(Now they _honoured_ him from their heart as if he had been a god). The whole sense of the passage requires us to refer the words οὐ τιμωμένοισιν to the poorer Scythians, who possess little, and therefore can offer nothing to the gods, and also do not wish to do so, as is clearly shown in what follows; and it is exactly for this reason that Hippocrates says, then they ought to suffer more from the disease than the rich, if the gods practised any system of equivalent returns. [399] Ταῦτα δὲ τοῖσί τε Σκύθῃσι πρόσεστι, καὶ _εὐνουχοειδέστατοί_ εἰσι ἀνθρώπων διὰ τὰς προφάσιας, καὶ ὅτι ἀναξυρίδας ἔχουσι ἀεὶ καὶ εἰσι ἐπὶ τῶν ἵππων τὸ πλεῖστον τοῦ χρόνου, ὥστε μήτε χειρὶ ἅπτεσθαι τοῦ αἰδοίου, _ὑπό τε τοῦ ψύχεος καὶ τοὺ κόπου ἐπιλήθεσθαι τοῦ ἱμέρου καὶ τῆς μίξιος, καὶ μηδὲν παρακινέειν πρότερον ἢ ἀνανδρωθῆναι_. for translation see text above: “And this is the case ..., to resign their manly privilege.” We have it is true translated according to the text, yet we cannot possibly take this as being uncorrupted, but without for the moment being in a position to offer a complete emendation of it. The sequence of thought, if we are not altogether in error, is this: The Scythians ride _continually_, which of its self weakens their power of generation and desire for coition, then besides this they wear trousers, a thing that particularly struck the Greek because he did not use them himself. These trousers were so tight, that the wearer could not get at the genitals with his hand; again the genitals lay close to the body, did not hang down, could not be set in motion; at the same time they were also protected against the wind, so that no cooling process could take place; the idle repose and the constantly heightened temperature in combination weakened the genitals to such a degree that the impulse to coition was at last totally lost. Views which entirely agree with our experience of the present day, and indeed were by _Faust_, as is notorious, exaggerated almost to caricature. Now if Hippocrates has expressed, as is likely enough, these views in the words ὑπό τε τοῦ ψύχεος καὶ τοῦ κόπου (under the influence of cold and lassitude), the text must be corrupt, and this is what we wish to insist on. For if by the words we understand frost and lassitude, then the first at any rate is impossible; how could the Scythians suffer from frost, when they wore trousers! Then the cooling process spoken of just now must be intended by ψύχος (cold)! But if κόπος (striking, beating, so weariness, lassitude) is understood literally, in accordance with its derivation from κόπτω (to strike), in the sense of blows, shocks, and taken as referring to the genitals, especially the testicles, a negative and a verb must have been lost from the text, and this appears to us too the most probable explanation, though at the time we cannot say what verb. The matter would be at once decided, if we could translate: so that they could