogue VI.)
[5]. Suidas under Astyanassa: “Astyanassa, maid of Helen the wife of Menelaus, who was the first to invent the different positions in the act of love. She wrote “Of Erotic Postures”; and was followed and imitated by Philaenis and Elephantine, who carried further the series of suchlike obscenities.”
[6]. Priapeia, LXIII: “To her a certain girl (I very nearly gave her name) is wont to come with her paramour; and if she fails to discover as many postures as Philaenis describes, she goes away again still itching with desire.”
Philaenis has found a champion of her good name in Aeschrion, who wrote an epitaph for her that is still extant in Athenaeus, bk. VIII. ch. 13: The last lines read: “I was not lustful for men nor a gad-about; but Polycrates, by race an Athenian, a mill clapper of talk, a foul-tongued sophist, wrote—what he wrote; I know nought of it all.”
Her works were familiar to Timarchus in Lucian (Apophras, p. 158,—vol. VII., of Works of Lucian, edit. J. P. Schmid): “Tell me where you find these words and expressions,—in what books? is it in the volumes of Philaenis, that are always in your hands?”
[7]. Suetonius, Tiberius, ch. 43: “He decorated his various and variously arranged sleeping-chambers with pictures and bas-reliefs of the most licentious character, and furnished them with the works of Philaenis, that no one in performing should want a model of the posture required.”
Priapeia, III: “Taking pictures from the licentious treatises of Elephantis, Lalagé presents them an offering to the stiff-standing god, and begs you prove if she performs agreeably to the pictured postures.”
It would seem then that artists depicted the postures described by Elephantis, she herself possibly setting the example. Paintings of the sort Lalagé dedicates to Priapus, and asks her lover to have her and see if she is a docile pupil in faithfully imitating all the modes of connection depicted in them. No doubt such representations of licentious postures, taken from the works of Elephantis or Philaenis or elsewhere stimulated the ingenuity of Artists to work out in emulation these enticing motifs to the highest degree of finish. Ovid alludes to such works of art in his Art of Love, II., 680: “They unite in Love in a thousand postures; no picture could suggest any fresh ones ...”; as also the author of an ancient Epigram quoted by Joseph Scaliger in his Commentary on the Priapeia, III.; “And when she has thrown herself into every posture in imitation of the seductive pictures, she may go: but let the picture be left hanging over my bed.” Nothing was commoner with the Romans than to decorate the wall and partitions of rooms with licentious paintings, as may be gathered from Propertius II., vi, 27 sqq.: “The hand that first painted filthy pictures, and exposed foul sights in an honest home, corrupted the pure eyes of young maids, and chose to make them accomplices of his own lubricity. In old days our walls were not daubed with fancies of this vile sort, when never a partition was adorned with a vicious subject.”
[8]. Suidas: “Paxamus wrote the Dodecatechnon; the subject is the obscene postures.” But I think he has no good reason to connect with this the epithet Dodecamechanos given to a certain Cyrené. The said wanton damsel seems to have practised rather than described the twelve postures of Venus. Suidas under Dodecamechanon: “There was a famous hetaera, Cyrené by name, further known as Dodecamechanos, because she practised twelve different postures in making love.”
Aristophanes says in the Frogs, 1361-63: “Do you dare to criticize my songs, you that modulate your cadences on the twelve-fold postures of Cyrené?” Her name occurs also in the Thesmophoriazusae (104), but merely her name. (Our invariable rule is to quote from Burmann’s edition of Aristophanes.) I am doubtful as to whether Musaeus should be counted among writers on the Erotic postures. Martial, XII., 97 recommends Instantius Rufus to read his (Musaeus’) books, as being of the most advanced lasciviousness, vying with those of the Sybarites in obscenity and full of the most suggestive and spicy wit; warning him at the same time to have his girl ready to hand, if he did not want his hands to perform the wedding-march and consummate the marriage without a woman at all.
[9]. Athenaeus, XIV., 13: “Also the Ionic dialect has to show the poems of Sotades and the “Ionic” poems preceding his, those of Alexander the Aetolian, and Pyres of Miletus, and Alexis, and others of the same class. The last mentioned is known as the Cinaedologue. But in this genre the most eminent writer is Sotades, of Maroneia, as is stated by Carystius of Pergamus in his work on Sotades, and by Apollonius, Sotades’ son, who also wrote a work on his father’s poems. “His end was a miserable one. Having assailed Ptolemy Philadelphus, king of Egypt, with witticisms too independent for the sensitive ears of princes, the king caused him to be enclosed in a leaden casket, and thrown into the sea.”
[10]. Who were these “maids of Didymus.” Nobody knows. Failing any more plausible supposition, it may very well be conjectured that among the four thousand works written according to Seneca (Letter LXXX.-VIII.) by the Grammarian Didymus, there was one on the postures of lascivious girls, worthy to be named side by side with the treatises of Elephantis. Undoubtedly a man who devoted himself to such subtile questions as whether Anacreon was more libertine than drunkard, whether Sappho was a public woman or not, was quite likely to discuss the Erotic postures.
[11]. See Bayle’s Dictionary, article: Pierre Arétin; also Murr’s Journal zur Kunstgeschichte (Year-Book of the History of Art), vol. XIV., pp. 1-72.
[12]. Pierre Bayle, in his Dictionary, under Pierre Arétin: “There is a Dialogue between Maddalena and Giulia, entitled La Puttana Errante (The wandering whore), in which are exhaustively treated i diversi congiungimenti (the different modes of intercourse), to the number of thirty-five. Aretino, though the book has always been printed under his name, disowns it, declaring it to be the work of one of his pupils named Veniero.” Brunet, Manual du Libraire (Book dealer’s Handbook). “The Puttana errante, a little book, very rare, quite worthy of Aretino in view of the obscenities it contains, but which has been erroneously attributed to him. Lorenzo Veniero, a Venetian nobleman, is the real author. He published it to avenge himself on a Venetian courtesan named Angela, whom he designates under the insulting name of Zaffetta, that is to say, in the Venetian dialect, daughter of a police-spy.”
[Bayle, Forberg and many other writers have confused the Puttana errante, a poem by Lorenzo Veniero and a burlesque parody of the Romances of chivalry, with the Dialogue between Maddalena and Giulia, a prose work to which the Elzevirs gave the title properly belonging to the poem. Neither one nor the other is the work of Pietro Aretino. See note at end of vol. VI. of the Dialogues du divin Pietro Aretino (Dialogues of the divine Pietro Aretino), Paris, Liseux, 1879, 3 vols. 18°, and London, 1880, 3 vols. 18°. [Note of French Translation of Forberg, Manuel d’Erotologie classique, Paris, Liseux, 1882.]
CHAPTER I
OF COPULATION
AND first of all let us consider what is accomplished by means of the mentula introduced into the vulva. This is, properly speaking, to effect copulation; but there are various ways of doing it. As a matter of fact copulation can be effected:—the man face downwards with the woman on her back, the man on his back with the woman face down, the man on his back with the woman turning her back to him; the man sitting with the woman turning her face towards him, sitting with the woman turning her back to him; the man standing or kneeling with the woman turning her face towards him, standing or kneeling with the woman turning her back to him. Let us examine each of these methods separately.
