There was rarely anything congenital, at that period at least, in the art of the Sodomite. It was purely one of acquisi-' tion; as it was also in Rome at a corresponding period, where the terms c-inasdi, palhici, and paidi-cones, represented a class of youths who, for a given sum, and not always because they had a taste for it, surrendered themselves as passive instruments to the unnatural lubricity of the debauched Romans.

But along with these debased creatures, who gave their hands, mouths, and rectums indiscriminately and passively to the sexual act, were the active participants, the fellatores and fellatrices, who, male and female, played the active role in the revolting vice. In addition were the irrumator and cunnilingus, men who used the tongue to gratify women, a frightful habit which, under the caption of sapphism, or Lesbian love, I shall deal with later.

Thus, as the testimony of the Roman poets clearly points out, in their mad effort to escape the venereal plague which infected the genitals, they only succeeded in transferring it to other seats, the mouths and throats of the fellatores becoming so foul from infection as to justify the exclamation of Martial—"thou sayest that lawyers and poets have a bad breath; but, Zoilus, it is still worse with the fellator! "1

Perseus speaks of a certain individual whose "tender mouth conceals a putrid ulcer,"* and Cotta Messalimia, " who had exhausted himself by all the excesses of debauchery," the progenitor of that celebrated nymphomaniac empress, who, deserting the couch of the imbecile Claudius, used to spend her nights in the brothels, leaving next morning, as the poet says, "exhausted but never satisfied," carried, himself, on his face and eyelids, the distinctive marks of the " rotten race of Messala."*