Videsne ut Cinaedus orbem digito temperet?

Tiberius, with his pisciculi and greges exoletorum, invented the Symplegma or nexus of Sellarii, agentes et patientes, in which the spinthriae (lit. women’s bracelets) were connected in a chain by the bond of flesh[FN#379] (Seneca Quaest.  Nat.).  Of this refinement which in the earlier part of the nineteenth century was renewed by sundry Englishmen at Naples, Ausonius wrote (Epig. cxix.  I),

          Tres uno in lecto:  stuprum duo perpetiuntur;

And Martial had said (xii. 43)

          Quo symplegmate quinque copulentur;
          Qua plures teneantur a catena; etc.

Ausonius recounts of Caligula he so lost patience that he forcibly entered the priest M. Lepidus, before the sacrifice was completed.  The beautiful Nero was formally married to Pythagoras (or Doryphoros) and afterwards took to wife Sporus who was first subjected to castration of a peculiar fashion; he was then named Sabina after the deceased spouse and claimed queenly honours.  The “Othonis et Trajani pathici” were famed; the great Hadrian openly loved Antinous,and the wild debaucheries of Heliogabalus seem only to have amused, instead of disgusting, the Romans.

Uranopolis allowed public lupanaria where adults and meritorii pueri, who began their career as early as seven years, stood for hire:  the inmates of these cauponae wore sleeved tunics and dalmatics like women.  As in modern Egypt pathic boys, we learn from Catullus, haunted the public baths.  Debauchees had signals like freemasons whereby they recognised one another.  The Greek Skematizein was made by closing the hand to represent the scrotum and raising the middle finger as if to feel whether a hen had eggs, tater si les poulettes ont l’oeuf:  hence the Athenians called it Catapygon or sodomite and the Romans digitus impudicus or infamis, the “medical finger"[FN#380] of Rabelais and the Chiromantists.  Another sign was to scratch the head with the minimus—­digitulo caput scabere Juv. ix. 133).[FN#381] The prostitution of boys was first forbidden by Domitian; but Saint Paul, a Greek, had formally expressed his abomination of Le Vice (Rom. i. 26; i.  Cor. vi. 8); and we may agree with Grotius (de Verit. ii. c. 13) that early Christianity did much to suppress it.  At last the Emperor Theodosius punished it with fire as a profanation, because sacro-sanctum esse debetur hospitium virilis animae.

In the pagan days of imperial Rome her literature makes no difference between boy and girl.  Horace naively says (Sat. ii. 118):—­

          Ancilla aut verna est praesto puer;

and with Hamlet, but in a dishonest sense:—­

                    —­Man delights me not
          Nor woman neither.

Similarly the Spaniard Martial, who is a mine of such pederastic allusions (xi. 46):—­

          Sive puer arrisit, sive puella tibi.