Coition with the man face down on the woman who lies on her back is the ordinary method, and the most natural.
Aloysia Sigaea says:
“For my own part I like the usual custom and the ordinary method best: the man should lie upon the woman, who is on her back, breast to breast, stomach to stomach, pubis to pubis, piercing her tender cleft with his rigid spear. Indeed what can be imagined sweeter than for the woman to lie extended on her back, bearing the welcome weight of her lovers’ body, and exciting him to the tender transports of a restless but delicious voluptuousness? What more pleasant than to feast on her lovers’ face, his kisses, his sighs, and the fire of his wanton eyes? What better than to press the loved one in her arms and so awake new fires of desire, to participate in amorous sensations unblunted by any taint of age or infirmity? What more favorable to the delight and enjoyment of both than such lascivious movements given and received? What more opportune at the instant of dying a voluptuous death than to recover again under the revivifying vigour of burning kisses? He who plies Venus on the reverse side, satisfies but one of his senses, he who does the same face to face satisfied them all.” (Dialogue VI.)
Ovid, the Master of Loves’ Mysteries, invites pretty women to take this posture by preference:
“See you reckon up each of your charms, and take your posture according to your beauty. One and the same mode does not become every woman. You are especially attractive of face; then lie on your back.” (Art of Love, III., 771-773.)
This posture is by no means limited to one mode. The woman lying on her back, the rider may clasp her between his legs, or she may receive him between hers. Yet another position may be adopted, according as the woman lie back with legs stretched wide apart or with the knees raised.
It is this position,—lying on her back with legs wide apart, that Caviceo asks Olympia to assume for making Love:
“I do not wish you”, he says, “to work your buttocks, or to respond with corresponding movements to my efforts. Neither do I wish you to lift your legs up, whether both at once, or one after the other, when I have mounted you. What I do wish you to do is this: First stretch your thighs as far apart, open them as wide as a woman well can. Offer your vulva to the member which is going to pierce it, and without altering this position, let me complete the work.... Count my thrusts one by one, and see you make no mistake in the total” (Aloysia Sigaea, Dialogue V.).
Would you see a representation of this? Take the tale Félicia ou mes fredaines, part II., ch. xxv, and look at the plate facing the text.
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.
The latter position is recommended by Ovid to the woman with rounded thighs and faultless figure:
“She that has young rounded thigh and flawless bosom, should ever lie reclined sideways on the couch”[[14]] (Art of Love, II., v. 781, 782).
Copulation face to face with the woman sitting obliquely is described by Aloysia Sigaea with her usual elegance and vivacity:
“Caviceo came on, blithe and joyous” (it is Olympia speaking). “He despoils me of my chemise, and his libertine hand touches my parts. He tells me to sit down again as I was seated before, and places a chair under either foot in a way that my legs were lifted high in air, and the gate of my garden was wide open to the assaults I was expecting. He then slides his right hand under my buttocks and draws me a little closer to him. With his left he supported the weight of his spear. Then he laid himself down on me ... put his battering-ram to my gate, inserted the head of his member into the outermost fissure, opening the lips of it with his fingers. But there he stopped, and for awhile made no further attack. “Octavia sweetest”, he says, “clasp me tightly, raise your right thigh and rest it on my side.”—“I do not know what you want”, I said. Hearing this he lifted my thigh with his own hand, and guided it round his loin, as he wished; finally he forced his arrow into the target of Venus. In the beginning he pushes in with gentle blows, then quicker, and at last with such force I could not doubt that I was in great danger. His member was hard as horn, and he forced it in so cruelly, that I cried out, “You will tear me to pieces.” He stopped a moment from his work. “I implore you to be quiet, my dear”, he said, “it can only be done this way; endure it without flinching.” Again his hand slid under my buttocks, drawing me nearer, for I had made a feint to draw back, and without more delay plied me with such fast and furious blows that I was near fainting away. With a violent effort he forced his spear right in, and the point fixed itself in the depths of the wound. I cry out.... Caviceo spirted out his venerean exudation, and I felt irrigated by a burning rain.... Just as Caviceo slackened, I experienced a sort of voluptuous itch as though I were making water; involuntarily I draw my buttocks back a little, and in an instant I felt with supreme pleasure something flowing from me which tickled me deliciously. My eyes failed me, my breath came thick, my face was on fire, and I felt my whole body melting. “Ah! ah! ah! my Caviceo, I shall faint away”, I cried; “hold my soul—it is escaping from my body” (Dialogue V.).
Finally the conjunction with the woman lying on her side, particularly on her right side, is deemed by Ovid the most simple, calling for the least effort:
“A thousand modes of Love are there; the simplest and least laborious of all is when the woman lies reclined on her right side” (Art of Love, III., 787, 88).
Above all this position is the most convenient for tall women:
“Let her press the bed with her knees, with the neck slightly bowed, she whose chief beauty is her long shapely flank” (Art of Love, III., v. 779, 80).
It seems that the Phyllis of Martial allowed herself to be done in that way:
“Two arrived in the morning, who wanted to lie with Phyllis, and each was fain to be first to hold her naked body in his arms; Phyllis promised to satisfy them both together, and she did it; one lifted her leg, the other her tunic” (X., 81).
She was lying on her side; the f... lifted her leg; the pederast her tunic.
We now come to the manner, in which the man lying on his back has connection with the woman face downwards. The parts are interchanged; the woman plays the rider and the man the horse. This figure was called the horse of Hector.
Martial says:
“Behind the doors the Phrygian slaves would be masturbating, every time Andromaché mounted her Hector horse fashion” (XI., 105).
Ovid, however, with much sagacity denies that this posture could have pleased Andromaché; her figure was too tall, for this to have been agreeable or even possible for her. It is for little women, that it is pleasant to be thus placed:
“A little woman may very well get astride on her horse; but tall and majestic as she was, the Theban bride never mounted the Hectorean horse” (Art of Love, III., v. 777, 778).
It is no business of ours to decide the question.
At any rate Sempronia takes this posture with Crisogono.
“He could wait no longer: “Are you undressed”, said Crisogono. “Now, my Sempronia, take the position, which gives me so much pleasure, you know which.” He stretches himself down on his back, she gets upon him astride, with her face towards him, and with her own hand guides his burning arrow between her thighs” (Aloysia Sigaea, Dial. VII).
This is the same attitude, which in Horace is imposed by the slave upon the little harlot, who:
“... naked in the light of the lantern, plied with wanton wiles and moving buttocks the horse beneath her” (Sat. II. vii, v. 50).
As to the matron spoken of v. 64 of the same satire as “never having sinned above”, no doubt this posture did not suit her. Women have not all the same taste.
Evidently, it was as little to the taste of the girl whom Xanthias in Aristophanes’ Wasps (v. 499) asked to ride him; for she asks him indignantly, and playing on the double meaning of the word (Hippias and ——, a horse), if he was for re-establishing Hippias’ tyranny: “Irritated she asked me if I wanted to revive the tyranny of Hippias.”
