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Shoes and Sex
Ovid is the expert in seduction. Here is some of his advice:
When she's on her chaise-longue, make haste to find a footstool
for those dainty feet of hers, help her on a off with her slippers
(et tenero soleam deme vel adde pedi.)
Such attentions please.
Perhaps Vitellius' father had read Ovid and was treating Messalina accordingly. Perhaps if Propertius had paid Cynthia that kind of attention, rather than coming early in the morning to check up whether she had been sleeping alone, he would have fared better. As it was, he got a telling-off and a brush-off:
dixit, et opposita propellens suavia dextra
prosilit in laxa nixa pedem solea.
She sprang, and with a hand thrust out to stay
my kisses, sped on slippered feet away.
What this translation does not bring out is laxa solea. So angry was Cynthia with her suspicious lover that she did not wait to do her sandal straps up. As for advice to the lady, Ovid again is our guide (Ars Amatoria 3.271). If her feet are unsightly, then sandals are not at all the thing. She must cover her feet in alutae, shoes with uppers of a soft leather treated with alum. Ovid recommends that the leather be white:
pes malus in nivea semper celatur aluta.
If the love-affair goes wrong - or ends in marriage - then the solea will come in handy for the wife or wronged mistress to beat her man with. In Terence's Eunuch the soldier Thraso, who has earlier gone so far as to attack the house of Thais, finally resolves to surrender to her, as did Hercules to Omphale. The unsympathetic parasite Gnatho comments:
utinam tib commitigari videam sandalio caput.
I hope I'll see her take a slipper to soften your head.
The learned Dr Smith in his Dictionary of Antiquities, is clear in his own mind about married life in Roman times:
In domestic life the sandal commonly worn by females was often used to chastise a husband and bring him into subjection. (My emphasis)
Davus told the satirist Persius what his mistress would do to him when he told her he was giving her up:
But Davus, do you think she'll cry when I leave her?
Nonsense, my boy! She'll give you a whacking with her red slipper.
Juvenal knows what a wife can do, with the help of magic:
Here comes a pedlar of magic spells and Thessalian philtres.
With these any wife can so befuddle her husband's wits
that he'll let her slipper his backside.
quibus valet mentem vexare mariti
et solea pulsare nates. (Satire 6.612)