In a later _Dialogue_, a lover accuses his mistress of having slept the previous night with another man. He says that stealing to her chamber to surprise her, he hoped the companion he found there was only her maid, but his exploring hand discovered a cropped head. She replies that it was her girl friend whose hair has been cut because of illness and who hides her disfigurement by day with a wig. The gentleman apparently takes no exception to this explanation, though whether the lover was maid or girl friend, the implication is obvious. Lucian’s own attitude may or may not be that of the male lover of women in his _Amores_.[46] In the course of a long debate with a pederast on the relative merits of the two modes of sexual experience, the champion of heterosexual love says: “If it is becoming for men to have intercourse with men, then for the future let women have it with women ... girding themselves with their infamous instruments of lust ... in a word, let our wanton tribades reign unchecked.” As to Alciphron, in his _Letters from Town and Country_ (2:12)[47] he describes a day-long picnic to which a courtesan has invited her friends at her lover’s villa. After a meal of oysters and lettuce, “the sort Aphrodite is said to love,” the guests pair off, a few with their male lovers, the rest with women partners “of random choice,” and drift away into surrounding thickets. Whether the feminine coupling is from preference or _faute de mieux_ is not made exactly clear. The author neither expresses nor implies any judgment on the activity portrayed. That gleanings should be so comparatively meager from a full millennium is scarcely surprising in the light of later history. After the collapse of Roman power, repeated waves of barbarian invasion, famine, and plague reduced both social organization and literature to only what could be salvaged in the growing Christian monasteries. As the spoken language drifted into dialects of unlettered vernacular, churchmen clung to Latin as the medium of communication, but they withheld classical belles-lettres from laymen for many centuries and undoubtedly winnowed and expurgated it. Deeply ingrained in Christian morality were several factors making for obliteration of anything sympathetic to female variance. One was general asceticism, a natural reaction from Roman excesses during the later Empire. Another was the animus against all homosexuality which Christianity inherited from Hebrew mores. A third was the intolerance toward women in any sexual role, largely chargeable to the strong anti-feminine bias of St. Paul.