women presumed to be prostitutes performing sex acts may show the breasts covered by a strophium even when the rest of the body is naked. In the real world as described in literature, prostitutes sometimes displayed themselves naked at the entrance to their brothel cubicles, or wore see-through silk garments; slaves for sale were often displayed naked to allow buyers to inspect them for defects, and to symbolize that they lacked the right to control their own body. As Seneca the Elder described a woman for sale: Naked she stood on the shore, at the pleasure of the purchaser; every part of her body was examined and felt. Would you hear the result of the sale? The pirate sold; the pimp bought, that he might employ her as a prostitute. The display of the female body made it vulnerable. Varro said sight was the greatest of the senses, because while the others were limited by proximity, sight could penetrate even to the stars; he thought the Latin word for "sight, gaze", visus, was etymologically related to vis, "force, power". But the connection between visus and vis, he said, also implied the potential for violation, just as Actaeon gazing on the naked Diana violated the goddess. The completely nude female body as portrayed in sculpture was thought to embody a universal concept of Venus, whose counterpart Aphrodite is the goddess most often depicted as a nude in Greek art. Female genitals The "basic obscenity" for the female genitalia is cunnus, "cunt", though perhaps not as strongly offensive as the English. Martial uses the word more than thirty times, Catullus once, and Horace thrice only in his early work; it also appears in the Priapea and graffiti. One of the slang words women used for their genitals was porcus, "pig", particularly when mature women spoke of girls. Varro connects this usage of the word to the sacrifice of a pig to the goddess Ceres in preliminary wedding rites. Metaphors of fields, gardens, and meadows are common, as is the image of the masculine "plough" in the feminine "furrow". Other metaphors include cave, ditch, pit, bag, vessel, door, hearth, oven, and altar. Although women's genitals appear often in invective and satiric verse as objects of disgust, they are rarely referred to in Latin love elegy. Ovid, the most heterosexual of the classic love poets, is the only one to refer to giving a