Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/306

 out laughing" and "applied the verse to the Emperor, with great applause."

Of Latin tragedians we have only imperfect data, as also only imperfect fragments, except as to Seneca, who has always descended to posterity as a rigid stoical moralist in theory at lease, and whose sober plays are not in touch with homosexual themes.

Juvenal and Persius the great social satirists, of Imperial Rome, are plentiful in similisexual allusions. We have nothing to warrant our supposing that their rebukes of such aspects of Latin fashionable life were not entirely sincere. But they do not repudiate it as any more repehensiblereprehensible [sic] than venal, shameful heterosexuality in the City. Juvenal (who pointedly refers to intersexualism in high life) writes one amusing satire on a young town-catamite, a kept-youth; under the title, "The Sorrows of Nævolus"; a most explicit and amusing complaint of his badly-paid and exausting [sic] métier.

Horace, in spite of his dionysian sexuality was pederastic, not only by what he indicates but from allusions of various members of his dissolute "set." His relations with the youth Lysicus are a topic of raillery from Martial. Martial also accuses Horace of carefully hiding away a certain handsome boy in his employ, lest visitors should desire him.

In considering the many apostrophes by Martial to his pederastic loves, Telesphorus, Alexis, Diadumenos, Earinus, Dion, and Hyllus, the homosexualism of Martial has little that is idealistic. Only in a few such tributes to boyish loveliness is the poet refined and hellenic. The same explicit animalism informs his Epigrams concerning female light o'-loves. Martial was a kettle that called every other pot black. Virulently