Again in his Lysistrata (v. 678) this master of wanton wit points to the same thing, declaring the female sex to be very good at riding and fond of driving: “Woman loves to get on horseback and to stick there.”
Aristophanes mocks similarly those, of whom he says, in verse 60 of the same play, that “They are aboard their barks.” “They are mounted on their chargers.” For —— signifies both a ship and a horse. Plango in Asclepiades, Brunck’s Analecta, vol. I., 217, affects the same figure.
“When she in horsemanship vanquished the ardent Philaenis, whilst her Hesperian coursers foamed under her reins.”
Yet more expert in this kind of amorous riding than Philaenis herself, this ardent votary of pleasure thanks Venus in this epigram, that she has been able so to exhaust certain Hesperian gallants, whom she had mounted, that they had left her with wanton members all drooping, and feeling no desire left in them. To bestride men was also the favourite pastime of Lysidicé, who was never tired in the service of Venus, of whom the following epigram of Asclepiades treats:
“Many a horse has she ridden beneath her, yet never galled her thigh with all her nimble movements.”
Courtesans consecrated to Venus a whip, a bit, a spur, in order to signify, that with their clients they like best to pose themselves in that way, and that they preferred riding themselves to being ridden,—nothing more.
It is the same when in Apuleius, Fotis satiated her Lucius with the pleasures of the undulating Venus:
“Saying this she leaped upon the couch and, seated upon me backwards, plying her hips, vibrating her lithe spine lasciviously, she satiated me with the delights of the undulating Venus, till both of us exhausted, powerless and with useless limbs, sunk down, exhaling our souls in mutual embraces” (Metamorph., II., ch. II).
The next figure,—the man lying supine and the woman turning her back to him, is executed by Rangoni with Ottavia, under the direction of Tullia:
Rangoni: Look how stiff I stand! But I want to try the bliss in a new way.
Tullia: In a new way? No! I swear by my wanton soul you shall not. You shall not take a new way.
Rangoni: It was a slip of the tongue; I meant to say a new posture.
Tullia: And what sort of one? I have an idea ... what they call the horse of Hector. Lie down on your back, Rangoni; let your puissant spear stand firm to the enemy, who is to be pierced, Well done!
Ottavia: What must I do, Tullia?
Tullia: Clip Rangoni between your thighs, mounting him a-straddle. His cutlass as he lies should meet your sheath poised over it. Why! you’ve taken the position admirably. Excellent!
Rangoni: Oh! what a back, worthy of Venus! Oh! the ivory sides! Oh! the inviting buttocks!
Tullia: No naughty words! He who praises the buttocks, slanders the vulva! You know better, Ottavia! Her greedy vulva has swallowed your bristling member whole, Rangoni.
Ottavia: Quick, Rangoni, it is coming!... quick, quick, help me!
Rangoni: I am coming, Ottavia,—I am come! Are you?—Are you, darling!
Tullia: How now? Are you so quickly done up, you two? (Aloysia Sigaea, Dial. VI).
The pygiacic[[15]] mysteries, to which Eumolpus in Petronius (Satires, ch. cxl), invites a young girl, refer to the posture practised by the man lying on his back, with the woman upon him, her back turned towards him.
“Eumolpus did not hesitate to invite the young girl to the pygiacic mysteries, but begged of her to seat herself upon the goodness known to her (that being himself, to whose goodness the mother had recommended her daughter), and ordered Corax to get on his stomach under the bed on which he was, so that with his hands pressed against the floor, he might assist with his movements those of his master. Corax obeyed, beginning with slow undulations responding to those of the young girl. When the crisis was approaching, Eumolpus exhorted Corax with a loud voice to quicken up his movements. Thus placed between his servant and his mistress, the old man took his pleasure as in a swing.”
Would it be surprising, if in these posterior mysteries, Eumolpus’ member had perchance gone wrong, and taken by mistake one orifice for the other?
You will find this figure represented in a copper-plate engraving in the very elegant book of d’Hancarville, Monuments du culte secret des dames romaines, ch. xxv, and you will be glad to know the note, with which the learned annotator accompanies the same.
“This attitude is to the taste of many men, and even the ladies find an increase of pleasure in practising it. It is supposed, that Priapus penetrates farther in, and that the fair one by her movements procures for herself a more voluptuous delight, and a more abundant libation.”
Is it possible for the man, conveniently, to manage the business while turning his back to the woman lying on her back? Experts must decide. Aloysia Sigaea says with good common sense:
“There are many postures it is impossible to execute, even supposing the joints and loins of the candidates for the sacred joys of Venus more flexible than can be believed. By dint of pondering and reflection more ideas occur to the fancy than it is practicable to realize: Nothing is inconceivable to the longings of an unbridled will; nothing difficult to a furious and unregulated imagination. Love will find out a way; and an ardent fancy level mountains. Only the body is unable to comply with everything the mind, good or bad, suggests.”
In another work of d’Hancarville’s, Monuments de la vie privée des douze Césars, plate XXVII., you find represented men seated and copulating with women, who are facing them; plate XV., in the same book presents to your curiosity a man sitting and working a woman, who turns her back on him. Augustus is seated: he is attacking backwards, with true imperial audacity, Terentia[[16]], the wife of Maecenas, after drawing her onto his lap; Maecenas is present, asleep—asleep of course only for the Emperor. You may see a similar posture in the Contes et Nouvelles en vers by Jean de la Fontaine: it is on the plate appended to the tale, called Le Tableau, p. 223, vol. II., Amsterdam, 1762.
Nothing is more frequent than conjunction whilst standing, the woman with her back to the man; it is indeed very easy to do it that way in any place, as you have only to lift up the fair one’s petticoats, and out with your weapon; it is, therefore, the best manner for those who have to make instantaneous use of an opportunity, when it is important to be sharp about it, as may happen, when you take your pleasure in secret. Thus Priapus complains of the wives and daughters of his neighbors, who came incessantly to him burning with ticklish desires.
“Cut off my genital member, which every night and all night long my neighbours’ wives and daughters, for ever and for ever in heat, more wanton than sparrows in springtide, tire to death,—or I shall burst!...” (Priapeia, XXV).
I remember a medical man of our time, one of the most celebrated professors, (I had nearly uttered his name), who to emphasize this, called his daughter, and pointing to the blushing girl, while his hearers could not help smiling said: “This girl I fabricated standing.” A representation of this position is to be found in the Monuments de la vie privée de douze Césars, pl. XLVI., and another in the Monuments du culte secrets des dames romaines, pl. XIII.
