stay them from overflowing like a river in flood and producing horrid abominations, a wild cataclysm and confusion of nature in matters of love. For men have had intercourse with she-goats and sows and mares, while women have been inflamed with mad love of male beasts. Indeed it is from such unions that your Minotaurs have been engendered, and Silvani or Aegipans, and—as I suppose,—the Sphinxes too and Centaurs[136]. True under compulsion of hunger, dog and bird sometimes feed on a human corpse; but no man has ever been invited to coition by any beast, though you constrain beasts by force to this as well as to other shameful pleasures, and use them contrary to all right). Like all other forms of vicious lust, Sodomy too was an outcome of Asiatic[137] and Egyptian luxury, and already in quite early times familiar in those regions,—in fact, as is the case with sexual excesses generally, this vice appears to have developed from the religious cult of the countries named. Among the Egyptians[138] at any rate we meet with Mendes, the sacred Goat or Pan, worshipped by means of Sodomy on the part of his female devotees, who were shut up along with him. _Boettiger_[139] goes so far as to conjecture that the tame snakes in the temple of Aesculapius, which were also kept in private houses[140] as a plaything of the women, were trained and employed by them for purposes of Sodomy. In confirmation a passage is brought forward in this connection by _Forberg_, loco citato, p. 368, from _Suetonius_[141], in which the mother of Augustus, Atia, is spoken of: “In Asclepiadis Mendetis Θεολογουμένων libris lego, Atiam cum ad sollemne Apollinis sacrum media nocte venisset, posita in templo lectica, dum ceterae matronae dormirent, obdormisse; draconem repente irrepsisse ad eam paulloque post egressum: illamque expergefactam _quasi a concubitu mariti purificasse se_ et statim in corpore eius exstitisse maculam, velut depicti draconis, nec potuisse unquam eximi, adeo ut mox publicis balneis perpetuo abstinuerit”[142]. (In the books of the _Theologoumena_ (sacred writings) of the Asclepiad Mendes I read how Atia, who had come to the wonted festival of Apollo at midnight, when her litter had been set down in the Temple, and the other matrons were sleeping, herself fell asleep; how a snake suddenly crept in to her, and presently emerged again; and how on waking she _purified herself as after intercourse with her husband_, and immediately there appeared a mark on her body, representing the likeness of a snake, which could never be got rid of, so much so that soon she left off ever after frequenting the public baths). However the Roman women seem to have especially made use of the ass[143] for the satisfaction of their _nymphomania_, an animal that was famed in Antiquity for its salaciousness.