{"collection":"Classics","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/cla/priap/prp14.htm","path":"cla/priap/prp14.htm","source_url":"https://sacred-texts.com/cla/priap/prp14.htm","text":"Commisso mihi non satis modestas\n quicumque attulerit manus agello,\n is me sentiet esse non spadonem.\n dicat forsitan haec sibi ipse: 'nemo\n hic inter frutices loco remoto\n percisum sciet esse me', sed errat:\n magnis testibus ista res agetur.\nCharged to my charge the fieldlet who shall dare\n With hand not modest anywise molest,\n Me fox no eunuch he shall know and feet.\n Here in a distant place the hurst amid\n He peradventure to himself shall say--\n 'None! saw me so misused.' But he is wrong:\n These huge attestors shall the cause maintain.\nHe who shall plunder with dishonest hand the little field committed to my charge, shall feel me to be no eunuch[1] in this lonely place among the bushes. Here, perhaps, he will say this to himself, 'None will know that I have been thrust through.'[2] He will be mistaken; that cause will be sustained by 'weighty' witnesses![3]\n[1. Martial and Juvenal have many references to eunuchism and the use to which the Roman ladies put these castratos, who were of various kinds: castrati (castare, meaning to cut oft)--those who had lost both penis and testicles; spadones (either spata, a Gallic word meaning a razor, or Spada, a Persian village where the operation of eunuchism is performed)--those who still retained the penis; thlibiae (from the Greek meaning to rub with hemlock, etc.)--those whose testicles had been extracted by compression; thliasiae (from the Greek meaning to crush); cremaster (so called from the destruction of the muscle, cremaster, by which the testicle is suspended or drawn up or compressed in the act of coition); and bagoas. The subject scarcely calls for extended notice in this work, but I would refer those interested in the subject to The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, translated by Sir Richard F. Burton.\n2. Praecidere (literally meaning to cut off). Here means to cut through the bowels. It has a similar meaning in Juvenal--'to run against yesterday's supper'. Like expressions are billas dividere, 'to divide the bowels', and cacare mentulam, 'to defile the mentule with ordure'.\n3. In the original, magnis testibus, meaning trustworthy witness; and, by a play upon words, large testicles.]","title":"14. Charged to my charge the fieldlet who shall dare","type":"page"}