The passage of Dio Chrysostom discussed in the preceding section brings us, in virtue of a variety of hints it contains, to the much canvassed Νοῦσος Θήλεια (feminine disease) of the Scythians. Stark has collected with the greatest care everything that has so far been adduced by different authors in explanation of the subject; and on his Work we must base our own efforts in the investigations that follow.
Herodotus294 relates how the Scythians had made themselves masters of all Asia, and how some of them on their homeward march had plundered the very ancient temple of Venus Urania at Ascalon, a town of Syria; and then proceeds as follows:
“On such of the Scythians as plundered the temple at Ascalon, and on their posterity for successive generations, the goddess inflicted the θήλεια νούσος—feminine disease. And the Scythians say themselves it is for this cause they suffer the sickness, and moreover that any who visit the Scythian country may see among them what is the condition of those whom the Scythians call Ἐναρέες”. (a Scythian word, probably having the same meaning as Greek ἀνδρόγυνοι—men-women).
The different views that have been formulated at different times as to the nature of the νοῦσος θήλεια may be readily classified as follows. It was regarded as:—
1. a Vice, this vice being,
a) Paederastia; manifestly the oldest explanation,—already alluded to by Longinus, but specially championed by Bouhier295, also entertained by the interpreters of Longinus, Toll and Pearce, as well as by Casaubon (Epistolae) and Costar296;
b). Onanism (Self Masturbation),—a view Sprengel297 is inclined to decide in favour of.
2. a bodily Disease,—to wit,
a). Haemorrhoids (Piles); an opinion maintained by Paul Thomas de Girac298, Valckenaar in his Notes to Herodotus, Bayer299, and the authors of the “General History of the World”300;
b). actual Menstruation, for which le Fèvre and Dacier would seem to have declared;
d). actual loss of the Testicles, true Eunuchs, Mercurialis304 considered must have been implied; and with this view Stark’s conclusion in part coincides, who understood a disease involving complete loss of virile power, both corporeal and mental, and producing an actual metamorphosis of the male type into the female.
(3). a mental Disease, in fact a form of Melancholia. This is the view adopted by Sauvages305, Heyne, Bose, Koray306 and Friedreich.
It would naturally be our task to examine the reasons alleged for and against these separate views. Supposing however we succeed in satisfactorily proving one of them to be the right one, then ipso facto all the rest come to nothing; and so we propose here to essay the advocacy of the oldest of them,—the view that makes the νοῦσος θήλεια to be the vice of paederastia. En passant we must call attention to the fact that under the name of paederastia must be understood not only the vicious habit of the paederast pure and simple, of the man that is who practices the act, but also of the pathic, who offers opportunities for its commission. This is a point which above all others has been quite left out of sight by the adversaries of the view in question.
The next question we have to answer would seem to be this: Could paederastia be regarded as a consequence of the vengeance of Venus? As it is the Scythians that are in question, the first thing would naturally appear to be to determine what conception the Scythians had of Venus. But inasmuch as the data are lacking for any demonstration of the sort, while the Scythians themselves ascribe the νοῦσος θήλεια to the vengeance of Venus, we may very well refer for a reply to this first question to the general character of the cult of the goddess307 and what has been said on the whole subject above; and herein there seems to exist no reason why we should not answer the query asked above in the affirmative. Granted that Venus was regarded as goddess of fruitfulness or as dispenser of the joys of Love, then in either aspect it was but natural she should withdraw the marks of her favour from the culprits (the paederasts). These neither wished for posterity nor enjoyed the delights connected with natural coition, but were equally indifferent towards the one and towards the other308; and the first sign of the vengeance of the goddess consists in the withdrawal of her benefits.
How Stark, following the lead of an anonymous French author quoted by Larcher309, can maintain there is no question of punishment here, as in that case Venus would be acting against her own interest, we fail to understand; and Larcher himself calls this unknown writer un homme d’esprit, mais peu instruit (witty but superficial). This is proof sufficient in our opinion that only a jest is intended, but one that Stark, p. 7 (notes 19 and 20.), has taken with the utmost seriousness.
