The Romans had filthy minds, to put it mildly, and the people of medieval Europe had earthy senses of humor.
As a fan of smut, I’ve always been fond of medieval fabliaux -- short bawdy tales, typically in verse, popular throughout western Europe in the high middle ages. The genre started in France but spread to Germany and Italy, and Chaucer’s pilgrims also tell a few. As did Boccaccio. My medieval Italian is for shite, but his Decameron’s in prose and modern translations do fine for a pony. So for a lark, I once versified its smuttiest story, just to make it look more like a fabliau. And then forgot about it.
(The Decameron is quite topical, BTW: a party of aristocrats quarantine together for ten days (in their case, from the Black Plague) and tell each other stories to keep themselves amused. Sound familiar?)
Speaking of languages, I’m a serial language learner. Twenty or so years ago, I picked Latin as my next, just because. For better or worse, I have a habit, when I get to the point where I’m starting to read independently, of using poetry as practice texts -- to make it interesting. Sometimes, I translate poems that strike my fancy. For Latin, I mostly read Ovid, Catullus, and Martial, but I didn’t translate them much -- I mean, they’re popular for a reason, but that means they’ve been done so many times over the centuries. The smutty epigrams from the Priapea, however, caught my eye. Great stuff, and all but unknown. I translated about two dozen, all told, versifying half -- and forgot about them, too.
I’ve recently been going through my old files, seeing whether anything was worth revising or at least revisiting, and found both of these. As far as the priapic poems, the eight I posted were the best of the lot, or at least were the ones I’m not embarrassed to show in public. Alibech’s Service needed a little polish, mostly for voice, but otherwise was decent journeywork. And since the content of both fit SOL, here they are. I hope you enjoy them.