But further, a man may join himself to a woman standing face to face by supporting her in such a way, that her whole body is lifted up, her thighs resting on the man’s hips, or else by lifting up the lower part of her body, whilst the upper part is resting on a couch. Will you feast your eyes with a representation of this not ungraceful position? If so you will not omit to look at plate XXIV of the Monuments du culte secret des dames romaines, and plate XL of the Monuments de la vie privée des douze Césars; Ovid, if I am not mistaken, had his eyes on one or the other of these figures:
“Milanion was supporting Atalanta’s legs on his shoulders; if they are fine legs this is how they should be held” (Art of Love, III., vv. 775, 776). The former of these modes is no doubt that described by Aloysia Sigaea, Past Mistress of these naughtinesses, and with a vivacity, a grace, and elegance that leaves nothing to be desired:
“La Tour came forward instantly.... I had thrown myself on the foot of the bed”—(Tullia is speaking)—“I was naked; his member was erect. Without more ado he grasps in either hand one of my breasts, and brandishing his hard and inflamed lance between my thighs, exclaims “Look Madam, how this weapon is darting at you, not to kill you, but to give you the greatest possible pleasure. Pray, guide this blind applicant into the dark recess, so that it may not miss its destination; I will not remove my hands from where they are, I would not deprive them of the bliss they enjoy.” I do as he wishes, I introduce myself the flaming dart into the burning centre; he feels it, drives in, pushes home.... After one or two strokes I felt myself melting away with incredible titillation, and my knees all but gave way. “Stop”, I cried—“stop my soul, it is escaping!” “I know”, he replied, laughing, “from where. No doubt your soul wants to escape through this lower orifice, of which I have possession; but I keep it well stoppered.” Whilst speaking he endeavoured, by holding his breath, still further to increase the already enormous size of his swollen member. “I am going to thrust back your escaping soul”, he added, poking me more and more violently. His sword pierced yet deeper into the quick. Redoubling his delicious blows, he filled me with transports of pleasure,—working so forcefully that, albeit he could not get his whole body into me, he impregnated me with all his passion, all his lascivious desires, his very thoughts, his whole delirious soul by his voluptuous embraces. At last feeling the approach of the ecstasy and the boiling over of the liquid, he slips his hands under my buttocks, and lifts me up bodily. I do my part; I twine my arms closely round his form, my thighs and legs being at the same time inter-twisted and entangled with his, so that I found myself suspended on his neck in the air, lifted clean off the ground; I was thus hanging, as it were, fixed on a peg. I had not the patience to wait for him, as he was going on, and again I swooned with pleasure. In the most violent raptures I could not help crying out—“I feel all ... I feel all the delights of Juno lying with Jupiter. I am in heaven.” At this moment La Tour, pushed by Venus and Cupido to the acmé of voluptuousness, poured a plenteous flood of his well into the genial hold, burning like fire. The creeper does not cling more closely round the walnut tree than I hold fast to La Tour with my arms and legs” (Dial. VI).
As to the last manner by means of which copulation may be achieved, the man standing with the woman half lifted up, Conrad practises it with slight modifications.
(Tullia speaking): “He opened my thighs—I do not dislike Conrad, though I am not particularly partial to him. I neither consented, nor refused. As to him, he fancied a novel posture, and not at all a bad one. I was lying on my back; he raised my right thigh on his shoulder, and in this position he transfixed me, while I was awaiting the event, without greatly desiring it. He had at the same time extended my left thigh along his right thigh. His tool plunged into the root, he began to push and poke, quicker and quicker. What need to say more? Picture the conclusion for yourself” (Dial. VI).
Last of all, a man can get into a woman turning her back to him after the manner of the quadrupeds, who can have no connection with their females otherwise than by mounting upon them from behind[[17]]. Some authorities have held that a woman conceives easier while on all fours. Lucretius says:
“... Women are said to conceive more readily when down after the manner of beasts, as the organs can absorb the seed best so, when the bosom is depressed and the loins lifted” (Of the Nature of Things, IV., vv. 1259-1262).
Also Aloysia Sigaea:
“Some people pretend that the fashion to make love indicated by Nature is that one where the woman offers herself for copulation after the manner of the animals, bent down with the hips raised; the virile ploughshare penetrates thus more conveniently into the female furrow, and the seminal flow waters the field of love.... The doctors, however, are against this posture; they say it is incompatible with the conformation of the parts destined for generation.” (Dial. VI.)
However this may be, it happens frequently, that women cannot be managed in any other way. Given an obese man and a woman likewise obese or with child, how are they to do the thing otherwise? This is the reason why, so they say, Augustus having married Livia Drusilla, divorced wife of Tiberius Nero and already six months gone in pregnancy, had connection with her after the manner of animals. Plate VII of the Monuments de la vie privée des douze Césars will give you an idea of the posture assumed by both of them. But why should we not give you the annotations whereby the learned editor has elucidated the plate? Here they are:
“This Drusilla was the famous Livia, the wife of Tiberius Nero, who had been one of Anthony’s friends. Augustus fell violently in love with her, and Tiberius gave her up to him, although she was at the time six months with child. A good many jokes were made about the eagerness of the Emperor, and one day, while they were all at table, and Livia was reclining by Augustus, one of those naked children, whom matrons used to educate for their pleasures, going up to Livia said: “What are you doing here? yonder is your husband”, pointing to Nero, “there he is”[[18]]. Soon afterwards Livia was confined, and the Romans said openly, that lucky people get children three months after being married, which passed into a proverb. One historian says that Augustus was obliged to caress his wife “after the manner of beasts” on account of her pregnancy, and it was to this luxurious attitude that the cameo of Apollonius, the celebrated gem-cutter of the time of Augustus, makes allusion. True that the state in which Livia was may have made this posture necessary: but it seems that it was at all times to the taste of the Ancients, either because they considered this attitude favorable for procreation, as Lucretius maintains, or because they found it to be a refinement of voluptuousness. The most extraordinary and least natural postures have always appeared to rakes as enhancing the pleasure of the conjunction. But it must be admitted that imagination still outruns actual possibilities.”
A singular reason for the necessity of encountering a woman backwards is given by Aloysia Sigaea, with her usual sagacity:
“For pleasure, one likes a vulva which is not placed too far back, so as to be entirely hidden by the thighs; it should not be more than nine or ten inches from the navel. With the greater number of girls the pubis goes so far down, that it may easily be taken as the other way of pleasure. With such coition is difficult. Theodora Aspilqueta could not be deflowered, till she placed herself prone on her stomach, with her knees drawn up to her sides. Vainly had her husband tried to manage her, while lying on her back, he only lost his oil” (Dialogue VII).
Ovid recommends this way with women who begin to be wrinkled:
“Likewise you, whose stomach Lucina has marked with wrinkles, mount from behind, like the flying Parthian with his steed” (Art of Love, III., v. 785, 86).
The same advice also seems to be given by him a little before:
“Let them be seen from behind whose backs are sightly” (v. 774).
But besides necessity, it is a fact that women are worked in this way out of mere caprice, variety offering the greatest pleasure. It is simply for this reason that Tullia suffers Fabrizio to do her that way, in Aloysia Sigaea:
“As Aloysio got up” (Tullia speaks) “Fabrizio makes ready for another attack. His member is swollen up, red and threatening. “I beg of you “Madam”, he says, “turn over on your face.” I did as he wished. When he saw my buttocks, whiter than ivory and snow, “How beautiful you are!” he cried. “But raise yourself on your knees and bend your head down.” I bow my head and bosom, and lift my buttocks. He thrust his swift-moving and fiery dart to the bottom of my vulva, and took one of my nipples in either hand. Then he began to work in and out, and soon sent a sweet rivulet into the cavity of Venus. I also felt unspeakable delight, and had nearly fainted with lust. A surprising quantity of seed secreted by Fabrizio’s loins filled and delighted me; a similar flow of my own exhausted my forces. In that single assault I lost more vigour than in the three preceding ones” (Dialogue VI.)[[19]].
