Smoothly does it: Martial 6.56

6.56

You've leg-hair like boar bristles; your chest's a rug: but do you think it fools the gossips, Charidemus? Take it from me and lose the body hair -- all of it. Tell everyone you wax your bum. "Whatever for?" You know they're talking -- lots. Make them think you're only taking it up the arse.


-Martial's hierarchy of sexual shame strikes again (see Sapsford)...

Kiss with confidence, bid with none: Martial 6.66

6.66

There was this girl the other day -- not so great a reputation, the kind who sit out in the depths of Subura -- and auctioneer Gellius was trying to sell her off. For the longest time the bids were pitiful, so he took it into his head to show everyone she was clean. So he grabbed hold of her (she was having none of it) and kissed her -- twice, three, four times. What to know what good it did him? A guy who was just then bidding six hundred, pulled out.

This poem relies on the motif of the impure mouth, os impurum, with which regular readers will be all too familiar. We don't want to know where that mouth has been.

Pontellianus and Cascellius: the sound of silence

7.3

Why don't I send you my little books, Pontilianus? I don't want you sending me yours.

7.9

Cascellius can count his sixty years. So he must have a brain; when will he learn to talk?

Shaming a slut, cheating a widow

4.12

You don't say no to anyone, Thais; but if that doesn't embarrass you, this at least should: you don't say no to anything.

5.32

Crispus didn't leave his wife a penny in his will, Faustinus. 'So who got it all?' He did.

Three from book One

These are three I worked up the other day while I was waiting to pick someone up:

 

1.28

Think it's yesterday's wine Acerra stinks of? You're wrong; he always drinks till dawn.

1.32

I don't like you, Sabidius, and I can't say why. All I can say is: I really don't.

1.33

Gellia's lost her father. Sheds no tears, when alone; in company, weeps buckets on cue. It's not mourning if you're fishing for compliments, Gellia: real grief happens off-stage.