Latin obscenity
Documented obscenities occurred rarely in classical Latin literature, limited to certain types of writing such as epigrams, but they are commonly used in the graffiti written on the walls of Pompeii and Herculaneum.
Another source is the anonymous Priapeia (see External links below), a collection of 95 epigrams supposedly written to adorn statues of the fertility god Priapus, whose wooden image was customarily set up to protect orchards against thieves.
These words are strictly avoided in most types of Latin literature; however, they are common in graffiti, and also in certain genres of poetry, such as the short poems known as epigrams, such as those written by Catullus and Martial.
As a result, it was "not a neutral technical term, but an emotive and highly offensive word", most commonly used in despective or threatening contexts of violent acts against a fellow male or rival rather than mere sex (futūtiō 'fucking').
From this poem it is clear that Catullus's friends Veranius and Fabullus were kept under an equally close rein when they accompanied Lucius Piso to his province of Macedonia in 57-55 BC.
1.2.68) is as follows, in which he advises a young man who was beaten up as a result of an affair with the dictator Sulla's daughter: And Lucilius says, referring to the fact that Roman men apparently used to masturbate with their left hand: The word mūtō may be related to the marriage deity Mutunus Tutunus.
Juvenal, showing his knack for describing grossly obscene matters without using taboo words, writes as follows in one of his satires (9.43-4): Another euphemism for the penis was cauda ('tail'), which occurs twice in Horace,[22] and continues today in the French derivative queue ('tail' or 'penis').
[23] And one of the characters in Petronius's Satyricon, Ascyltus, is described as follows:[24] Yet another euphemism is cōlēs or cōlis or caulis, which literally means the stem or stalk of a plant (such as a cabbage, onion, or vine).
It appears in Catullus 37: and in a graffito from Pompeii: The grammarian Sacerdos preserves a quotation about Pompey, that says quem non pudet et rubet, nōn est homō, sed sōpiō ('whoever is not ashamed, and does not blush, is not a man, but a sopio.')
Martial (6.36) in one epigram teases a certain friend: Suetonius's Lives of the Twelve Caesars,[32] quotes a letter from Mark Antony to Augustus which contains the sentence: The participle arrēctus means 'erect'.
Ovid (Amōrēs 3.7.65-6): And a girlfriend of Horace's chides him with the words (Epodes 12): While Catullus (67.23) speaks of an impotent husband in these terms: Mentula has evolved into Sicilian and Italian minchia and South Sardinian minca.
[41] The exact words of the text here are disputed,[42] but the general sense is clear: Ovid (Fasti 2.241) recounting the same story, and perhaps implying that Attis removed the whole organ, similarly uses the phrase onus inguinis ('the burden of his groin').
Italian coglioni, French couilles, couillons; Portuguese colhões, Galician collóns, collois, collós, Catalan collons, Sardinian cozzones, Romanian coi, coaie, Spanish cojones (now a loanword in English).
Vulva (or volva) in classical Latin generally signified the womb, especially in medical writing, and also it is also common in the Vetus Latina (pre-Jerome) version of the Bible.
[78] The Latin word laxāre appears to be used in the same sense in Priapeia 31: haec meī tē ventris arma laxābunt ('these weapons of my belly will relax you' (of pēdīcātiō).
A famous ribald song in Old Occitan sometimes attributed to the troubadour William IX of Aquitaine reads: The aggressive sense of English "fuck" and "screw" was not strongly attached to futuō in Latin.
Instead, these aggressive connotations attached themselves to pēdīcāre 'to sodomise' and irrumāre 'to force fellatio' respectively, which were used with mock hostility in Catullus 16: The passive voice, pēdīcārī, is used of the person who is forced to submit to anal sex, as in Priapeia 35, in which the god Priapus threatens a thief: The verb pēdīcāre could also be used of having anal sex with women, as in the following lines from Martial (11.104.17–18) (in the poem he claims to be speaking to his wife): There is some doubt in the dictionaries whether the correct spelling was ped- or paed- (Lewis and Short give the latter).
Irrumātio is the counterpart of fellātio; in Roman terms, which are the opposite way round to modern conceptions, the giver of oral sex inserts his penis into the mouth of the receiver.
Martial (2.47) advises one effeminate man who is having an adulterous affair, and who would not perhaps have objected too much if the husband punished him by sodomising him: According to Adams (1982, p. 126-7), it was a standard joke to speak of irrumātio as a means of silencing someone.
The supporters of this view cite another word mascarpiōnem (from mascarpiō), which occurs once in Latin literature in Petronius (134.5), and which appears from the context to mean 'beating the penis with a wand (to stimulate it)'.
In another poem (11.22) Martial advises a friend: He continues: This apparently dates back to a belief of Aristotle that vigorous sexual activity caused a boy's voice to turn rapidly into that of a man.
It becomes Galician, Catalan, Spanish, and Portuguese cagar, in Vegliot Dalmatian kakuor, in French chier, and in Romanian as căcare (the act of taking a dump) or a (se) căca.
But on hearing thunder, The word can also be used in a metaphorical sense, as at Martial 3.17, speaking of a pastry which had been blown on by a man with impure breath (caused no doubt by oral sex) to cool it down:[112] The politer terms for merda in Classical Latin were stercus (gen. stercoris), 'manure' and fimum or fimus, 'filth'.
It was preserved in Romanian too, not for feces, where căcat (derived from caco) is used instead, but in the word dezmierda, originally meaning 'to wipe the bottom of (an infant)'; subsequently becoming 'to cuddle' or 'to fondle'.
In the Sermones 1.8, 46, Horace writes: Christopher Smart translates this passage as 'from my cleft bum of fig-tree I let out a fart, which made as great an explosion as a burst bladder'.
However, the Oxford Latin Dictionary quotes an inscription from a public bath in Ostia which says[115] Judging from derivatives in some of the daughter languages (see below), there was also a noun *vissīna 'a silent fart', but no trace of this is found in the extant texts.
[116] Martial writes of a certain man, who after an embarrassing incident of flatulence when praying in the temple of Jupiter, was careful in the future to take precautions: In Petronius (47), in the speech of the vulgar millionaire Trimalchio, euphemisms suā rē causā facere and facere quod sē iuvet 'do what helps one' are both used for relieving oneself of wind: The antiquity of pēdō and its membership in the core inherited vocabulary is clear from its reduplicating perfect stem.
It is cognate with Greek πέρδομαι (perdomai), English fart, Bulgarian prdi, Polish pierdzieć, Russian пердеть (perdet), Lithuanian persti, Sanskrit pardate, and Avestan pərəδaiti, all of which mean the same thing.
This IE root with a palatal ģh was formerly mixed up (e. g. in Pokorny's IEW) with another one with velar *gh meaning 'mist' (Russian mgla), hence erroneous tentative overall translations like 'to sprinkle' or 'to wet' which still turn up sometimes.
*Pissiāre represents a borrowing from the Germanic languages, and appears elsewhere in the Romance territory, as in French pisser, Catalan pixar, Italian pisciare and Romanian a (se) pișa, along with English to piss.
