[Leica] Digitus Impudicus

[benmarks2005 at gmail.com (Benjamin Marks)]

Cecil Adams points out on the Straight Dope.com (
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a980904.html):

Now for the facts. The "one-finger salute," or at any rate sexual gestures
involving the middle finger, are thousands of years old. In *Gestures: Their
Origins and Distribution*, Desmond Morris and colleagues note that the 
*digitus
infamis* or *digitus impudicus* (infamous or indecent finger) is mentioned
several times in the literature of ancient Rome. Turning to our vast
classical library, we quickly turn up three references. Two are from the
epigrammatist Martial: "Laugh loudly, Sextillus, when someone calls you a
queen and put your middle finger out."

(The verse continues: "But you are no sodomite nor fornicator either,
Sextillus, nor is Vetustina's hot mouth your fancy." Martial, and Roman
poets in general, could be pretty out there, subject-matter-wise. Another
verse begins: "You love to be sodomized, Papylus . . .")

In the other reference Martial writes that a certain party "points a finger,
an indecent one, at" some other people. The historian Suetonius, writing
about Augustus Caesar, says the emperor "expelled [the entertainer] Pylades
. . . because when a spectator started to hiss, he called the attention of
the whole audience to him with an obscene movement of his middle finger."
Morris also claims that the mad emperor Caligula, as an insult, would extend
his middle finger for supplicants to kiss.

It's not known whether one displayed the *digitus infamis* in the same
manner that we (well, you) flip the bird today. In another of his books
Morris describes a variety of sexual insults involving the middle finger,
such as the "middle-finger down prod," the "middle-finger erect," etc., all
of which are different from the classic middle-finger jerk. But let's not
quibble. The point is, the middle-finger/phallus equation goes back way
before the *Titanic*, the Battle of Agincourt, or probably even that time
Sextillus cut off Pylades with his chariot. And I ain't kidding yew.

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