Page:The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter (1922), vol. 2.djvu/169

lus still dishonor the cities of the modern world. Tatian, writing in the second century, says (Orat. ad Græcos): “pæderastia is practiced by the barbarians generally, but is held in pre-eminent esteem by the Romans, who endeavor to get together troupes of boys, as it were of brood mares,” and Justin Martyr (Apologia, 1), has this to say: “first, because we behold nearly all men seducing to fornication, not merely girls, but males also. And just as our fathers 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 hemorrhoids are incised, the surgeon grinning the while,” just as the physician of the nineties grinned when some young fool came to him with a blennorrhœal 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