Note 56 — Chapter II · ON PEDICATION
Reading edition
Pardon me, illustrious Marcus Pullarius, for having almost forgotten you. Ausonius, Epigr. LXX.:
“Which Marcus? The one they call the “cat that catches boys”, he who tarnishes all the purity of childhood, who plies with his back-door tool the rearward Venus, the poet Lucilius’ subulo, his pullipremo.”
Ausonius calls him the pullarian cat, because he hunted after young lads (puelli) as the cat gives chase to birds; he calls him, applying to him the same epithets as “Lucilius, who Satires he had the opportunity of reading,—more fortunate in this than we,—a subulo” (from subula, an awl), wanting to make it understood that with his member he transfixed, like a cobbler with his awl, the anus of cinedes; and pullipremo, from his compressing in his work young lads.