: to suck The word originally had an innocent sense, meaning to suck the teat or to suck milk, but in classical times the sexual sense was predominant. The verb fellō and the nouns and (less often) the feminine are common in graffiti, and the first two also occur several times in Martial's epigrams. The practice was thought particularly degrading for a man, and Martial, mocking a certain masculine lesbian, writes (7.67): ("She does not suck cocks – she thinks this not masculine enough –but absolutely devours the middle parts of girls.") was generally used absolutely, without an object. A Pompeian wall inscription says ("Myrtis, you suck well"), and another says ("Romula does fellatio with her boyfriend here and everywhere"). leaves little trace in Romance languages, being replaced by ("to suck") and its derivatives. Though it is not represented by descendants, it is represented by learned borrowings such as the French fellation. and : to lick The verb ("I lick") was common in both sexual and non-sexual contexts. As a sexual term, it could have , , or as its object. Martial (3.96) writes: ("You lick my girlfriend, you don't fuck her;and you boast about it as if you were an adulterer and a fucker.But if I catch you, Gargilius, you'll shut up!") Its synonym was also sometimes used in a sexual sense. Martial (3.81) criticises a eunuch who presumed to have oral sex with women: ("That tongue of yours ought to be licking the middle parts of men (not women)") : to "peel" "to take the bark off", "peel" and "to take the husk off", "to skin, flay" are famously used in a sexual sense in two places in Latin literature by Catullus and Ausonius. It has been argued that the meaning is to pull back a man's foreskin, in order to masturbate him. Ausonius (Ep. 71), after mentioning various perversions (), says: ("Crispa, however, practices all the perversions in one body:she 'peels', she sucks, she puts it in either hole,lest she leave anything untried before she dies.") What seems to shock Ausonius is that Crispa actively enjoyed taking an active role in such practices rather than passively submitting to male desires as was the norm. The other sexual use of this word is in Catullus (57), who says in a moment of bitterness: ("Caelius, our Lesbia, that Lesbia,that one woman whom Catullusloved more than himself and all his