are spoken of as keeping herds of oxen, or goats, or sheep, or brood
mares, so now they keep boys, solely for the purpose of shameful usage,
treating them as females, or androgynes, and doing unspeakable acts. To
such a pitch of pollution has the multitude throughout the whole people
come!" Another sure indication of the prevalence of the vice of sodomy
is to be found in Juvenal, Sat. ii, 12-13, "but your fundament is smooth
and the swollen haemorrhoids are incised, the surgeon grinning the
while," just as the physician of the nineties grinned when some young
fool came to him with a blennorrhoeal infection! The ancient jest which
accounts for the shaving of the priest's crown is an inferential
substantiation of the fact that the evils of antiquity, like the legal
codes, have descended through the generations; survived the middle ages,
and been transmitted to the modern world. A perusal of the Raggionamente
of Pietro Aretino will confirm this statement, in its first premise, and
the experiences of Sir Richard Burton in the India of Napier, and Harry
Franck's, in Spain, in the present century, and those of any intelligent
observer in the Orient, today, will but bear out this hypothesis. The
native population of Manila contains more than its proportion of
catamites, who seek their sponsors in the Botanical Gardens and on the
Luneta. The native quarters of the Chinese cities have their "houses"
where boys are kept, just as the Egyptian mignons stood for hire in the
lupanaria at Rome. A scene in Sylvia Scarlett could be duplicated in any
large city of Europe or America; there is no necessity of appeal to
Krafft-Ebbing or Havelock Ellis. But there is still another and surer
method of gauging the extent of paederastic perversion at Rome, and that
is the richness of the Latin vocabulary in terms and words bearing upon
this repulsive subject. There are, in the Latin language, no less than
one hundred and fifteen words and expressions in general usage.

But it is in Martial that we are able to sense the abandoned and