Priapeia

So long as thou snatchest nothing from me with audacious hand, thou mayst be chaster than Vesta herself. But, if thou dost, these belly-weapons of mine will so stretch thee that thou wilt be able to slip through thy own anus.

Girl, more meagre than dried grapes,[*]( This is reminiscent of an epigram by Catullus against Furius, in which he describes him as having a body more dried than horn by extreme poverty; adding, 'Sweat, saliva, mucus and nasal snivelling, all these are absent from thee. Add to this cleanliness the still greater cleanliness that thy buttocks are purer than a salt-cellar. Thou does not cack ten times in the whole of the year, and then it is harder than a bean or than pebbles, so that if thou rubbest and crumblest it in thy hands thou canst never dirty a finger.') more dusky-white than boxwood or unsullied wax; who makes the ants congregated on her body and members seem corpulent; whose bowels the Etruscan soothsayer could without opening see through the skin; who, like pumice, has no sap, insomuch as no one has seen her sputter; who, physicians think, has sand for blood, and in her veins sawdust--[this girl] is wont to come to me in the night, and approaches me, wan, attenuate and ghostlike, whilst I, as an insular iron-worker scrapes,[*]( Islands abound in metals, hence convicts in ancient times were transported to work on them.) seem to be rubbing in the horn of a lantern.[*]( Here used in a jocular comparison of the girl's parts with the horn of a lantern for hardness and dryness in coition.)

Of old, the Priapi enjoyed the Naiads and Dryads, and there was the wherewithal to cause the swollen vein of the God to droop. Now there is naught of this; moreover, I am so full of desire that I think the whole of the Nymphs have perished. 'Tis doubtless an unseemly thing to do, but lest I burst with the excessive tension [of my member], my hand, the sickle laid aside, shall become my mistress

At a sacrifice made to the God of Lechery, a girl was cheaply hired as sufficient for the wants of the common weal, who as many men she spent in a single night, dedicates to thee so many willow-wood pokers.[*]( In the original Latin verpa, meaning the virile member. So called from its similarity in shape to the instrument used in scouring furnace fires. The damsel laid on the altar of Priapus, as ex-votos, a quantity of wooden members equal in number to the men with whom she had had connection in a single night. This seems to have been a customary practice amongst the lower classes of women.Juvenal relates how the Empress Messalina was accustomed in disguise to visit a brothel at night, and borrowing her cell from Lycisca, one of the courtesans, to show such capability for the work that she exhausted all who cared to visit her, and returned to the palace in the early morning, still raging with unsatisfied lust. It is said that within twenty hours she surpassed the above-named courtesan by twenty-five 'rides'.)

Thou shalt be bardashed,[*]( Bardache, meaning a catamite. Italian bardascia, from the Arabic baradaj, a captive, a slave. The old English was ingle or yngle (a bardachio, a catamite, a boy kept for sodomy). In Latin Bulgarus means a Bulgarian or a heretic, from which our vulgar modern word 'bugger' is derived, as is the Italian bugiardo and the French bougre.) thief, for the first theft; and if twice caught, I will irrumate thee. But if thou shalt attempt a third theft, that thou mayst suffer penalties twain, I will both sodomise and irrumate thee.