attested in Latin as early as Cicero, and became the usual polite term. The relationship with the Greek verb (oureō), "to urinate", is not clear. In Classical Latin, however, the verb ūrīnārī meant "to dive into water", and was "a diver", "those who dive". Catullus (37) writes contemptuously of a certain Spaniard who was one of the lovers of his girlfriend Lesbia: ("You above all, one of the long-haired ones,son of rabbit-filled Celtiberia,Egnatius, made handsome by your dark beard,and your teeth brushed clean with Iberian piss.") Another word for urine, but less commonly used, was . This word relates to , "to wash". The Romans, innocent of soap, collected urine as a source of ammonia to use in laundering clothes. The early agricultural writer Cato, an advocate of cabbage, used this word when he wrote ( 156): ("Cabbage is good for the digestion and for the urine.") Etymology Meiere is an inherited Indo-European word. It relates to Sanskrit mehati, "urinates", Persian mīz, "urine", Lithuanian myža, "he/she urinates", Greek (omeikhein), "to urinate", which, taken together, point to an Indo-European *h3meiģh-. This IE root with a palatal ģh was formerly mixed up (e. g. in Pokorny's IEW) with another one with velar *gh meaning "mist" (Russian mgla), hence erroneous tentative overall translations like "to sprinkle" or "to wet" which still turn up sometimes. In the Romance languages Though mingere and meiere are the Classical Latin forms, meiāre seems to have been the popular form in Late Latin. This underlies Galician mexar, Portuguese mijar, and Spanish mear. *Pissiāre represents a borrowing from the Germanic languages, and appears elsewhere in the Romance territory, as in French pisser, Catalan pixar, Italian pisciare and Romanian a (se) pișa, along with English to piss. Latin words relating to prostitution Compared to the anatomical frankness of the Roman vocabulary about sexual acts and body parts, the Roman vocabulary relating to prostitution seems euphemistic and metaphorical. Prostitutes were called meretrīx, "earner", and lupa, "she-wolf"; a brothel was a lupānar; these words referred to the mercantile and perceived predatory activities of prostitutes. The Latin verb prōstō meant "to be up for sale" and prōstituō meant "to expose for public sale." The poet Juvenal (6.120-3) describes how the disgraced Empress Messalina used to enjoy playing the part of a prostitute in a brothel: sed nigrum flāvō crīnem abscondente galērōintrāvit calidum veterī centōne lupānaret cellam vacuam atque suam; tunc nūda papillīsprōstitit aurātīs