Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/04/06/the-ancient-roman-poem-so-explicit-it-wasnt-published-until-the-20th-century.html
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Catullus is always a Latin class favourite for teenagers. Vicious insults about napkin-stealers and grinning fools who use urine to brush their teeth are balanced by implorations to the lovely Lesbia (what more pithy way to express the angst of unrequited love than “I hate and I love”?)
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I guess it’s true what they say: Rome wasn’t fucked in a day.
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It’s amusing to realize there’s a Latin phrase for “face-fuck”.
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A book that I read about Roman sexual mores explained that the face-fucking part is really the crux of this one. Summarizing briefly, Romans – it has been claimed – didn’t stress the gay/straight distinction we might make as much as the fucker/fuckee distinction, where “fucker” was typically the penetrating partner, and “fuckee” was the person getting penetrated. Being the fucker was good if you were a man, because it meant you were strong and virile and in-charge, whereas being the fuckee was bad, because it meant you were submissive and weak and getting used. Generally speaking, the Romans thought that manly men ought to be fucking women, but you didn’t lose your Man Card just for banging a guy as long as you were the dominant partner. If word got out that you were the submissive – as they saw it – partner, however, then your virtus – your reputation for Roman manly virtue – was pretty much shot (*).
Next up was the role of the mouth, which for the Romans was the seat of oratory, articulacy, expressiveness etc., basically everything that made you a person of influence and importance and honor in society. Having someone else’s lower bits in or next to your mouth was a no-no, and extremely demeaning (**).
Which made irrumatio (‘mouth fucking’) about the most shaming thing you could do to another man, because it not only made them the fuckee (weak, submissive) but it also polluted their all-important mouth. Catullus is really pulling out the big guns here. That threat carries much more weight than his promise to simply fuck someone up the ass.
(*) There were exceptions. Julius Caesar seems to have survived the Queen of Bithynia story with his prestige undamaged, but maybe only Caesar could have survived that one.
(**) This has the implications you might imagine for cunnilingus. A man kneeling down to pleasure a woman was bad enough, but using his tongue to do it? Disgraceful. Poor Roman ladies. At least the wealthier ones could summon a slave to do the job, because slaves had no honor to lose.
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From Wiikpedia
The first line, Pēdīcābo ego vōs et irrumābō (“I will sodomize and face-fuck you”), sometimes used as a title, has been called “one of the filthiest expressions ever written in Latin—or in any other language”.[2]
The ciitation is to the Telegraph which continues the tradition of encouraging vulgariians to learn latin, so that they might read pornography.
“Irrumabo vos et pedicabo vos,” wrote Mr Lowe, before kindly adding, “It’s Catullus, not very polite.”
Too right, it’s not polite; in fact it’s so rude that the English translation still can’t be printed in a family newspaper without using dashes. For those of a sensitive disposition, turn away now. Even with dashes, it’s pretty graphic stuff – “I will b----- you and face-f— you.”
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Seeing the macrons in your quote led to an irresistible urge to stand up and declaim that filthy stuff aloud in the correct formal metre.
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Romans, Russians (given what some of their ‘soldiers’ are doing to each other in Ukraine and their attitudes to it).
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That comes from Russian prison culture.
The only interactions allowed between higher-caste prisoners and roosters are purchasing sexual services from them, raping them (my personal sources say that this was completely acceptable up until approximately 2010, but that currently, although it won’t make you a rooster, it is considered to be a minor infraction with a material fine attached to it), and beating them up—but only with kicks or using improvised weapons, as even the touch of a punch is still considered taboo. It might seem bizarre that a man who rapes another man is not seen as impure, but his victim is—but it harks back to a sense of sexual dominance found in prison cultures and reactionary machismo worldwide.
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They thought it was too important to leave as a phrase: they had a single word for it. Irrumare: to fuck someone in the face.
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Actually, it was published well before the 20th century. It just was never published in English until then. The idea was, by the time you had enough Latin to translate the first line, you were probably old enough to deal with the first line. I remember when I was first learning Latin, coming across the Loeb edition, and thinking “why aren’t these lines translated?”
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From a review of *Expurgating the Classics"
The volume fittingly concludes with two chapters on classical collections, Philip Lawton’s “For the gentleman and the scholar: sexual and scatological references in the Loeb Classical Library” and Robert Crowe’s “How to fillet a Penguin.” Lawton provides an overview of the aims of and intended audience for the Loeb series of facing-page translations of Greek and Latin texts, as well as a discussion of translation strategies for offensive material that worked against making the text accessible (obfuscation, excision and non-translation, and retranslation or inserting a translation in a language other than English). He concludes that these strategies, used in the first third of the twentieth century, made portions of translations less than accessible to all but the classically educated (male). Crowe’s topic is Paul Turner’s translation of Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe , published in the Penguin Classics series in 1956, and in a revised, unexpurgated, version in 1968, under the successive editorships of E.V. Rieu and Betty Radice, before and after Penguin’s success in the 1960 Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscenity trial. Crowe does an excellent job of discussing how the legal and social climate can influence translation of texts involving homosexuality or explicit sex.
https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2013/2013.10.08/
The kindle excerpt is fascinating, but the publisher wants 50 bucks for it.
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“people who write on shithouse walls/
should roll their shit in little balls/
people who read these lines of wit/
should eat those little balls of shit.”
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irrumo < in + ruma + -ō
ruma was “an udder, a teat”, so the etymology of irrumo te was basically “make you suck something”.
As opposed to fello, which was “to suck”, thus fellatio (“an act of sucking”).
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Roy Cohn’s; all the way down.
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Had recently been to some galleries in London, looking at all the old paintings from wayyy back. Noticing the themes and such… the women with bared breasts (for no reason it seems other than to show b00bies… no baby Jesus or cherubs suckling… you look and say… well, that isn’t a thing that is done THESE days.
And I got to thinking - OMG if back in the day, what if it was THE thing to paint people in the most vulgar ways… like… airing it out, or various legumes inserted in places - maybe those DO exists somewhere but kept away from sensitive eyes?
If there were poems with such vulgarity (to then and today’s standards)… where are the similar paintings?
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