This copulation from the back is practicable in another very pleasant fashion, an excellent reproduction of which can be seen in the Monument du culte secret des dames romaines, plate XXVIII. A woman is represented with her hands placed on the ground, while the lower part of the body is lifted up and suspended by cords; she is turning her back to the man who stands. This seems to be much the same position as was taken up by the wife of the artisan Apuleius speaks of in his Metamorphoses (book IX), whom “bending over her, the lover planed with his adze, while she leant forward over a cask.” An engraving showing this ingenious attitude is appended to the story of The Tub in the Contes et Nouvelles en vers of Jean de La Fontaine, vol. II., p. 215.
FOOTNOTES - OF COPULATION
[13]. This method was not unknown at the time of Aristophanes, as we see from the following passage of the Peace:
“So that you may straightway, lifting up the girl’s legs, accomplish high in air the mysteries” (v. 889, 890).
And in the Birds he says:
“For this girl, your first messenger, why! I will lift up her legs and will in between her thighs” (v. 1254, 55).
[14]. Readers will find another figure given in some of the books: “The man should be standing, while the woman reclines sideways on the bed.”
[15]. From —— buttock.
[16]. Dio Cassius, LIV., 19: “He was so fond of her, that one day he matched her against Livia, as to which of them was the most beautiful.” It was no bad idea to engage them in such a match, but think you he suffered them to fight this out in any costume but that in which the Goddesses three presented themselves before the dazed eyes of Paris?
[17]. Pliny has treated this at great length in his Natural History (Book X., ch. 63).
[18]. Compare Dio Cassius, bk. XLVIII., ch. 44.
[19]. The thing itself is very old; Aristophanes alludes to it in the Peace:
“To wrestle on the ground, to stand on all fours” (v. 896).
And in the Lysistrata:
“I will not squat down like a lioness carved on a knife-handle” (v. 231).
CHAPTER II
ON PEDICATION
SO much for copulation in the normal way. We will now discuss another mode of pleasure,—that due to introduction of the member into the anus. A man who exercises his member in the anus, be it of a man or a woman, pedicates; he is called a pederast, pedicon, drawk[[20]], and the other party, who allows himself to be invaded in that way, is called the patient, cinaedus, catamite[[21]], minion, effeminate; if adult or worn out, he is named exolete. The masculine pleasure (so called because women allowed themselves much more rarely to be pedicated than men) is appreciated equally by the active party, the pedicon, as by the passive party, the patient. The pleasure of the pedicon is easy to understand, as the enjoyment of the virile member consists in the intensity of the friction; the pleasure felt by the patient by the introduction of the member in his entrails is more difficult to make out,—at least for my feeble intelligence, for such practices are quite strange to me. Do not believe, however, that the pleasure of the patient is only secondary, nor yet that he prostitutes himself only in order to do the same afterwards himself, nor that he remedies in this way the sluggishness of his own member by the vigorous working of another man’s nerve causing a pleasurable titillation of the posterior, analogous to that which Antonius Panormitanus (Hermaphroditus, I., 20), tells us may be produced by inserting the fingers in the anus[[22]], or still better, by beating the same locality with rods, according to Aloysia Sigaea:
“Amongst the men of our acquaintance, I have heard the Marquis Alfonso say that rods act as spurs to the amorous battle; without them he would be sluggish and impotent. He has his buttocks flogged with rods vigorously, his wife being present lying ready on the bed. During the flagellation his tool begins to stiffen, and the more violent the strokes are, the stronger is the tension. When he feels himself in proper condition, he precipitates himself upon his wife, works her with rapid movement, and inundates her with the heavenly gifts of Venus and wins all the delights a man may find in Love”[[23]] (Dialogue V).
What else was it but this that so stirred Rousseau, the precocious genius of Geneva, and his boyish member, and brought such ideas into his head, when on one occasion Mlle. Lambercier, cracking the whip upon the buttocks of the child, inflicted that punishment, which he afterwards was longing for all the rest of his life? Hear him relate the circumstance himself in his merry way and with his habitual charm of style, in the first book of the Confessions; we only omit small matters, added by the immortal author for the amplification of the narrative:
“As Mlle. Lambercier had for us the affection of a mother, so she had the authority of one, and she carried the latter so far as to inflict upon us the punishment of children when we had deserved it. For a long time she only used threats, and such a threat of a novel punishment seemed very dreadful to me; but after the execution I found the experience less terrible than the expectation, and the oddest thing was, the punishment made me more partial to her, who had inflicted it, than I had been previously. I stood in fact in need of all this affection for her and of all my natural mildness, in order to hold back from provoking the same punishment by acting so as to deserve it, for I had found in the pain, and even in the shame, a mixed feeling, in which sensuality predominated, and which left me with more desire than apprehension of experiencing the same treatment over again from the same hand. Who would believe that this chastisement of a child eight years old by the hand of a maiden of thirty should have influenced my tastes, my longings, my passions for the remainder of my life? Tormented by I know not what, my eye feasted ardently upon good-looking females; they constantly came into my mind doing to me as Mlle. Lambercier had done. Imagining only what I had experienced, my desires did not pass beyond the sort of voluptuous feeling I had known already. In my foolish fancies, in my erotic fury, in the extravagant acts to which they incited me sometimes, I borrowed in imagination the help of the other sex, without ever dreaming it was good for any other use than that which I wanted to make of it. When in the course of time I had grown up to manhood, my old taste of childhood associated itself so much with the other, that I never could divert the desires which fired my senses; and this absurdity, joined to my natural timidity, made me always anything but enterprising with women, as I dared not say all or could not do all I wanted; the sort of enjoyment, of which the other was for me but the last stage, could neither be initiated by the one who longed for it, nor guessed by the other who might have granted it. Thus I have passed through life coveting, yet not daring to tell the persons I loved most what it was I coveted. Never bold enough to declare my inclination, I amused it as least by ideas in connection with it. One may judge what such avowals must have cost me, considering that all through my life, seized in the presence of those I loved by the fury of a passion which bereft me of voice, hearing and sense, and made me tremble all over convulsively, I never could venture to tell them my folly, and ask them to add the one familiarity which I wanted to the other ones. I only got to it once in my childhood, with another child of my age, and the proposal came from her.”
However to return to our proper subject, from which we have strayed. If pleasure felt by the passive party cannot be conceived to be of a kind, which through the anus is communicated to the mentula (member), we must come to the conclusion that the patient experiences in the anus the same kind of irritation which the other party feels in his genital parts; that, therefore, the patient feels in that place a real pleasure unknown to those who have not tried it[[24]]. Martial at any rate speaks out without any circumlocution of this rut of the anus:
“Of his anus, split to the naval, not a vestige is left to Carinus; for all that he is in rut to the very navel. Oh! the scurvy lot of the wretch! Bottom he has none,—but he will be a cinede” (VI., 37).
