Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott’s Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon of 1851 contains a sobering entry:

ραφανιδοω: to thrust a radish up the fundament, a punishment of adulterers in Athens

In recalling this to friends at Christmas in 1972, historian John Julius Norwich wrote, “I’m sure it must once have been familiar to every schoolboy, and now that the classics are less popular than they used to be I should hate it to be forgotten.”