by Melissa Mohr
mentula = a mans yarde, his pricke, his privities
verpa = a mans yard
—Thomas Thomas, Dictionarium, 1596
The Forum of Augustus, completed ca. AD 40. Can you find the phallus?
Walking around in ancient Rome, one saw a lot of penises. There were erect penises sculpted, painted, and scratched over door frames, on chariot wheels, in gardens, on the borders of fields, in elaborate murals in reception rooms of fancy villas, hung around the necks of prepubescent boys. Even the Forum of Augustus, the center of Roman political and military life, was designed in the shape of an erection. Some scholars argue that it is an example of architecture parlante—a building whose form speaks to its purpose. The forum was where military triumphs were celebrated, where law cases were argued, where boys came to put aside their childish clothing and assume the toga virilis, the garment that marked them out as full Roman citizens, as men. Something that today we see only in private was displayed prominently in public in ancient Rome.
This is another example of “speaking architecture,” the Oikema, designed by Claude-Nicholas Ledoux in the eighteenth century. Like the Roman Forum, it was to serve as a place of masculine initiation—it was to be a brothel. In Ledoux’s vision, the calming, classical style of the building, combined with some good instruction, would teach the young men inside to subjugate their sexual urges and become productive citizens of France. It was never built.
Most cultures—including ancient Rome’s and our own—dictate that whatever parts of the body should be concealed in clothing must also be concealed in language. Obscenities arise from the body parts and actions that a culture deems unacceptable for public display. Latin captures this link between the body and language by referring to obscene words as nuda verba—“naked words.” These words represent the thing itself, without the linguistic drapery of euphemism or circumlocution.
Given the prevalence of the public penis, and the link between concealment and obscenity, one would expect that Latin words for the penis would not be obscene. If you can see penises everywhere in public, you should be able to say the word for them in public. But actually, Latin words for the penis are obscene. Mentula (penis) was quite obscene, and verpa—a penis with its foreskin pulled back, hence erect or circumcised—was even worse. Even the word penis itself was offensive in Latin, though not as shocking as the two primary obscenities, mentula and verpa.
This dichotomy between what was seen and what could be said developed because in Rome, obscenity also had religious aspects. According to Freud, taboos have two contradictory directions, at least in the “traditional” societies popular with anthropologists of the early twentieth century. Taboo things are unclean and forbidden, but they are also sacred and consecrated. In ancient Rome, the genitalia were verecunda (parts of modesty) and pudenda (parts of shame), but they were also verenda (parts of respect) and veretrum (parts of awe, with a healthy dose of fear). Modern English-speaking societies have lost the latter side of the binary—for us the genitals are shameful, but they inspire no religious respect.
As we’ve seen, one meaning of the Latin obscenus was “of ill omen,” signifying things that would taint a religious rite and make it fail. This category mostly included sexual acts and language—a vestal virgin not being quite virgin enough, a priest not abstaining from sex for long enough before a ceremony, insulting the gods with bad words. But this held true for only certain kinds of religious rites. Other kinds actually relied on obscenity for their success. The obscene had its own gods and goddesses, its own place in the smooth running of nature and the Roman state. We’ve already met the garden god Priapus, with his huge, perpetually erect phallus; Pan was the god of woodland groves and shepherds, with the hindquarters of a goat and his own large, often erect penis. There was also the mysterious Mutunus Tutunus, who may have been nothing but a giant erect penis, statues of whom brides had to sit on as part of the wedding ceremony. The erect penis symbolized, and in some sense was supposed to guarantee, fertility.
Obscene language, which represents the genitalia and sex so directly, was likewise used in ceremonies to promote fertility. Uttering these ordinarily taboo words at a wedding, for example, was thought to channel the procreative power of the things to which they referred, ensuring the fertility of the marriage. Wedding guests would sing fescennine songs, full of ribaldry and teasing. Unfortunately, no examples of these survive, but you can get a flavor from an epithalamium, a poem written in honor of a wedding, by Catullus, in which the poet urges the groom to give up his smooth boys now that he is about to be married, and advises the bride to deny her husband nothing (a common euphemism for oral sex in Latin) lest he start to seek his pleasures elsewhere. Obscenity was also an important part of festivals such as the ludi florales, the games of Flora, the goddess of spring. At the end of these games, prostitutes danced naked while the crowd shouted obscenities to ensure the fertility of the coming season. Obscene words were thought to be magical, with the power to affect the world. If you wanted a marriage to produce children, or spring to come with healthy crops and young animals, nuda verba could help to bring it about.
