The Plague of Lust, Vol. 1 (of 2): Being a History of Venereal Disease in Classical AntiquityRosenbaum, Julius
History
The Plague of Lust, Vol. 1 (of 2): Being a History of Venereal Disease in Classical Antiquity
Rosenbaum, Julius
Sexually transmitted diseases -- History
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time being superseded, seek to do to other women what they are known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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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