Page:The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter (1922), vol. 2.djvu/247

 generally practised by the freed-women; their manner necessarily showed the results of their education. But the young sparks of Rome never paid much attention to them, they preferred to have love affairs with the wives of their friends. For one Sallust who ruined himself with freedwomen, there were five Cupienniuses; “Cupiennius, that admirer of the pudenda garbed in white,” Hor. Sat. I, ii, 36. Delia, Lesbia, Ipsythillia, Corinna, Nemesis, Neeria, Cynthia, Sulpitia, Lycimnia, and almost all the women to whom, under real or assumed names, Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, Horace, and others, addressed their erotic compositions, were Roman married women. Horace is the only one who celebrated a freedwoman in some of his odes. This is due, however, to his taste for variety and perhaps also, to his birth, for he himself was the son of a freedwoman. Ovid’s Art of Love and the Satires of Juvenal reveal the extent to which gallantry was the fashion at Rome and Cato would never have praised the conduct of that young man who had recourse to a public house if that had been an ordinary course of procedure.

In Europe of the middle ages, the priests and abbots helped to some extent in reviving the profession of the courtesans. Long before, Saint Paul had stated in his Epistles that it was permitted to the apostles Rh