However our view is directly supported by another myth, which Dio Chrysostom mentions, speaking of the sweating at the armpits with which the Lemnian women were afflicted. According to this legend Venus punishes the women of Lemnos310:
“Haec Dea veluti etiam ceteri, sua sacrificia praetermitti non aequo animo ferebat: quae cum Lemniae mulieres Veneris sacrificia sprevissent, Deae maxime iram in se concitasse creditae sunt, quod etiam non impune putantur fecisse. Nam tantum foetorem illis excitasse feminis Dea perhibetur, ut a suis maritis contemnerentur.” (This goddess, no less than other deities, could not bear the neglect of her proper sacrifices with equanimity. Thus the women of Lemnos, having omitted to perform these sacrifices of Venus, are believed to have brought down on themselves the most serious anger of the goddess, and this they are accounted not to have done with impunity. For the goddess, as is related, caused such a foul odour to arise among the women, that they were scorned by their husbands.) If the view mentioned just above as taken by the Apostle Paul and by St. Athanasius is the right one, it would seem that the Lemnian women had suffered themselves to be used by their husbands for purposes of paederastia; then as a consequence there had been set up the evil odour of the mouth and breath, and this had driven the men to desert their wives to live with the captive Thracian slave-women (Apollonius).
But indeed the Ancients generally, or at any rate the Greeks and Romans, seem to have always held the opinion that unnatural coition, as well as all the similar forms of indulgence taking its place, were a consequence of the wrath of Venus, against whom the individuals had offended311. This appears also from the play of Philoctetes, of whom the Scholiast to Thucydides312 says: “Moreover Philoctetes, having on account of the death of Paris fallen sick of the feminine disease, and being unable to bear the shame of it, left his country and founded a city, which in memory of his misfortune he named Malacia—Effeminacy.” Martial313 had the same myth in his mind when he wrote:
In Sertorium
Mollis erat, facilisque viris Paeantius heros,
Vulnera sic Paradis dicitur ulta Venus.
Cur lingat cunnum Siculus Sertorius, hoc est,
Ex hoc occisus, Rufe, videtur Eryx.
(To Sertorius.—The Hero, son of Paeas (Philoctetes), was effeminate and easy of access to men; in this way Venus is said to have avenged the murder of Paris. Why should Sicilian Sertorius lick the pudendum of women? this is why, because it would appear, he was the slayer, Rufus, of a man of Eryx.) Of course there can be no question here of the disease which detained Philoctetes at Lemnos and prevented his taking part in the expedition to Troy; and if the older legend says nothing as to the νοῦσος θήλεια of Philoctetes, it is clear from this (as Meier, loco citato, has shown) that only in times when paederastia was becoming prevalent, were all these legends invented, to get as it were a sort of excuse by alleging a distinguished predecessor in the practice. So Martial says, addressing Gaurus:314
Quod nimio gaudes noctem producere vino,
Ignosco: vitium, Gaure, Catonis habes.
Carmina quod scribis Musis et Apolline nullo,
Laudari debes: hoc Ciceronis habes.
Quod vomis: Antoni, quod luxuriaris: Apici;
Quod fellas—vitium dic mihi, cuius habes?
(That you love to prolong the night with excess of wine, I can excuse; you have the vice, Gaurus, of Cato. That you write verses with no inspiration of Muses and Apollo, for this, you should be praised; it is a fault of Cicero’s you have. That you vomit, well! ’twas a habit of Antony’s; that you are a gourmand, ’twas Apicius’ weakness.—That you suck (as a fellator), whose vice have you here, pray tell me!) The above Epigram of Martial’s (To Sertorius) shows very clearly how the poets represented each form of unnatural indulgence of the sexual impulse as vengeance of Venus. It is a cunnilingus that is in question here, and his vice is accounted for in this way:—just as Philoctetes on account of the slaying of Paris had been punished by Venus with paederastia, so the Sicilian Sertorius probably became a cunnilingus because he had killed an inhabitant of Eryx, where was situated a famous temple of the goddess. Similarly it will not surprise us if besides paederastia Philoctetes was saddled with the vice of Onanism at a later period, as is implied in the following poem of Ausonius:315
Subscriptum picturae Crispae mulieris impudicae
Praeter legitimi genitalia foedera coetus,
Repperit obscoenas Veneres vitiosa libido.
Herculis haeredi quam Lemnia suasit egestas,
Quam toga facundi scenis agitavit Afrani,
Et quam Nolanis capitalis luxus inussit;
Crispa tamen cunctas exercet corpore in uno:
Deglubit, fellat, molitur per utramque cavernam,
Ne quid inexpertum frustra moritura relinquat.
