With such views, respect for woman was bound to sink to a low level; fear of over-population even led to the avoidance of intimate intercourse with her. Unnatural means of satisfying sexual desires were resorted to. The Greek states were cities with small territories, unable to supply the usual sustenance to a population in excess of a given number. Hence the fear of over-population caused Aristotle to recommend to the men abstinence from their wives, and pederasty, instead. Before him, Socrates had praised pederasty as the sign of a higher culture. In the end, the most promising men of Greece became adherents of this unnatural passion. Regard for women sank all the deeper. There were now houses for male prostitutes, as there were for female. In such a social atmosphere, it was natural for Thucydides to utter the saying that woman was worse than the storm-lashed ocean's wave, than the fire's glow, than the cascade of the wild mountain torrent. "If it is a God that invented woman, wherever, he may be, let him know, that he is the unhallowed cause of the greatest evil."[13] The male population of Greece having become addicted to pederasty, the female population fell into the opposite extreme: it took to the love of members of its own sex. This happened especially with the women of the island of Lesbos, whence this aberration was, and still continues to be named, "Lesbian love," for it has not yet died out: it survives among us. The poetess Sappho, "the Lesbian nightingale," who lived about six hundred years before our reckoning, is considered the leading representative of this form of love. Her passion is glowingly expressed in her hymn to Aphrodite, whom she implores: "Glittering-throned, undying Aphrodite, Wile-weaving daughter of high Zeus, I pray thee, Tame not my soul with heavy woe, dread mistress, Nay, nor with anguish." A still more passionate sensuousness is attested in her hymn to the handsome Atthis.