Sporus

[3] Some think Nero used his marriage to Sporus to assuage the guilt he felt for allegedly kicking his pregnant wife Poppaea to death.

[4] Scholars have deduced that Sporus was likely an epithet given to him when his abuse started, considering it to be derived from the Greek word σπόρος (spóros), meaning "seed" or "semen", which may refer to his inability to have children following his castration.

[12] Suetonius quotes one Roman who lived around this time who remarked that the world would have been better off if Nero's father Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus had married someone more like the castrated boy.

[12][13] In 69 AD, Sporus became involved with Otho, the second of a rapid, violent succession of four emperors who vied for power during the chaos that followed Nero's death.

His victorious rival, Vitellius, intended to use Sporus as a victim in a public entertainment: a fatal "re-enactment" of the Rape of Proserpina at a gladiator show.

[4][13] In 1735, Alexander Pope wrote a satirical poem, Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, that mocked the courtier Lord Hervey, who had been accused of homosexuality a few years earlier.

He scoffs at using so strong a weapon as satire upon a weak and effeminate target like Sporus, "that mere white curd of ass's milk", and in a famous line Pope poses the rhetorical question: "Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?