(Inscribed beneath a Portrait of Crispa,—an immodest woman.—Over and above the natural modes of intercourse in legitimate coition, vicious lust has discovered impure ways of love: the way that his loneliness at Lemnos taught the heir of Hercules (Philoctetes), that which the comedies of eloquent Afranius displayed on the stage, and that which deadly luxury branded on the men of Nola. But Crispa practises them all in her sole person: she skins, she sucks, she works by either aperture, that she may not leave anything untried, and so have lived in vain!)
No doubt Stark, p. 19, is quite right in saying this passage has nothing to do with the θήλεια νοῦσος; but the poet has by no means, as he puts it in his note, temporum ordine lapsus,—committed an anachronism. He makes no mention whatever of any vengeance of Venus, saying nothing more than that loneliness led the inheritor (of the arrows) of Hercules to Onanism. This is not merely advancing a conjecture, as Stark does, but (to say nothing of the Lemnia egestas—Lemnian loneliness), admits of being legitimately developed from the whole sequence of thought in the Epigram. Crispa’s vices are mentioned in the order of their shamefulness. The least disgraceful is Onanism, such as Philoctetes practised, next comes the vice of the cinaedus and of the pathic, for which Afranius serves as example, and lastly fellation. Thus it shows a complete want of comprehension, when the commentators quote the scholion to Thucydides given a little above as an explanation. Had Philoctetes been referred to as a pathic, the succeeding verse would be entirely superfluous; which verse does not receive a word of notice from the expositors, presumably because they failed to understand the allusion. The true explanation is afforded by a passage in Quintilian:316 “Togatis excellit Afranius, utinamque non inquinasset argumenta puerorum foedis amoribus, mores suos fassus.” (Afranius excels in fabulae togatae (polite comedies), and it were to be wished he had not defiled his plots by disgusting intrigues with boys, thereby discovering his own morals). Forberg, loco citato p. 283, quotes this passage indeed, but explains (both here and on p. 343) the libido (lust) of Philoctetes as being that of the pathic.
To prove that Venus manifested her wrath in the way specified, we may further cite the race of the daughters of Helios, whom she punished by the infliction of licentious love. Thus Hyginus says:317 Soli ob indicium (concubitus cum Marte) Venus ad progeniem eius semper fuit inimica, (Because of the Sun’s revelation (of her intrigue with Mars) Venus was ever a bitter enemy of his posterity); and Seneca:318
Stirpem perosa Solis invisi Venus
Per nos catenas vindicat Martis sui
Suasque: probris omne Phoebeum genus
Onerat infandis.
(Venus, loathing the posterity of the hated Sun, punishes on us the fetters that bound her lover Mars and her. With abominable and disgraceful practices she afflicts the whole race of Phoebus).
An example of such vengeance is afforded by Pasiphaë, of whom the Scholiast on the passage of Lucian cited below relates how, Ἡλίου οὖσα ἐκ μήνιδος Ἀφροδίτης ταύρου ἠράσθη, (being a daughter of the Sun, she became enamoured of a bull through the influence of angry Aphrodité), a fable which might very well be explained—for ταύρος (a bull), like κένταυρος (a Centaur), occurs in the sense of paederast—as meaning that she had become a female pathic. So Theomnestus says in Lucian:319 “So lecherous a look resides in the eyes, that compelling all beauty to its will, it can find no satiety. And often was I uncertain whether this were not some spite of Aphrodité. Yet am I none of the children of Helios, neither a natural heir of the Lemnian women, nor puffed up with the scornful insensibility of Hippolytus, that I could have provoked against me such an implacable hatred on the part of the goddess)”. Philo Judaeus320 also represents paederastia as a punishment of such men as married a woman legally repudiated, and the like: πρὸς δὲ συμβάσεις εἴ τις ἐθέλοι χωρεῖν ἀνὴρ τῇ τοιαύτῃ γυναικὶ, μαλακίας καὶ ἀνανδρίας ἐκφερέσθω δόξαν, ὡς ἐκ τετμημένος τῆς ψυχῆς τὸ βιωφελέστατον μισοπόνηρον πάθος.... δίκην οὖν τινέτω σὺν τῇ γυναικί. (But if any man should wish to enter into contracts with such a woman, let him bear the ill-repute of softness and effeminacy, as having eradicated from his soul that sentiment of hatred for ill-doers which is most useful for life,—So let him pay his penalty along with the woman). In Athenaeus one of the speakers exclaims (Deipnos., XIII. p. 605 D.): Ὁρᾶτε οὖν καὶ ὑμεῖς, οἱ φιλόσοφοι παρὰ φύσιν τῇ Ἀφροδίτῃ χρώμενοι, καὶ ἀσεβοῦντες εἰς τὴν θεὸν, μὴ τὸν αὐτὸν διαφθαρῆτε τρόπον. (Beware then ye too, philosophers who indulge the pleasures of Aphrodité against nature, and act impiously towards the goddess, that ye be not destroyed in the same way).
