Note 7 — THE Metamorphoses of Venus

Suetonius, Tiberius, ch. 43: “He decorated his various and variously arranged sleeping-chambers with pictures and bas-reliefs of the most licentious character, and furnished them with the works of Philaenis, that no one in performing should want a model of the posture required.”

Priapeia, III: “Taking pictures from the licentious treatises of Elephantis, Lalagé presents them an offering to the stiff-standing god, and begs you prove if she performs agreeably to the pictured postures.”

It would seem then that artists depicted the postures described by Elephantis, she herself possibly setting the example. Paintings of the sort Lalagé dedicates to Priapus, and asks her lover to have her and see if she is a docile pupil in faithfully imitating all the modes of connection depicted in them. No doubt such representations of licentious postures, taken from the works of Elephantis or Philaenis or elsewhere stimulated the ingenuity of Artists to work out in emulation these enticing motifs to the highest degree of finish. Ovid alludes to such works of art in his Art of Love, II., 680: “They unite in Love in a thousand postures; no picture could suggest any fresh ones ...”; as also the author of an ancient Epigram quoted by Joseph Scaliger in his Commentary on the Priapeia, III.; “And when she has thrown herself into every posture in imitation of the seductive pictures, she may go: but let the picture be left hanging over my bed.” Nothing was commoner with the Romans than to decorate the wall and partitions of rooms with licentious paintings, as may be gathered from Propertius II., vi, 27 sqq.: “The hand that first painted filthy pictures, and exposed foul sights in an honest home, corrupted the pure eyes of young maids, and chose to make them accomplices of his own lubricity. In old days our walls were not daubed with fancies of this vile sort, when never a partition was adorned with a vicious subject.”