The Anatomy of Melancholy

If you wish, see their catalogue in that same Bale. “Girls,” he says, “could not sleep in their beds because of the necromantic friars.” If such things occurred among vowed religious, monks and saints—those consubstantial beings, forsooth—what would you suspect went on in the marketplace or at court, among nobles or in brothels? What foulness, what filth would be absent?

Meanwhile I pass over those shameful practices of the monks, unfit even to be mentioned: their masturbations—Rodrigo de Castro calls them “masturbators”—and those who whip one another to arouse sexual desire; male prostitutes, women who take the receptive role, flute girls, and those lustful little women, the tribades, who rub themselves against one another and, besides eunuchs, use artificial penises to satisfy their desire.

Indeed, more astonishing still, not long ago in Constantinople a woman fell desperately in love with another woman. She dared something scarcely credible: changing her clothes and passing herself off as a man, she opened negotiations for marriage and was soon married. But consult the author himself, Busbecq.

I pass over those Egyptian embalmers who have intercourse with the bodies of beautiful women, and the insane lust of people who even fall in love with statues and images. The story of Pygmalion in Ovid is well known, as is that of Mundus and Paulina in Hegesippus’s Jewish War, book 2, chapter 4.

Pontius, a legate of Gaius Caesar—whom I suspect to be the man who crucified Christ—was so inflamed with lust for pictures of Atalanta and Helen, Pliny reports in book 35, chapter 3, that he wished to take them away, had the nature of the plaster permitted it. Another man fell in love with a statue of Good Fortune—Aelian, book 9, chapter 37—and another with the Good Goddess. No part is left free of disgrace.

“Abductions for sexual violation,” as that author says, “and not even the mouth is exempt from lust.” Elagabalus received lust through every opening of his body, according to Lampridius’s Life of him.

A certain Hostius had mirrors made and arranged so that, while being penetrated by a man, he could face away and see every movement of his stallion in the mirror, delighting in the falsely magnified size of the man’s penis as though it were real. At the same time he submitted to a man and a woman—foul and abominable even to describe.

So what Gryllus charged against Ulysses in Plutarch may well be true: “Down to this day, among us no male has loved a male, nor female a female, as many memorable and celebrated men have done among you. To leave the common people aside, Hercules deserted his friends while pursuing a beardless companion,” and so forth.