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.