on her husband's 'horse'.") The word also occurs. In 14.203 Martial writes of a Spanish girl from Gādēs (Cádiz): ("She wiggles so sexily and itches for it so charmingly that she would have made a masturbator out of Hippolytus himself!") Hippolytus was famous in mythology for his chastity, and for refusing the advances of his stepmother, Phaedra. Etymology Lewis and Short suggest that the word may be derived from "to defile oneself with a hand", and this is the usual view, and supported ("with some hesitation") by J.N. Adams. Another view,D. Q. Adams (1985). however, is that it comes from * + ("to excite the penis"), assuming an otherwise unattested meaning of "penis" for ("male"). The supporters of this view cite another word (from ), which occurs once in Latin literature in Petronius (134.5), and which appears from the context to mean "beating the penis with a wand (to stimulate it)". It is argued that in this word, the element mās- may be the same as in . Yet another proposed etymology is that the element masturb- derives from a Proto-Indo-European root *mostrgh- meaning "brain, marrow", and hence "semen". Synonyms and euphemisms Martial (9.41) criticises a Roman gentleman for masturbating, using the phrase: ("you use your left hand as a concubine and your hand serves Venus as your girlfriend") The hand used for masturbating by the Romans was evidently the left one, as Martial 11.73 confirms. (Compare also the fragment of the satirist Lucilius quoted above in the section on .) In another poem (11.22) Martial advises a friend: ("do at least cease from troubling your groins with copulating hand"). He continues: ("In smooth-skinned boys this (i.e their hand) sins more than their cock, and their fingers hasten the process of turning them into a man.") This apparently dates back to a belief of Aristotle that vigorous sexual activity caused a boy's voice to turn rapidly into that of a man. In another poem (2.43), however, Martial admits that he himself for want of a sexual partner sometimes resorts to the practice: ("but as for me, my hand has to serve instead of Ganymede"). In another (11.46), addressed to a man who finds it difficult in middle age to get an erection, Martial uses the word ("I shove" or "prod") to signify masturbation: ("and your shrivelled dick is prodded by your fingers until they get tired, but doesn't raise its