A little poem complaining at the grossness of sex and the dejection that can follow it is credibly ascribed to Gaius Petronius Arbiter, sometime favourite of the aesthete-Emperor Nero. It is better, says the poem, to stick to kissing. Hear this curious piece, which shares something of the outlook of the decadents of the late nineteenth century, and follow in English, here.
The illustration is an artist’s impression Petronius’s final moments as he died by an elaborate suicide after his fall from grace, in an illustration from Sienkiewicz’s novel, Quo Vadis?