Rome did not just associate the genitalia with fertility, however. The penis was also a symbol of threatening power. As we have seen, Roman culture thought of sex in terms of domination—the active male penetrates “lesser” creatures, whether women, boys, or passive men, defining himself as a “real man” and as a citizen. This power of the penis could be transferred to different areas. Bullae, the necklaces containing phallus-shaped fascini, were thought to shield their wearers from the evil eye—they had what is called apotropaic (from the Greek meaning “to ward off”) power. Songs containing obscenities could, in the right context, also protect people from evil forces. They were sung when someone’s good fortune was likely to attract invidia, envy or ill will. They offered protection in two ways—the obscenities themselves contained the power to ward off evil, and the songs’ mockery took their subjects down a peg or two, to a level where they no longer invited invidia. Victorious generals were serenaded with fescennine songs—their moment of triumph was also a moment of great weakness. When Julius Caesar returned to Rome in 46 BC, for example, he was publicly celebrated for vanquishing the Gauls and publicly mocked for being the cinaedus of Nicomedes, king of Bithynia, many years earlier. One verse ran:
All the Gauls did Caesar vanquish, Nicomedes vanquished him;
Lo! now Caesar rides in triumph, victor over all the Gauls,
Nicomedes does not triumph, who subdued the conqueror.
Some verses were even more specific, calling Nicomedes Caesar’s pedicator (butt fucker). The obscenity and mockery of these verses were thought to protect Caesar at this vulnerable moment when hundreds, even thousands of people might be watching him with envy.
Obscene words were also involved in Roman cursing. Today cursing is often used to mean obscene language (does the government still have “good reason to regulate cursing and nudity on broadcast television?” the New York Times asked recently). But curse originally had a much narrower definition, referring to language that wished ill on someone and called on a deity to make it happen. In English, our most familiar curses are of the form “(May) God damn you!” and “Go to hell!” Words such as fuck are curses in the loose sense of the term, but “Fuck you!” might be considered a curse according to its narrower meaning as well. As Lenny Bruce supposedly noted, it makes little sense to tell someone off in this way: “What’s the worst thing you can say to anybody? ‘Fuck you, Mister.’ It’s really weird, because if I really wanted to hurt you I should say ‘Unfuck you, Mister.’ Because ‘Fuck you’ is really nice!” Why wish something pleasurable on the person you are trying verbally to abuse? Some theories hold that “Fuck you!” is equivalent to “Go fuck yourself!” and that the impossibility furnishes the insult. It takes two to have sex, masturbation isn’t as fun—so there! Other theories hold that the phrase is a threat: “(I’ll) fuck you,” our equivalent to irrumabo vos. The phras
e makes the most sense, however, when considered as a curse formula, with fuck simply replacing the damn in “Damn you!” A powerfully taboo body-related word substitutes for the weakly taboo religious one so that the curse can retain its impact.
Roman curses were much more elaborate and ritualistic. They were scratched on thin pieces of lead and tin, tightly folded up, pierced with a nail, and cast into wells or tombs so that they could reach the gods of the underworld, whose aid they invoked. They were called defixiones—binding spells—because they were supposed to restrain or bind the person mentioned in the curse. A typical example comes from a tablet near Rome:
Malchio son/slave of Nikon: his eyes, hands, fingers, arms, nails, hair, head, feet, thigh, belly, buttocks, navel, chest, nipples, neck, mouth, cheeks, teeth, lips, chin, eyes, forehead, eyebrows, shoulder-blades, shoulders, sinews, guts, marrow [?], belly, cock [mentula], leg, trade, income, health, I do curse [“bind,” deficio] in this tablet.
Whatever Malchio had done, it made somebody really angry. Bind at first might seem an ineffectual verb with which to curse, but the idea is that such restraint renders powerless the things bound. Gladiators and charioteers, thieves, and unfaithful partners of both sexes were common targets of defixiones. On the back of Malchio’s tablet there is a curse directed at Rufa Publica (Rufa the “public woman,” the prostitute) that binds her body parts in a similar fashion, including her nipples (mamillae) and cunnus. Perhaps Rufa and Malchio had gotten a thing going and her cuckolded lover cursed them both. Or perhaps the curser simply wanted to save some money, gratifying two unrelated grudges with one curse tablet. In any case, the use of obscene words in defixiones seems to have had no particular significance for the working of the curse. A word such as mentula was employed simply as the vox propria, the most direct word for a thing, on a par with dentes (teeth) or pedes (feet). The concept of cursing, though, is closely connected to obscenity. The defixiones were, like some Roman obscenitas, a religious language—they called on the gods to effect the curser’s wishes. In modern English, cursing has mostly lost its religious implications, and its meaning has changed to indicate the taboo words for body parts and actions that were a feature of Latin cursing but were not of its essence.
How We Recognize Latin Obscenity
How can we be sure that the words we’ve been talking about are actually obscene? Latin is a dead language. No one has a firsthand sense of what was sayable and what wasn’t. How do scholars know, for example, that cunnus was a very, very bad word, while meio was not obscene at all?