According to Diodorus (V. 55) the sons of Neptune in consequence of the wrath of Venus plunged into such madness that they violated their mother. The Propontides, who had denied the godhead of Venus, were cast by her into such an amorous phrenzy that they publicly gave themselves to men, and they were subsequently turned into stones.321 Myrrha, whose mother proclaimed herself to be fairer than Venus, was driven by the goddess into unchastity with her own father.322
In later times this idea was even transferred to the Star of Venus. The following appears in Firmicus “In octavo ab horoscopo loco, Mercurius cum Venere, si vespertini ambo, inefficaces et apocopos reddent, et qui nihil agere possint.” (In the eighth place of the horoscope, Mercury in conjunction with Venus, if both are evening stars, will make men impotent eunuchs and such as can effect nothing.)—a notion that first arose perhaps from the name Hermaphroditus323.
Thus there would be nothing inconsistent with the views universally held in Antiquity in considering the νοῦσος θήλεια (feminine disease) of the Scythians, and equally that of Philoctetes, as consequences of the wrath of Venus. That paederastia was invariably regarded as a Vice by the Ancients (and particularly by the Greeks) we have already, following the lines laid down by Meier, we think sufficiently proved. Stark, who repeatedly (pp. 12, 16, 20.) denies this, has been led into error merely by the mistake that was generally prevalent in his time of confusing paedophilia and paederastia; and it is on this misapprehension he bases his argument. How the Scythians came to hold this belief that the wrath of Venus was to blame for what they suffered, must indeed be left an open question. But it should be remembered it was not the pathics themselves who advanced this opinion, but only the rest of the Scythians; for Herodotus says expressly, λέγουσί τε οἱ Σκύθαι διὰ τοῦτο σφεας νοσέειν (and the Scythians say that for this cause they were afflicted). Again it was only ὀλίγοι τινὲς αὐτῶν ὑπολειφθέντες (a few of the Scythians who were left behind), a few of the stragglers, who would seem to have plundered the temple of Aphrodité; and it certainly was only later that this act of impiety was brought into connection with the vice,—in the same way as the killing of Paris by Philoctetes was with the legend of his lewd practices.
§ 15.
The second question we have to answer will be this: how could Herodotus write that the descendants of these few stragglers alive in his time suffered from the νοῦσος θήλεια (feminine disease)? From the fact that, while descendants are named, strictly speaking only male descendants can be in question, it is clear the statement is only a general one, and must not be understood to imply more than that certain members of these families were Cinaedi, not of course that the whole posterity was afflicted with the νοῦσος θήλεια. We see at the present day how the impurity of the father passes on to the son; so it need be matter for no surprise whatever to find the vice of the cinaedi descending in the same way among certain members of a family. As a matter of fact these Scythian temple-robbers are by no means the only examples Antiquity holds up to us of such a thing, for the Orator Lysias324 says of the family of Alcibiades, that most members of it had become prostitutes.
What is more, the opinion was avowedly and directly held by the Ancients, that pathics were born with the predisposition to the vice. In particular Parmenides (509 B.C.) expressed this view in a Fragment, which Caelius Aurelianus325 has preserved in a chapter of his Work. This chapter treats solely of the vice of the pathic, and is of the greatest importance for our subject. We could not forgo quoting it in full, particularly as it is the sole authority for the views held by physicians on this vice, and up to now appears to have been entirely overlooked.
De mollibus sive subactis; quos Graeci μαλθακοὺς vocant.
