Note 220 — SECOND SECTION. Influences which served to hinder to a greater or less degree the inception of Diseases consequent upon the Use or Misuse of the Genital Organs.

Martial, bk. X. Epigr. 90.,

(Why pluck you bare, Ligella, your old organ? why vex you the ashes of your tomb? Such nice allurements are for girls. You are mistaken if you think yours is of a sort that a man’s member should be fain to belong to it.) This passage, together with those quoted a little above from Aristophanes and Theopompus, will explain sufficiently what Horace (Sat. I. 2. v. 36.) meant by his “mirator cunni Cupiennius albi,” (Cupiennius admirer of a white organ), for the albus (white) here evidently stands for rasus, depilatus, nudus, (shaven, freed from hair, bare); as in Juvenal, Sat. I. 111., Nuper in hanc urbem pedibus qui venerat albis, (Who but now had arrived in this city with white, i. e. bare, feet.) The commentators have hitherto always explained it by matrona stola alba, seu candida, vestita, (a matron clad in a white, or glistening-white, robe), because, as Heindorf puts it, no other interpretation is to hand. But really there are several possible explanations on similar lines. It might be for “canus cunnus”, (hoary, aged; organ) (Martial, bk. IX. 38., bk. II. 34.), though again the meaning of depilatus (free of hair), in another sense, might equally well be at the bottom of this, as is the case with cana labra (hoary, white, lips)—IX. 28. Or albus (white) may be taken as synonymous with increta, cerussata (whitened with chalk, painted with ceruse), to which Martial supplies the explanation, when he says (III. 42.),

(When you endeavour to hide the wrinkles on your stomach with powder, ’tis your own belly, Polla, not my lips, you smear with the stuff),—as also bk. IX. 3., Illa siligineis pinguescit adultera cunnis, (It—i. e. your penis—in adulterous loves, grows fat on women’s organs powdered with fine wheaten flour); [but another way of taking the line is: She, i. e. your mistress,—adulterous dame, grows fat on wheaten cakes—cakes baked in the shape of cunni.] The Lomentum, which is not derived from lavimentum or lavamentum (something to wash with), as Scheller, following Voss, makes it to be, but from the Greek λείωμα faba communita (ground beans), was bean-meal (Vegetius, De re veterin. V. 62., says: in subtilissimo lomento, hoc est farina fabacea, (in the finest lomentum, that is bean-flour.); and at the present day the Japanese, it seems, according to Thunberg, use a kind of bean-meal instead of soap. Roman ladies were most careful to maintain the aequor ventris (smoothness of the belly)—Aulus Gellius, Noctes Att. I. 2.); whence Martial, (III. 72.) says, addressing Laufella, who refuses to bathe with him:

(Either your breasts hang flabby from your bosom, or you fear, if you strip, to betray the furrows on your belly.) To obviate wrinkles on the face, they sprinkled their faces with chalk; and so Petronius, (Satyr. ch. 23.) says: et inter rugas malarum tantum erat cretae, ut putares detectum parietem nimbo laborare, (and amidst the wrinkles of the cheeks was so much chalk, that you would think a partition-wall had been stripped and was wrapped in a cloud of dust); and we read in Lucian’s poem (Greek Anthology, Bk. II. tit. 9.) μὴ τοίνυν τὸ πρόσωπον ἅπαν ψιμύθῳ κατάπλαττε. (Now don’t besmear all your face with ceruse). However if cunnus must be taken as equivalent to femina (a woman), it would be on all fours with albus amicus (white, white-faced, friend) in Martial (bk. X. 12.), which Farnabius explains by σκιατρόφος (reared in the shade, delicate), answering more or less to our “Whey-face”. At any rate any of these interpretations are for certain nearer the truth than the stola alba (clad in a white robe) one.