Masturbation is little noted in the sources for Roman sexuality.Richlin, "Sexuality in the Roman Empire," p. 351. The Romans evidently preferred the left hand for masturbation.Antonio Varone, Erotica pompeiana: Love Inscriptions on the Walls of Pompeii («L'Erma» di Bretschneider, 2002), p. 95. Martial has a few mentions in his poems, but considers it an inferior form of sexual release resorted to by slaves, though he admits to masturbating when a beautiful slave-boy is too expensive to obtain: "my hand relieved me as a substitute for Ganymede".Martial, 2.43.14Williams, p. 270J.P. Sullivan, Martial, the Unexpected Classic: A Literary and Historical Study (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 190. Martial describes slaves masturbating behind the door as they watch Andromache ride Hector (11.104.13–14). It was a longstanding if infrequent theme in Latin satire; one of the few surviving fragments of Lucilius, Rome's earliest satirist, jokes about a personified penis (Mutto) whose girlfriend Laeva ("Lefty") wipes away his "tears".At laeva lacrimas muttoni absterget amica ("A girlfriend wipes away Mutto's tears—his left hand, that is"): Lucilius 307 and 959. Kirk Freundenburg has dubbed the muttō of Lucilius "clearly the least finicky of all personified penises in Roman satire": Satires of Rome: Threatening Poses from Lucilius to Juvenal (Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 205. A graffito from Pompeii reads "when my worries oppress my body, with my left hand I release my pent-up fluids".multa mihi curae cum [pr]esserit artus has ego mancinas, stagna refusa, dabo: CIL 4.2066, as cited by Younger, p. 108.