“Molles sive subactos Graeci μαλθακοὺ vocaverunt, quos quidem esse nullus facile virorum credit. Non enim hoc humanos ex natura venit in mores, sed pulso pudore, libido etiam indebitas partes obscoenis usibus subiugavit. Cum enim nullus cupiditati modus, nulla satietatis spes est, singulis Sparta non sufficit sua. Nam sic nostri corporis loca divina providentia certis destinavit officiis. Tum denique volentes alliciunt veste atque gressu, et aliis femininis rebus, quae sunt a passionibus corporis aliena, sed potius corruptae mentis vitia. Nam saepe tumentes [timentes], vel quod est difficile, verentes quosdam, quibus forte deferunt, repente mutati parvo tempore virilitatis quaerunt indicia demonstrare, cuius quia modum nesciunt, rursum nimietate sublati, plus quoque quam virtuti convenit, faciunt et maioribus si peccatis involvunt. Constat itaque etiam nostro iudicio, hos vera sentire. Est enim, ut Soranus ait, malignae ac foedissimae mentis passio. Nam sicut feminae Tribades326 appellatae, quod utramque Venerem exerceant, mulieribus magis quam viris misceri festinant et easdem, invidentia pene virili sectantur, et cum passione fuerint desertae, seu temporaliter relevatae, ea quaerunt aliis obiicere, quae pati noscuntur, iuvamini humilitate [iuvandi voluptate ex] duplici sexu confecta, velut frequenti ebrietate corruptae in novas libidinis formas erumpentes, consuetudine turpi nutritae, sui sexus iniuriis gaudent, illi comparatione talium animi passione iactari noscuntur. Nam neque ulla curatio corporis depellendae passionis causa recte putatur adhibenda, sed potius animus coercendus, qui tanta peccatorum labe vexatur. Nemo enim pruriens corpus feminando correxit, vel virilis veretri tactu mitigavit, sed communiter querelam sive dolorem alia ex materia toleravit. Denique etiam a Clodio historia curationis data ascaridarum esse perspicitur, quos de lumbricis scribentes vermiculos esse docuimis longaonis327 in partibus natos. Parmenides328 libris quos de natura scripsit, eventu, inquit conceptionis molles aliquando seu subactos homines generare. Cuius quia graecum est epigramma et hoc versibus intimabo [imitabo]: Latinos enim, ut potui, simili modo composui, ne linguarum ratio misceretur.
Femina, virque simul Veneris cum germina miscent
Venis, informans diverso ex sanguine virtus
Temperiem servans bene condita corpora fingit.
At si virtutes permixto semine pugnent,
Nec faciant unam, permixto in corpore dirae
Nascentem gemino vexabunt semine sexum.
Vult enim seminum praeter materias esse virtutes, quae si se ita miscuerint et [ut] eiusdem corporis [vim unam] faciant, unam congruam sexui generent voluntatem. Si autem permixto semine corporeo virtutes separatae permanserint utriusque Veneris natos adpetentia sequatur. Multi praeterea sectarum principes genuinam dicunt esse passionem et propterea in posteros venire cum semine, non quidem naturam criminantes, quae suae puritatis metas aliis ex animalibus docet: nam sunt eius specula a sapientibus nuncupata: sed humanum genus, quod ita semel recepta tenet vitia, ut nulla possit instauratione purgari, nec ullum novitati liquerit locum, sitque gravior senescentibus mentis culpa, cum plurimae genuinae, seu adventitiae passionis corporibus infractae consenescant, ut podagra, epilepsia, furor et propterea aetate vergente mitiores procul dubio fiant. Omnia et enim vexantia validos effectus dabunt firmitate opposita subiacentium materiarum, quae cum in senibus deficit, passio quoque minuitur, ut fortitudo; sola tamen supra dicta, quae subactos seu molles efficit viros, senescenti corpore gravius invalescit et infanda magis libidine movet, non quidem sine ratione. In aliis enim aetatibus adhuc valido corpore et naturalia ventris [veneris] officia celebrante, gemina luxuriae libido non divititur, animorum nunc faciendo, nunc facie iactata [animo eorum nunc patiendo nunc faciendo iactato]: in iis vero qui senectute defecti virili veneris officio caruerint, omnis animi libido in contrariam ducitur appetentiam, et propterea femina validius Venerem poscit. Hinc denique coniiciunt plurimi etiam pueros hac passione iactari. Similiter enim senibus virili indigent officio, quod in ipsis est nondum, illos deseruit.” (On effeminate men or subservients, called μαλθακοὶ—soft, effeminate, by the Greeks.—Effeminate men, or subservients, were called by the Greeks μαλθακοὶ. A man finds it difficult to believe in the existence of such creatures. For it was not nature prompted the introduction of this as part of human habits; rather was it lust that, expelling shame, subjected to foul uses parts of the body that should never have been so employed. For no limit being set to passion, and no hope of satiety being entertained, the several members find each its own realm insufficient; whereas divine providence destined the different portions of the body to perform definite functions. In fine they go out of their way to allure by dress and gait and other feminine attributes, things unconnected with bodily emotions, being rather due to a corrupted mind. For often, moved by fear, or (however difficult to believe) by shame, towards persons whom they happen to respect, they change of a sudden and for a brief space seek to show marks of manly power; but not knowing where to put the limit, they are again carried away by excess, and going beyond what is fit for an honest man are involved in yet greater offences. Thus it is evident, in our opinion, that such men have a sense of the true state of things. For theirs is, as Soranus declares, the passion of a corrupt and utterly foul mind. For as women that are called Tribades, because they practise the love of either sex, are eager to have intercourse with women more than with men, and pursue these with a jealousy almost as violent as a man’s, and when they have been deserted by their love or for the time being superseded, seek to do to other women what they are known to suffer, and winning from their double sex a pleasure in giving pleasure, like persons deboshed by constant drunkenness, being nurtured on evil habitude, delight in wrongs to their own sex,—even so these men (pathics) are seen by a comparison with women of this sort to be tormented with a passion that is of the mind. For no bodily treatment it is rightly deemed should be adopted to expel the passion, rather must the mind be disciplined which is afflicted with such a pollution of vices.
