The publisher Leonard Smithers was a brilliant but shady character who operated on the fringes of the rare book trade, issuing small, clandestine editions of risqué books with the boast: 'I will publish the things the others are afraid to touch'. Smithers encouraged Beardsley's interest in French, Latin and Greek texts of this kind and commissioned drawings to illustrate Aristophanes's famously bawdy satirical play Lysistrata and the Satires of the late Roman poet Juvenal. Beardsley made his outrageous drawings for Juvenal in the summer of 1896 whilst recuperating at the genteel seaside resort of Boscombe.

Beardsley's design for the frontispiece to Juvenal's Sixth Satire, 'Against Woman', shows the poet, crowned with a laurel wreath but with his tunic tucked up to reveal the genitals, vigorously lashing a plump and placid woman tied to a slender column. The image is derived from a famous late 16th-century print, Satyr flogging a Nymph, from the so-called 'Lascivious Series' by Agostino Carracci (1557-1602).