An ardour of this strange sort even affected Tullia, as she confesses herself in the pages of Aloysia Sigaea:
“Seeing resistance was in vain, I yielded to the madmen. Aloysio bends forward over my buttocks, brings his javelin to the back-door, knocks, pushes, finally with a mighty effort bursts in. I gave a groan. Instantly he withdraws his weapon from the wound, plunges it in the vulva and spurts a flood of semen into the wanton furrow of my womb. When all was over, Fabrizio attacks me in the same fashion. With one rapid thrust he introduced his spear, and in less than no time made it disappear in my entrails; for a little time he plays at come and go, and scarce credible as it may sound, I found myself invaded by a prurient fury to such an extent that I have no doubt, that I should get accustomed to it very well, if I chose” (Dialogue VI).
Coelius Rhodiginus confirms this pruriency of the anus in ch. 10. of XV. book of his Lectiones antiquae.
“We know”, he says, “that the minions experience a very great pleasure in undergoing this shameful act.”
And he gives a reason for it, whether good or bad the doctors may decide: “With people whose seminal ducts are not in normal condition, be it that those leading to the mentula are paralysed, as is the case with eunuchs and the like, or for any other reason, the seminal fluid flows back to its source. If this fluid is very abundant with them, it accumulates in great quantities, and then the part where the secretion is accumulated longs for friction. People thus situated like above everything to play the part of patients.”
Be this as it may, nothing is more certain than the fact of such enjoyment on the part of the patient. So highly did the Roman cinedes prize a stiff member between their buttocks, that they could not see a big mentula without their mouths watering; they were ready to give their last penny to enjoy the favours of a man extraordinarily gifted in that way.
Juvenal, IX., v. 32-36:
“Destiny governs man; it influences the parts, which the toga covers. If your star pales, useless will be the length and strength of your member to you,—even though Virro shall have seen you naked with lips that water.”
Martial, I., 97:
“He wants to know why I think he is a minion? We bathe together; he never raises his eyes, but gazes with devouring looks at the sodomites; and cannot behold their members without his lips trembling.”
And again, II., 51:
“Oftentimes you have no more than a single penny in your box, and that penny more worn than your anus, Hyllus; yet neither baker nor wine shop will have it, but some man who sports an enormous member. Your unfortunate belly must starve for your anus; while the latter devours, the former is famished.”
It is therefore not astonishing that the public baths resounded with plaudits, when men with extraordinary members entered them.
Martial, IX., 34:
“If you hear clapping of hands in the bathing hall, Flaccus, you may be sure some deformed person’s enormous member is there.”
Juvenal, VI., v. 373, 374:
“Far seen, pointed at by all men’s fingers, he enters the baths.”
It was not without some art that the patients performed their functions. But their business was made up of these two chief requirements: depilation and knowing how to use the haunches.
Patients took care in the first place to remove the hair carefully from all parts of their body[[25]]; from the lips, arms, chest, legs, the virile parts, and in particular from the altar of passive lust, the anus: Martial, II., 62:
“Pluck out the hair from breast and legs and arms; keep your member cropped and ringed with short hair; all this, we know, you do for your mistress’ sake, Labienus. But for whom do you depilate your posteriors?”
And IX., 28:
“While you, Chrestus, appear thus with your parts all hairless, with a mentula like a vulture’s neck, and a head as shining as a prostitute’s buttocks with never a hair appearing on your leg, and with your pallid lips all shorn and bare, you talk of Curius, Camillus, Numa, Ancus, of all the hairy heroes we have ever read of in history, and spout big words and threatenings against theatres and the times. Let but some big-limbed man come into sight, you call him with a nod, and take him off....”
And he says, IX., 58:
“Nought is worse worn than Hedylus’ rags, save one thing only (he cannot deny it himself), his anus;—this is worse worn than his rags.”
In a similar way he has spoken before of the anus of Hyllus as more worn by friction than a poor man’s last penny (II., 51), and Suetonius (Life of Otho, ch. xii) speaks similarly of the body of Otho, given to the habits of a catamite, and Catullus (Carm. 33) reproaches the younger Vibennius: “You could not sell your hairy buttocks for a doit.”
For the same reason Galba requested Icelus to get depilated before he was to take him aside. Suetonius, Galba, ch. xxii:
“He was very much given to the intercourse between men, and amongst such he preferred men of ripe age, exolets. It is said that when Icelus, one of his old bedfellows, came to Spain, to inform him of Nero’s death, he, not content with kissing him closely before everyone present, asked him to get at once depilated, and then took him aside with him quite alone.”
Moreover even those depilated their anus, who by dint of a rough head of hair and a bristly beard, tried hard to simulate the gravity of the ancient Philosophers. Martial, IX., 48:
“Democritus and Zeno and ambiguous Plato,—all the sages whose portraits we see decked with bristling hair,—you prate of; you might well be Pythagoras’ heir and successor; while from your own chin hangs no less imposing a beard. But as bearded man it is a shame for you to receive a rigid member between your smooth posteriors.”
Juvenal, II., v. 8-13:
“Put not your trust in faces; everywhere is debauchery rampant! Thou wouldst whip the vicious; Thou! thou!—the most notorious of all Socratic minions! Hair-covered limbs and coarse hair along the arms bespeak a fiery soul; but on your smooth anus the surgeon cuts away the swollen tumours, a grin on his face the while.”
Persius, IV., v. 37, 38:
“Tell me, when you comb a scented beard upon your cheeks, why does a shaven member stand forth from your groin?”
This is why Martial, VI., 56 advised Charidemus to get his buttocks depilated, so that he might be taken for a patient rather than for a fellator:
“Because your thighs bristle with coarse hair, and your chest is shaggy, you think, Charidemus, to leave your words to posterity.”
“Take my word, and pluck out the hairs all over your body, and get it certified you depilate your buttocks. What for? you ask. You know they tell many tales about you; make them believe, Charidemus, that you are acting the patient.”
It was not patients only that had themselves depilated; men leading an idle, careless life followed the same practice[[26]].
“To be depilated, to have the hair dressed in tiers of ringlets, to tipple to excess in the baths,—these practices prevail in the city; still they cannot be said to be customary, for nothing of all this is exempt from blame” (Quintilian, Instit. orat., I., 6).
It is rather surprising that the same Quintilian, whose bile is stirred by curled hair, has let it pass by patiently, that women should bathe together with men:
“If it is a sure sign of adultery for a woman to bathe with men, why! it will be adultery to dine with young friends of the male sex, to have a male friend. You might as reasonably say a depilated body, a languid gait, a womanish robe, are certain signs of effeminacy, of want of virility; for such will seem to many to reveal immorality of character” (Ibid., V., 9).
Martial, II., 39 has also noticed, and not once only, the habits of those men who practised feminine arts of the toilette, and looked just as if they had come out of a band-box:
“Rufus, see you that man there on the first benches ... whose oiled curls exhale the whole shop of Marcelianus, and whose polished arms shine without a hair to be seen?”
Again, he says, V., 62:
“... Who is this Crispulus, who has legs undisfigured by a single hair?”
