Читать книгу Love Potions Through the Ages: A Study of Amatory Devices and Mores онлайн

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Thus fetter’d as I lay, “This, madam,” said I, “is not the way to rid you of your ague.”

“I grant it,” answer’d Psyche, “but I have a Dose at hand will infallibly do it” and therefore brought me a lusty bowl of satyricon and so merrily ran over the wonderful effects of it, that I had well-nigh suck’d it all off; but because Ascyltos had slighted her courtship, she finding his back toward her, threw the bottom of it on him.

Ascyltos perceiving the chat was at an end, “Am not I worthy,” said he, “to get a sup?” And Psyche fearing my laughter might discover her, clapped her hands, and told him, “Young man, I made you an offer of it, but your friend here has drunk it all out.”

“Is it so,” quoth Quartilla, smiling very agreeably, “and has Encolpius gugg’d it all down?” At last also even Gito laught for company, at what time the young wench flung her arms about his neck, and meeting no resistance, half smother’d him with kisses.

A peculiar situation in which erotic provocation or inducement to passion is conditioned by the concept of social prestige, or, in the contemporary idiom, status, is exemplified in a later passage in Petronius’ Satyricon: