Page:The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter (1922), vol. 2.djvu/163

 Antonius a catamite; but in Republican Rome, it is to Catullus that we must turn to find the most decisive evidence of their almost universal inclination to sodomy. The first notice of this passage in its proper significance is found in the Burmann Petronius (ed. 1709): here, in a note on the correct reading of “inter titulos, nudasque meretrices furtim conspatiantes,” the ancient reading would seem to have been “internuculos nudasque meretrices furtim conspatiantes” (and I am not at all certain but that it is to be preferred). Burmann cites the passage from Catullus (Epithalamium of Manlius and Julia); Burmann sees the force of the passage but does not grasp its deeper meaning. Marchena seems to have been the first scholar to read between the lines. See his third note.

A few years later, John Colin Dunlop, the author of a History of Roman Literature which ought to be better known among the teaching fraternity, drew attention to the same passage. So striking is his comment that I will transcribe it in full. “It,” the poem, “has also been highly applauded by the commentators; and more than one critic has declared that it must have been written by the hands of Venus and the Graces. I wish, however, they had excepted from their unqualified panegyrics the coarse imitation of the Fescennine poems, which leaves in our minds a Rh