e of any intelligent
observer in the Orient, today, will but bear out this hypothesis. The
native population of Manila contains more than its proportion of
catamites, who seek their sponsors in the Botanical Gardens and on the
Luneta. The native quarters of the Chinese cities have their "houses"
where boys are kept, just as the Egyptian mignons stood for hire in the
lupanaria at Rome. A scene in Sylvia Scarlett could be duplicated in any
large city of Europe or America; there is no necessity of appeal to
Krafft-Ebbing or Havelock Ellis. But there is still another and surer
method of gauging the extent of paederastic perversion at Rome, and that
is the richness of the Latin vocabulary in terms and words bearing upon
this repulsive subject. There are, in the Latin language, no less than
one hundred and fifteen words and expressions in general usage.

But it is in Martial that we are able to sense the abandoned and
cynical attitude of the Roman public toward this vice: the epigram upon
Cantharus, xi, 46, is an excellent example. In commentating upon the
meticulous care with which Cantharus avoided being spied upon by
irreverent witnesses, the poet sarcastically remarks that such
precautions would never enter the head of anyone were it merely a
question of having a boy or a woman, and he mentions them in the order
in which they are set forth here. No one dreads the limelight like the
utter debauchee, as has been remarked by Seneca. We find a parallel in
the old days in Shanghai, before the depredations of the American
hetairai had aroused the hostility of the American judge, in 1907-8. Men
of unquestioned respectability and austere asceticism were in the habit
of making periodic trips to this pornographic Mecca for the reason that
they could there be accommodated with the simultaneous ministrations of
two or even three soiled doves of the stripe of her of whom Martial (ix,
69) makes caustic mention:

"I passed the whole night with a lascivious girl whose naughtiness none
could surpass. Tired of a thousand methods of indulgence, I begged the
boyish favor: she granted my prayers before they were finished, before
even the first words were out of my mouth. Smiling and blushing, I
besought her for something worse still; she voluptuously promised it at
once. But to me, she was chaste. But, AEschylus, she will not be so to
you; take the boon if you want it, but she will attach a condition." In
all that could pertain