To cause a woman to feel the venereal spasm by the play of the tongue on her clitoris and in her vagina was a taste much in vogue amongst the Greeks and Romans. Martial lashes it severely in several epigrams, that against Manneius being especially biting.
Manneius, the husband with his tongue, the adulterer with his mouth, is more polluted than the cheeks of the Suburan prostitutes. The obscene bawd, when she has seen him naked from a window in the Subura, closes her door against him and prefers to kiss his middle, rather than his face. But lately he used to wander in all the cavities of the coynte [with his tongue], and could tell with certainty and knowledge whether there was in the womb a boy or a girl. (Rejoice, ye coyntes! for now all is over.) He is not able to stiffen his swiving tongue, for, whilst he sticks glued in the teeming vulva, and hears the babes whimpering within, a filthy disease[1] paralyses this gluttonous member; and now he can neither be pure nor impure.
Again he says, 'Zoilus, an evil star has suddenly struck your tongue, whilst you were licking. Certes, Zoilus, you will futter now.'
He also speaks of the foul breath of a coynte-licker, and in his epigram on Philaenis we read, 'She does not suck [men]--thinking this