Even the great Caesar did not disdain this coquetry, Suetonius, ch. 45:
“He took too much care of his appearance, to the point of not only having his beard removed with nippers, and shaved with a razor, but even of being depilated, for which things he was blamed.”
This custom is connected with those Samnite vases, filled with rosin and pitch to be heated for depilation, and for softening the pitch, found amongst the properties of Commodus, and which by the orders of Pertinax were sold by public auction. Julius Capitolinus speaks of them (Pertinax, 8). For removing the hair there were used in fact either tweezers or an unguent called dropax or psilothrum. Martial mentions the use of tweezers in the Epigram (IX., 28) quoted before; of dropax or psilothrum he speaks in Book III., 74:
“You depilate your face with psilothrum and your head with dropax.”
And again VI., 93:
“She revives her youth with psilothrum.”
And X., 65:
“You rub yourself every day with dropax.”
The dropax or psilothrum was obtained by melting rosin in oil (Pliny, Natural History, XIV. 20):
“Rosin dissolves in oil, and I am ashamed to say, that the most honest use made of this mixture is to serve people as a depilatory.”
Aëtius also mentions it in Book III., ch. cxc, of his Opus Medicum:
“The simplest dropax is the one called pitchplaster. Dry pitch is diluted with oil; it is applied hot to the skin, which must first be cleanly shaved, under which circumstances it adheres closely. Before the plaster is quite cold, it is taken off, warmed again, and put on afresh; again it is removed before being cold, and this process is repeated several times.”
Hence Juvenal’s, “Youthfulness by pitch”, (VIII., 114), and
“The thighs neglected and dirty with tufts of hair” of Nævolus, to whom he says:
“Your skin has none of the gloss, that of old the well-smeared plaster of hot pitch gave it” (Sat. IX., 13-15).
What else does Martial, mean when (III., 74), he speaks of “Gargilanus’ nails,—that cannot be trimmed with pitch?”
Persius (IV., 37-41) has, I presume, joined together both modes of depilation:
“Tell me, when you comb a scented beard upon your cheeks, why does a shaven member stand forth from your groin? Though five strong men weed your plantation and work your parboiled buttocks with the hooked tweezers, I tell you there is no plough will tame that stubborn field!”
Here forceps is the same thing as volsella (tweezers); while the “parboiled buttocks” would seem to refer to the hot dropax. After the application of such a plaster the skin could not but have a boiled look.
Ausonius (Epigr. CXXXI.) alludes to this passage of Persius:
“The reason you smooth your groin with hot dropax is that a skin soft and smooth entices the whores, plucked smooth themselves. But that you pluck out the herbage from your parboiled bottom, and polish up with pumice your battered Clazomenae, what means this,—if not that the vice of man with man works in you, and you are a woman behind, a man in front.”
The Clazomenae are without a doubt the man’s buttock, limp and cracked, as those of patients will be, as those of Carinus were, whom Martial, XI., 37 blames for “his lacerated anus.” Ausonius calls them so from the Greek, in Latin “frango” (I break), thus playing with the name of a city. Gonzalvo the Cordevan makes a similar pun, when, desiring to pedicate, he says, he wishes to go to Aversa; also when he wishes to irrumate the mouth, he says: “I go to the Orient”, or when he is about to lick the vulva, in Latin ligurire, “I go to Liguria.” By calling the Clazomenae hammered (battered) Ausonius means to imply that they were as if polished with a hammer, by having served as an anvil. It is as if my fellow-countrymen were to say in joke of a bald man (in German Kahl), “he scratches his polished Kehl.” What could be clearer or wittier? Forcellini is therefore wrong in saying this passage of Ausonius has no sense. Other editors have inclusas instead of incusas, indicating the fissure which separates the buttocks, by the rotundities of which it is on both sides closed in. But in the first place the Clazomenae may well be the buttocks, they being cleft, though not indeed themselves a cleft; in the second place, who could imagine this miserable man depilated the cleft of the buttocks rather than the buttocks themselves?
Some persons, by a refinement of luxury, employed women to depilate them. Such women called themselves ustriculae (from urere, to burn), as they made use of a sticky plaster of boiling dropax to burn the hair on the legs and other parts of the body. Tertullian (De Pallio, ch. 4), says: “So effeminate as to employ ustriculae”; while Salmasius, commenting playfully on the passage, p. 284, declares: “Once upon a time ustriculae served to depilate the legs; now they serve to harass our minds.” Augustus, who according to Suetonius, “was in the habit of singeing his legs with burning nutshells, to make the hair grow more silky” (Augustus, ch. 68), no doubt made use of the nimble hands of these ustriculae.
Women likewise resorted to depilation[[27]], looking upon the fleece of the pubis as something disgusting. Martial:
“... Nor yet one of your mother’s pots full of foul rosin, such as the women of the outer suburbs use to depilate themselves withal” (XII., 32).
As men employed women to free them of hair, so women offered their pubis without shame to men for the same office. Pliny’s bile rises at this (Nat. Hist., XXIX., 8): “Women are not afraid to show their pubis. It is but too true, nothing corrupts manners more than the art of the medical man.”
The emperors themselves condescended to undertake this office for their concubines.
Suetonius, Domitian, ch. 22:
“It was rumoured, that he was fond of depilating his concubines himself, and would bathe amid a crowd of the most infamous courtesans.”
Lampridius, Heliogabalus, ch. 31:
“In his baths he was always together with the women, and he made their toilets with psilothrum: he used psilothrum likewise for his beard, and, disgusting to relate, the same which the women had just been using. With his own hand he shaved off the fleece from the virile part of his pedicons, and then shaved his own beard.”
What Lampridius finds so repugnant, is that the emperor did not hesitate to use upon his beard the same ointment, which the women had just been applying as a plaster upon the pubis, and which he used at once and before the bad smell had evaporated.
But to return to our patients, they also were not in want of illustrious lovers, who took care to depilate them; an example of this we find in the emperor Hadrian, according to Spartianus, who says, ch. 4:
“That he corrupted the freedmen of Trajan, made the toilet of his minions, and often depilated them, while he was attached to the Court, is generally believed.”
In what other way can we believe Hadrian to have made the toilet of these minions, if not in the same way in which Heliogabalus made the toilet of his females, with psilothrum, particularly as it is added that he depilated them frequently? We may take it for granted that he used that ointment, or that he rubbed their faces with moistened bread, either to improve their skin or to hinder the beard growing too soon. Suetonius, Otho, ch. 12:
“He shaved his face every day, and rubbed it with damp bread, a habit which he had contracted when the first down began to appear, so as not to get bearded.”
Juvenal, II., 107 has aimed an arrow of the same sort at Otho:
“It surely is the duty of a mighty Captain ... to keep his skin right smooth ... and knead bread with his fingers to make a plaster for his face.”
