Now having made it clear by what we have said, that in order to gain knowledge of a disease in Antiquity it is by no means enough to go to the Physicians only, even when such existed, that the latter should never be regarded as sole possessors of whatever was known from the point of view of pathology and therapeutics, we are bound to apply the same rule in the case of diseases consequent upon vicious habits. Of this the foregoing Sections contain amply sufficient proofs. It has there been shown how the genital organs were under the protection of special deities. Diseases affecting them were ascribed to the vengeance of the said deities, as at Athens to Dionysus, at Lampsacus to Priapus. To them sufferers had recourse to win by their prayers the removal of the divine anger, as well as its consequences; and all this happened not only in times when Physicians did not as yet exist, but no less when they did and in defiance of them, as the poems of the Priapeia sufficiently prove.[270] How long these ideas lived on is shown by the pictures _Philo_ (p. 315) and _Palladius_ (p. 318) draw of their times, while the XVth. and XVIth. Centuries reproduced the same scenes. The most obvious reason for this no doubt was the _enigma presented by the origin_ of diseases of the genitals, particularly for any one unacquainted with the existence of contagions and their modes of activity. The man who with a healthy penis had accomplished coition, observed some days afterwards, though without resenting the fact, a mucous discharge to have been set up, or an ulcer, pustule, or what not, to have appeared. The cause of these affections he sought for in vain, for of course the mere act of coition was the very last thing he was likely to regard as such. Rather accustomed, wherever the cause of any phænomenon was unknown to him, to ascribe it to the intervention of the deity, he saw in his complaint likewise the Θεῖον (divine) as eventual cause. Naturally therefore it was divine assistance, and not human, that would avail to relieve him of his pain. Long after this time moreover, when men had ceased to refer all diseases to the vengeance of the gods, and now discovered natural causes for maladies of the genitals, as for other diseases, anything rather than just the act of coition was looked upon as cause of the observed effects, as indeed is the case to this day among the Turks,[271] and as the earliest Writers on Venereal disease abundantly show to have been so in their time. That the Physicians were no exceptions to this rule, we shall show on a later page.