These drunk people in painted masks. Why did he look at them, what he wants to see, see under masks? Wouldn't it be better to give up thinking and get into a full-flowing human river, bubbling on narrow city streets and spilling wide, on the outskirts, like a spring Tiber during floods?
Wouldn't it be better to boldly approach a young freed woman with an indiscreet offer? Or embarrass the venerable matron with a cheeky look? And then brag about your courage in front of the Victorinus or Fuscianus? Because Baebius Longus and another friend of the plebeians Calenus, already boasted wins over women. Not over slaves, with which you can do anything, but over the free Romans.
A 14-year-old boy entering adulthood. Isn't that why he should celebrate such an important event? Adulthood was not only to change one set of clothes for another, to switch from a white toga with a red stripe to a fully white one. Adulthood was the ability to do things that were previously forbidden, it was to deny all prohibitions.
He thought like this, and suddenly his thoughts were embarrassing. The heady feeling of freedom, the permission of anything to the soul, gave courage to the depths of the heart, led to recklessness. He and Antiochus went further to the Aventine hill, where there was a temple of the goddess of fertility Ceres. That's where the sanctuary of Liber and Libera was.
Narrow streets, high bulk of brick insulae, from the entrance to which carries the smells of cooking food, urine and sewage. The walls of the houses were painted with all sorts of words, for the most part obscene, to which everyone was accustomed here. “Semporius yesterday inserted Sext's widow,” “Nicanor beats Checher's wife,” “Flor is a real stallion; he is not enough for five women,” “Girls, I traded you for men's ass.”
This was not the first time Marcus has read such coarse inscriptions coming from the depths of people's self-awareness. Of course, the simplicity of street humor was not in any comparison with the exquisite jokes of lawyers, philosophers or rhetoricians. She was closer to the Atellan farce and the mime, to the actors who played them, for example, to the well-known Marullus. Nevertheless, Marcus was never confused by the frank images inspired by Eros, crammed defiantly with huge phalluses.