Page:The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter (1922), vol. 2.djvu/177

 (as if they were his mistresses), with whom love is a transient and fleeting affair? I will prove to you that you gain more by the boys than your lord: they make your husband keep to one woman. They give what a wife will not give. ‘I grant that favor,’ you say, ‘sooner than that my husband’s love should wander from my bed.’ It is not the same thing. I want the fig of Chios, not a flavorless fig; and in you this Chian fig is flavorless. A woman of sense and a wife ought to know her place. Let the boys have what concerns them, and confine yourself to what concerns you.” xii, 97.

“Wife, you scold me with a harsh voice when I’m caught with a boy, and inform me that you too have a bottom. How often has Juno said the same to the lustful Thunderer? And yet he sleeps with the tall Ganymede. The Tirynthian hero put down his bow and sodomised Hylas. Do you think that Megæra had no buttocks? Daphne inspired Phœbus with love as she fled, but that flame was quenched by the Œbalian boy. However much Briseis lay with her bottom turned toward him, the son of Æacus found his beardless friend more congenial to his tastes. Forbear then, to give masculine names to what you have, and, wife, think that you have two vaginas.” xi, 44. Rh