the Republican period, a Lex Cornelia prohibited various kinds of mutilation, including castration (Two millennia later, in 1640, the poet Salvatore Rosa would write in La Musica, “Fine Cornelia law, where hast thou gone / Now that the whole of Norcia seems not enough / For the castration of boys?”). Despite these prohibitions, some Romans kept beautiful male slaves as deliciae or delicati ("toys, delights") who were sometimes castrated in an effort to preserve the androgynous looks of their youth. The emperor Nero had his freedman Sporus castrated, and married him in a public ceremony. By the end of the 1st century AD, bans against castration had been enacted by the emperors Domitian and Nerva in the face of a burgeoning trade in eunuch slaves. Sometime between 128 and 132 AD, Hadrian seems to have temporarily banned circumcision, on pain of death. Antoninus Pius exempted Jews from the ban, as well as Egyptian priests, and Origen says that in his time only Jews were permitted to practice circumcision. Legislation under Constantine, the first Christian emperor, freed any slave who was subjected to circumcision; in 339 AD, circumcising a slave became punishable by death. A medical procedure known as epispasm, which consisted of both surgical and non-surgical methods, existed in ancient Rome and Greece to restore the foreskin and cover the glans "for the sake of decorum". Both were described in detail by the Greek physician Aulus Cornelius Celsus in his comprehensive encyclopedic work De Medicina, written during the reign of Tiberius (14-37 CE). The surgical method involved freeing the skin covering the penis by dissection, and then pulling it forward over the glans; he also described a simpler surgical technique used on men whose prepuce is naturally insufficient to cover their glans. The second approach was non-surgical: a restoration device which consisted of a special weight made of bronze, copper, or leather, was affixed to the penis, pulling its skin downward. Over time a new foreskin was generated, or a short prepuce was lengthened, by means of tissue expansion; Martial also mentioned the restoration device in Epigrammaton (Book 7:35). Hellenized or Romanized Jews resorted to epispasm to better integrate into the Greco-Roman society, and also to make themselves less conspicuous at the baths or during athletics. Of these, some had themselves circumcised again later. Regulating semen Too-frequent ejaculation was thought to weaken men. Greek medical theories based on the classical