Roman Eroticism -- dal "Dizionario di letteratura erotica" (Wedeck)

Speranza

Roman literature, particularly poetry, exults in the erotic theme. The variations of normal love, the passions between lesbians, the antics of homosexuals, the multiple perversions that the ingenuity and depravity of man have contrived, are all manifested in the written word, in the paean or anecdote, in the graffiti scrawled on the walls of ancient Pompeii and Herculaneum, in incidental but significant allusions in sober chronicles and moral denunciations.

There are occasional poems, sketches, appeals, pleas and lamentations in Nevio and the elegiac poets Properzio and Tibullo, in Catullus, Ovidio, Orazio, in Marziale, Persio, and Giovenale, in Ausonio, Claudiano, and Lussorio, Suetonio, the biographer of the Cesari, Plinio il Vecchio, the voluminous encyclopedist, Aulo Gellio, who gossips on life and letter, the orator Cicerone, the novelists Petronio and Apuleio, Plauto and Terenzio the comedy writers -- all touch on or highlight in some degree the infidelity of mistresses, the mercenary harlot, the desolation of rejection, the passons of kissing, the price of love, the naivete of cuckoldry, drunken orgies, promiscuity and jealousy, flirtations and seduction, modes of conquest, bawds and pimps and procuresses, houses of assignation, lechery and scatology, Priapus and the satyrs, reconciliations and unrequited love, marriage and misconduct.