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TTO ILLUSTRATE THE CLAIM THAT PROSPERITY IS OFTEN UNDESERVED, and that a morally depraved person can attain high station, Seneca gives his addressee Aebutius Liberalis the intentionally unpleasant example of Mamercus Scaurus {Beruf. 4.31.3):
quid? tu, cum Mamercum Scaurum consulem /aceres, ignorabas ancHlarum ilium suarum menstruum ore hiante exceptare? numquid enim ipse dissimulabat? numquid purus videri volebat?
Well? When you were helping to make Mamercus Scaurus consul,1 were you not aware that he used to swallow up the menstrual blood of his slave girls, openmouthed? He himself didn't try to hide it, did he? He didn't even want to seem pure, did he?
A few years later at most,2 Seneca makes the same charge against another recently deceased and otherwise unknown person {Epist. 87.16):
nuper Natalis,3 tarn inprobae linguae quam inpurae, in cuius ore feminae purgabantur, et multorum heres fuit et multos habuit heredes.
Recently Natalis, whose tongue was as insolent as it was soiled, in whose mouth women would cleanse themselves, was heir to many and left many heirs.
Seneca's remarks are among the very few recorded Roman references to menstruation outside medical or magical contexts,4 although he is not the first to connect it with degrading sexual experiences.5 Recent commentators have treated such allusions as documents of actual practice,6 perhaps because various other paraphilias are indicated in ancient Rome: classical sources undoubtedly furnish precedents for some erotic phenomena which have only recendy received specific names.7 Yet there is a risk that scholars of the present age, in which the documentation of sexual fetishes proliferates, will grasp ancient precedents for these behaviours too readily by taking evidence out of context. This short note presents Scaurus' attraction to menses or "menophilia" as a test case in the interpretation of ancient sexual behaviours.8 I shall argue that there is no reliable evidence of menophilia in antiquity, and that Seneca's remarks belong in the tradition of political invective, representing either his own hostility or that of an earlier source. In the case of Scaurus they may, however, mask a form of medical treatment with some bearing upon the place of menstruation in Roman medical history.
Seneca the Younger's second illustration of Scaurus' moral turpitude, at Ben. 4.31.4, is far more plausible, and less damning, than the first....