The case is different, from the first with the _Poets_. The _Satirists_ and _writers of Comedy_ it is true can only supply hints, and these are often quite unintelligible for later times, if Scholiasts and Commentators had not taken on them the task of explanation,—though again their statements must often be used with caution, as they are so apt to impute to earlier times the opinions of their own. But here also the field of these hints is very circumscribed, as they are only admissible so far as it is possible to extract from the subject-matter a ridiculous, satirical _motif_ (_versus iocosi_, _carmina plena ioci_,—jesting verses, songs full of jest, are demanded by the very personality of Priapus); and even then acquaintance with the fact alluded to in general terms is presupposed on the part of hearer and reader. We see from this how ill-considered is the contention of those who say that poets like _Horace_, _Juvenal_ or _Martial_, if they had been acquainted with the injurious consequences of sexual intercourse with Hetaerae, could hardly have failed to allude to them on occasion in _unequivocal_ terms. Hensler[4] excellently observed long ago:—“In our Century certainly no German poet says one word about it,—neither the dallying light-o’-love versifiers nor the serious poets. But from this to draw the conclusion,—_then_ Venereal disease did not exist among the people, _then_ it has never been seen in Germany this year, would make physicians and barber-surgeons smile!”
Then again consider the widely different character of the Peoples and their Languages. The flowery Asiatic and Hindoo was, to begin with, far enough removed from the spirit of Satire, and on all occasions preferred to have recourse to images that to us may well seem more than obscure. The Greek writers of Iambi (Satiric verses in the Iambic metre) are all but completely lost to us, while of the Comedians we possess only _Aristophanes_, in the interpretation of whom we are certainly not yet far enough advanced to make all his allusions plain to us. Above all, those who pronounce so dogmatically as to the existence of the Disease on the evidence of hints, appear to have hardly a notion of the condition in which the Lexicography of both Greek and Latin is,—a condition still in many respects deplorable.