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The Plague of Lust: A History of Venereal Disease in Antiquity (1901 Edition)
A 650-page philological foray into ancient sexuality, surprisingly light on STDs.
Soon sex became more than a means to an end — or, as Rosenbaum writes, with his characteristic coupling of prudish assessment and curvacious syntax: “The facility with which the bestial instinct could be satisfied and the titillation of carnal pleasure procured, was bound to rob the customary manner of sexual indulgence of the charm of novelty, and to set the depraved imagination of the voluptuary at work to solve the problem of how to import manifold variations into the simple act of copulation”. A reader of Rosenbaum’s volume will be faced with numerous bracing translations, such as one attributed to Galen, who proclaims that “the drinking of sweat, urine and the menstrual blood of women is vicious and shameful, and not less so when a person, as Xenocrates proposes to do, smears the regions of the mouth and throat with excrement and swallows it down.” Not less so, indeed. We learn misogynistic pejoratives like “meriochane”, given to Cleopatra by Horace and company, which Rosenbaum translates as “the woman who gapes wide for ten thousand men”, and encounter encyclopedic lists of Greek nicknames for prostitutes, some of which are rendered in English as “common strumpets” and “ground-thumpers”.
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