[165] Ammianus Marcellinus says (xxiii. 76) that the inhabitants of Persia were free from pederasty. But see also Sextus Empiricus, Pyrrhoniæ hypotyposes, i. 152.
[166] Vendîdâd, i. 12; viii. 27.
[167] Darmesteter, in Sacred Books of the East, iv. p. lxxxvi.
[168] Vendîdâd, viii. 26.
[169] Dînâ-î Maînôg-î Khirad, xxxvi. 1 sqq.
[170] Sad Dar, ix. 2, sqq.
Nor are unnatural sins allowed to defile the land of the Lord. Whosoever shall commit such abominations, be he Israelite or stranger dwelling among the Israelites, shall be put to death, the souls that do them shall be cut off from their people. By unnatural sins of lust the Canaanites polluted their land, so that God visited their guilt, and the land spued out its inhabitants.[171]
[171] Leviticus, xviii. 22, 24 sqq.; xx. 13.
This horror of homosexual practices was shared by Christianity. According to St. Paul, they form the climax of the moral corruption to which God gave over the heathen because of their apostasy from him.[172] Tertullian says that they are banished “not only from the threshold, but from all shelter of the church, because they are not sins, but monstrosities.”[173] St. Basil maintains that they deserve the same punishment as murder, idolatry, and witchcraft.[174] According to a decree of the Council of Elvira, those who abuse boys to satisfy their lusts are denied communion even at their last hour.[175] In no other point of morals was the contrast between the teachings of Christianity and the habits and opinions of the world over which it spread more radical than in this. In Rome there was an old law of unknown date, called Lex Scantinia (or Scatinia), which imposed a mulct on him who committed pederasty with a free person;[176] but this law, of which very little is known, had lain dormant for ages, and the subject of ordinary homosexual intercourse had never afterwards attracted the attention of the pagan legislators.[177] But when Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire, a veritable crusade was opened against it. Constantius and Constans made it a capital crime, punishable with the sword.[178] Valentinian went further still and ordered that those who were found guilty of it should be burned alive in the presence of all the people.[179] Justinian, terrified by certain famines, earthquakes, and pestilences, issued an edict which again condemned persons guilty of unnatural offences to the sword, “lest, as the result of these impious acts, whole cities should perish together with their inhabitants,” as we are taught by Holy Scripture that through such acts cities have perished with the men in them.[180] “A sentence of death and infamy,” says Gibbon, “was often founded on the slight and suspicious evidence of a child or a servant, … and pederasty became the crime of those to whom no crime could be imputed.”[181]
[172] Romans, i. 26 sq.