the Greeks, Homer scarcely knew the kiss, and later poets mentioned it only rarely.
When we come to Rome, the kiss has a more varied practice. There was the religious kiss, similar to Job's: persons were treated as atheists who would not kiss their hands when they entered a temple. In early Roman ages, the kiss was given by inferiors to superiors; in the pre-Cæsarean republic, this fell into disrepute. The emperors restored the practice of kissing hands, which gradually was etherealized until the crowd had to kiss their hands to the emperors, as one would to a god. Solomon spoke of the same custom among the Hebrews, and Cortez found it among the Mexicans whom he pillaged. A strange custom in Rome was to give the dying a last kiss, in order, as they thought, to catch the dying breath. As for kissing among men, let Martial, the old satirist, speak for Rome:
Every neighbor, every hairy-faced farmer presses on you with a strongly scented kiss. Here the weaver assails you, there the fuller and the cobbler, who has just been kissing leather; here the owner of a filthy beard, and the one-eyed gentleman; there one with bleared eyes, and fellows whose mouths are defiled with all manner of abominations.
He gives the other side of the picture, when he describes the kisses of his favorite:
The fragrance of balsam extracted from aromatic trees; the ripe odor yielded by the teeming saffron; the perfume of fruits mellowing in their winter repository; the flowery meadows of spring; amber warmed by the hand of a maiden; a garden that attracts the bees.