The first tool linguists use is the hierarchy of genres. Latin literature observes a strict linguistic decorum, with certain kinds of words considered appropriate for particular genres. From most salacious to least, the scale goes:
1. Graffito and epigram
2. Satire
3. Oratory and elegy
4. Epic
The most taboo words are found in the graffiti that were scratched everywhere in the Roman Empire—inside and outside houses, on columns in the Forum, in the public latrines, on gravestones, on sling bullets fired at enemies. If Pompeii is representative, and scholars generally agree that it is, most Roman cities would have been covered in scrawl. Occasionally the graffiti “artists” themselves took notice of this abundance, as one did in the amphitheater in Rome: “Oh wall, I am amazed that you have not fallen down since you support the loathsome scribblings of so many writers.” Walls were often the most convenient place to put any “loathsome scribblings” you might want to get off your chest. Romans didn’t have paper; vellum, made of animal skin, was extremely expensive; and wax tablets were neither permanent nor always very handy. Merchants wrote their prices on the walls of their shop and figured sums there. Advertisements for goods and services—including those offered by prostitutes—were inscribed on buildings across Pompeii. Election notices can also still be seen there, in which various groups of tradesmen recommended various candidates for office: “The goldsmiths unanimously urge the election of Gaius Cuspius Pansa as aedile.”* Such notices were so ubiquitous that they attracted their share of parody: “Dickhead recommends Lollius” (Lollius… verpus rogat).
Most graffiti are more personal, from the sweet and touching—marriage and birth announcements—to the shocking, some of which we’ve already seen. (And sometimes it’s both, as in this wish for a happy marriage: “Eulale, may you enjoy good health with your wife Vera and good fucking.”) Since the surviving graffiti are so florid in their obscenity, scholars have generally assumed that they were written by schoolboys and “the lower classes,” reasoning that only the immature or the vulgar would descend to the level of “Crescens’s member is hard—and enormous.” But scholars who study ancient literacy argue that only about 20 percent of the population could read and write, with a somewhat larger percentage possessing rudimentary reading ability. In reality, it must have been the pretty well-educated bragging that “I fucked here.”
Epigrams are on a par with graffiti in terms of the language they use. These are short, witty poems that express a single thought or observation. Catullus wrote some, and many were collected into the Priapea, but Martial is the acknowledged Roman master of the genre. Martial’s twelve books of epigrams depict Roman society, high and low, in all its variety—what happened at dinner parties, in fancy villas, in the public latrines, between husbands and wives, or between prostitutes and clients.
Although he was a Roman citizen, Martial was born in the provinces, in Spain, far from the centers of literary life and political power. His poems were his entrée into Roman high society—he had emperors for his patrons and was made an eques, a knight, part of the aristocracy. But using poetry as a means of personal advancement could have unintended, unpleasant consequences, especially for someone as attuned to the nuances of social hierarchy as Martial. Poets couldn’t support themselves by the stylus alone. Booksellers took most of the profits from their works, so they relied on patrons to survive.
The patron-client relationship was widespread and quite formalized in ancient Rome. Most Roman citizens were either patrons or clients, and some were both, to different people. Every morning clients went to their patron’s house for salutatio, the calling hour. The patron would distribute money (sportula, “the dole”), give legal advice, and inquire about any problems his clients were having—whether they needed money for a dowry, were having trouble selling their grain, had a sick mother, and so on. In return, clients owed their patrons obsequium, submission. (This gives us our word obsequious, referring to an overly fawning servility, which goes to the root of the problem with clientship.) They had to support their patrons politically, accompany them on walks around town, and generally be at their beck and call.
This subservient status rankled Martial. Being a client was a passive position, and in a society that equated manliness with action, self-assertion, and domination of others, no man wanted to be passive. It also affected Martial’s writing, setting up a dichotomy between his poetry and his personal life. Martial knew well that his epigrams “can’t please without a cock” (non possunt sine mentula placere)—that people liked them because they were racy, daring, and used obscene language. But as a client, he had to present at least a plausible fiction of being an honest, virtuous man, hence his continual protestations that “my little book doesn’t have my morals” (mores non habet hic meos libellus) or “my page is wanton, but my life is virtuous” (lasciva est nobis pagina, vita proba).
Writers had a license to use bad language in epigrams, which were meant to reveal the often unlovely truth about people and things and so needed to employ the plainest words possible. As Martial says: “A lascivious truth of words, that is the language of epigram” (lascivam verborum veritatem, id est epigrammaton linguam). It is hard to translate this properly—the Latin implies something like “the truth found in lascivious words,” alluding to their ability to expose what people most try to hide.
A poem from the Priapea makes it even clearer what kind of language
is appropriate for epigrams:
May I die, Priapus, if I am not ashamed to use obscene [obscenis] and improper [improbis] words. But when you, a god without shame, display your balls to me in all openness, I must call a cunt a “cunt” and a cock a “cock.”
Epigrams can also be fun, frivolous poems, full of dirty jokes and mock insults. Whether their purpose is recreation or moral improvement, their language is bad. If a word is found in epigrams and graffiti and nowhere else, we can be pretty sure that it was considered obscene by the Romans.
If a word appears in satires, it might be bad, but it is most likely not one of the primary obscenities.* Satires too had a mandate to reveal the truth about the world (which is, usually, that the vast majority of the population is corrupt, sexually perverse, or neglectful of the gods—never that people are good, law-abiding, and ready to help one another). Satires were supposed to use more decorous language than epigrams, however. We can assume, then, that a word such as criso (what a woman does during sex), which appears in the works of the satirists Juvenal and Persius, was bad but not deeply offensive, or the authors would have chosen something more befitting the dignity of their genre.