For no man ever remedied a prurient body by foul practices as a woman, nor got mitigation by contact of the male member, but concurrently he suffered some complaint or pain from a different (material) cause. So in fact the history of a cure given by Clodius is found to be really a case of recovery from “ascaridae”, which writers on intestinal worms have shown are a kind of worm born in the region of the rectum or straight gut. Parmenides in his books on natural science says “Effeminate men or subservients occasionally bring forth as a result of conception.” But as his Epigram is in Greek, I will imitate it in verse; so I have composed Latin lines like the original so far as I could make them, that there might not be a mixture of the two languages:—“When a woman and a man together mingle in the veins the seeds of love, the formative virtue that moulds of the diverse blood, if it keep due proportion, makes well-framed bodies. But if the virtues are discordant in the commingled seed, and have no unity, in the commingled body furies will torment the nascent sex with two-fold seed.” He means that over and above the material seed there are certain virtues residing in it; and if these have commingled in such a way as to have one and the same operative force in the same body, then they produce one single will that tallies with the sex. But if when the bodily seed was commingled, the virtues remained separate, the appetite for love of both kinds must pursue the offspring.
Many leading doctors of the schools moreover declare that the passion is innate, and therefore passes on with the seed to descendants, not indeed hereby incriminating nature, which teaches men the bounds of its purity by the example of other animals (for animals are called by wise men nature’s mirrors), but rather the human race that retains so obstinately vices once adopted, that by no renewal can it be purified, and has left no room for change. Similarly a mental depravity grows graver as men advance in life, whereas most affections of the body, whether innate or adventitious, get weaker as men get older, for instance gout, epilepsy and madness, and so as age advances undoubtedly grow milder. For all troublesome factors will produce strong effects in proportion to the firmness to resist possessed by the affected parts, and as this firmness is deficient in old men, so the complaint or passion diminishes in intensity, as does the general strength. But that passion which makes men subservient or effeminate, grows stronger and more serious as the body grows old and stirs the sufferers with yet more abominable lustfulness,—and not without a reason. For at other ages, the body being still strong and capable of performing the natural offices of love, there is no division of lust into double forms of wantonness, through their mind being tossed to and fro now by passive now by active lewdness. But in such as have failed from age, and become incapable of the manly office of love, all the wantonness of the mind is directed on the appetite for the opposite form of gratification; and for this cause a woman demands love more strongly than a man. In fact many conjecture it is for this reason that boys also are tormented by this passion. For they resemble old men in lacking power for the virile function. It is not yet born in boys; old men have lost it.)
To leave on one side for the present the many inferences of various sorts that this passage of Caelius Aurelianus must necessarily lead us to, as they will find a more suitable place later on, and to return to our question,—the mere fact of Herodotus mentioning posterity at all ought of itself to be sufficient to negative any idea of actual eunuchs, of loss of the generative power. For had the Scythians returning from Ascalon lost this power, they could have had no more descendants, and therefore the νούσος θήλεια could not have passed on to these, but must have become extinct with the original sufferers. On the other hand children already begotten by them before that period could have been in no way influenced by a disease communicable through the act of generation. Accordingly the νοῦσος θήλεια cannot possibly have affected these Scythians so as to annihilate the power of generation. Both must have co-existed side by side; and the contrary can never be proved from anything Herodotus says. As to another passage of Herodotus that might seem to demand some notice here, where the expression ἀνδρόγυνος (man-woman) is put side by side with ἐνάρεες, we will speak subsequently.
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