Latin obscenity is the profane, indecent, or impolite vocabulary of Latin, and its uses. Words deemed obscene were described as (obscene, lewd, unfit for public use), or (improper, in poor taste, undignified). Documented obscenities occurred rarely in classical Latin literature, limited to certain types of writing such as epigrams, but they are commonly used in the graffiti written on the walls of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Among the documents of interest in this area is a letter written by Cicero in 45 BC (ad Fam. 9.22) to a friend called Paetus, in which he alludes to a number of obscene words without actually naming them. Apart from graffiti, the writers who used obscene words most were Catullus and Martial in their shorter poems. Another source is the anonymous Priapeia (see External links below), a collection of 95 epigrams supposedly written to adorn statues of the fertility god Priapus, whose wooden image was customarily set up to protect orchards against thieves. The earlier poems of Horace also contained some obscenities. However, the satirists Persius and Juvenal, although often describing obscene acts, did so without mentioning the obscene words. Medical, especially veterinary, texts also use certain anatomical words that, outside of their technical context, might have been considered obscene. Latin taboo words Cicero's letter ad Fam. 9.22 In a letter to one of his friends, written about 45 BC, Cicero discusses a number of obscenities in Latin. It appears that the friend, Lucius Papirius Paetus, (whose letters to Cicero have not been preserved) had used the word ("penis") in one of his letters. Cicero praises him for his forthrightness, which he says conforms to the teachings of the Stoic philosophers, but says that he himself prefers modesty (). In the letter Cicero alludes to a number of obscene words, without actually mentioning them. The words which he alludes to but avoids are: ("arsehole"), ("penis"), ("cunt"), ("clitoris"), and ("testicles"). He also objects to words which mean "to fuck", as well as to the Latin word "two" because for bilingual speakers it sounds like the Greek () ("he fucks or sodomises"), and also to two words for passing wind, and . He does not object to using the word , and says that , which in his day was obscene, was formerly just a euphemism meaning "tail". Degrees of obscenity There thus appear to have been various degrees of obscenity in Latin, with words for