What wonder then if the women cherished similar artifices? Who can help thinking of the woman depicted with such marvellous art by Juvenal, from verse 460 to verse 472 of that Sixth Satire, to which Salmasius gave the epithet, of “divine”? “Her face is all puffy with bread crumbs, where the lips of the poor husband keep sticking”, to such an extent, that one doubts:
“... Whether her countenance, plastered and massaged with so many preparations, overlaid with poultices of boiled and moistened flour, should be called a face at all,—or a sore.... At last she peels her face, removes the outermost layers. For the first time she may be recognized for herself. Then she treats her skin with asses’ milk, for which she drags about in her train a herd of asses,—and would take them with her, if she were exiled to the North Pole.”
For painting the face it seems that a coating of chalk was used, as in the case of the Pederast mentioned in Petronius, who perspired so violently in working vainly the groin of Eucolpus:
“From his perspiring forehead flowed rivulets of acacia juice, and in the wrinkles of his cheeks there was such a mass of chalk that you might have believed you saw a wall exposed to the wind and washed by the rain” (Satyricon, ch. 23).
But let us leave all these nasty preparations, before we find ourselves stuck fast in them.
We have said that another branch of this business, on the part of the patient, consists in cevere. A patient cevet, who during the action wriggles and moves his haunches up and down, so as to enjoy more pleasure himself and give more pleasure to the pedicon. Women, doing the same in copulation, are said to crissare. Martial, III., 95:
“Nay! you pedicate finely, Naevolus; you ply your haunches right well.”
Juvenal, II., 20-23:
“... Virtue on their lips, they ply their buttocks.—‘Shall I honour you, in the act of your back-play, Sextus?’ says the infamous Varillus....”
The same author, IX., 40:
“With calculated art moves his haunches.”
Plautus, in the Pseudolus, III., 75:
“Soon as ever the fellow cowers down, ply your haunches in time to him.”
For this reason some authorities hold, I do not know whether rightly or wrongly, the word cinede to come from the fact that the wretches known by that name are in the habit of wriggling the private parts. Undoubtedly the suppleness of the thighs, the agility of the buttocks are counted amongst the particular talents of cinedes in Petronius, ch. 23:
Enter a Cinede reciting these verses:
“Hither, come hither, cinede wantons,—stretch the foot and take your course, fly with soles in the air, with supple thighs, and nimble buttocks, and libertine hands,—all ye old, emasculated minions of Delos, come!”
To this subject also refers Epigr. XXXVI of the 1st Book of the Hermaphroditus, edited by us; which consult, reader, if worth your while. As he who wriggles with his haunches does it to please somebody, people use the word cevere also to convey the meaning of sycophancy or adulation. Thus: “An, Romule, ceves” (What Romulus, you fawn too?) in Persius (I., 87); in the same way irrumate is used in the sense of an outrage, affront.
That women can be pedicated, exactly the same as men, is indicated by nature; that they have consented, is proved by numerous testimonies in Antiquity.—Apuleius, Metamorphoses, III., p. 138:
“While we were thus prattling, a mutual desire invaded our minds and roused our limbs; having undressed entirely we gave ourselves up to the transports of Venus. I soon felt tired. Fotis of her own good will offered me the catamite corollary.”
Martial, IX., 68:
“All night long I possessed a lewd young maiden, whose complaisant demeanor it were impossible to excel. Exhausted with a thousand modes of love, I asked for the puerile service, which she granted at once before I had finished my asking.”
The same, XI., 105, reproaches his wife as follows:
“You refuse to pedicate; yet Cornelia allowed it to Gracchus, Julia to Pompey, and Portia did it for Brutus. Ere the Derdanian Cupbearer served the wine, Juno herself acted Ganymede for Jupiter.”
Tullia permitted the same to Aloysio and Fabrizio, in Aloysia Sigaea; we have quoted the passage. Crispa tastes the same variety of pleasure, in Epigram LXXI of Ausonius:
“She lets herself be done in either orifice.”
The ancient Greeks took great delight in the posterior Venus. One can scarcely express what fervent admirers they were of beautiful buttocks; it went so far, that young girls competed in public, before an assemblage sitting as it were in another “Judgment of Paris” to pronounce which of them was the most gifted in that respect. Athenaeus (XII., 80) informs us that in the environs of Syracuse a villager had two daughters who often quarrelled as to which of them had the finest posteriors; one day they showed them on the highway to a young man from Syracuse, who chanced to be passing, and asked him to adjudicate between them. He decided in favour of the elder sister, fell at once violently in love with her, and on his return home he told his younger brother what had befallen him. The latter went forthwith to see the two girls, and became enamoured of the younger. Soon they got married to the two youths, who were opulent, and they were called by their fellow-citizens the Callipygi, because, although of lowly birth, their posteriors served them for a dowry. Full of gratitude, they dedicated a temple to Venus, under the title of Venus Callipygos (Venus of the beauteous buttocks).
It will not surprise you, that any young girl remarkable for her beautiful posteriors amongst her companions was all the more in request for the puerile office, and all the more disposed to lend herself to it. Mania consented to it in favour of Demetrius, as testified by Machon, in Athenaeus (XIII., 42), when the king wanting to enjoy her buttocks, she accepts his gift, and says:
“Son of Agamemnon, it is now your turn to have them.[[28]]”
A certain young man, Ponticus by name, exacted the same corollary in the morning from Gnathena, whom he had possessed all night; it is again Machon who tells us the story (ibid., XIII., 43). Demophon, the minion of Sophocles, asked the same favour of Nico[[29]] who being famed for the beauty of her buttocks,—“she is said to have had an exceedingly beautiful bottom”—was afraid he might lend them to Sophocles (ibid., XII., 45). Gnathaenion (ibid., XIII., 44) made an ingenious excuse for having been similarly complaisant. A certain tinker having ungenerously boasted he had five times running mounted that little courtesan in that way, Andronicus, whom she preferred to everybody else, got to hear it, and reproached her bitterly for having allowed such a blackguard to enjoy her so abundantly in a posture which his prayers never obtained from her. Gnathaenion replied that, not caring to have her breasts handled by a fellow black with dirt and soot, it had appeared to her better to take that posture, so as to receive the least possible fraction of the wretched creature’s body. Plate XXVII of the Monuments du culte secret des dames romaines presents the picture of a man pedicating a woman.
It is, however, not without some inconvenience, or even danger, that one lends oneself to the passive part. Aloysia Sigaea, Past-Mistress in the Sciences of Love, enlightens us on this point:
“In the first place intolerable sufferings are inflicted upon the patient, for in most cases he is invaded by too large a stake; hence frightful infirmities, incurable by all the art of Aesculapius. The confining muscles are ruptured, and consequently the excrements cannot be held back and escape. What could be more disgusting? I have known noble ladies afflicted with cruel maladies to such a degree by eruptions and ulcers, that it took them two or three years to recover their health. I myself (Tullia) have not escaped scot free from the accursed embraces of Aloysio and Fabrizio. When they first forced their darts in, I endured atrocious pain, but soon the feeling of slight titillation consoled me.... When however I reached home again, I felt a burning pain at the place they had lacerated: I felt myself consumed by an itching as if I were on fire, and in spite of the nursing of Donna Orsini, it cost much trouble to extinguish that confounded fire. If my lacerations had been neglected, I should have died a miserable death” (Dial. VI).