and educated their taste in
luxuries. The influx of slaves and voluptuaries from the Levant aided in
the dissemination of the vices of the orient among the ruder Romans. As
the first taste of blood arouses the tiger, so did the limitless power of
the Republic and Empire react to the insinuating precepts of older and
more corrupt civilizations. The fragments of Lucilius make mention of
the "cinaedi," in the sense that they were dancers, and in the earlier
ages, they were. Cicero, in the second Philippic calls 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 "intertitulos, 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 stronger
impression of the prevalence and extent of Roman vices, than any other
passage in the Latin classics. Martial, and Catullus himself, elsewhere,
have branded their enemies; and Juvenal in bursts of satiric indignation,
has reproached his countrymen with the most shocking crimes. But here,
in a complimentary poem to a patron and intimate friend, these are
jocularly alluded to as the venial indulgences of his earliest youth"
(vol. i, p. 453, second edition).

This passage clearly points to the fact that it was the common custom
among the young Roman patricians to have a bed-fellow