εἰ μὴ πύθοιθ’ ἡμῶν· ἐπεὶ τοπάζετε·
(For his father is sick of a portentous sickness, one that no one would ever know or conjecture the nature of, unless he should have learned it from us; for if you doubt me, guess yourselves.)
Love of play is suggested, and love of drink, love of sacrifice and finally love of winning guests and seeing them at his house (φιλόξενον—lover of guests), which last conjecture Sosias understands in an obscene sense as implying a cinaedus, and (vv. 84 sqq.) says:
μὰ τὸν κύν’, ὦ Νικόστρατ’, οὐ φιλόξενος,
ἐπεὶ καταπύγων ἐστὶν ὅγε Φιλόξενος,
(No! no! by heavens! Nicostratus, not a lover of guests (φιλόξενος) for our friend Philoxenus is a man given to unnatural lust,) where φιλόξενος and καταπύγων are explained as being synonymous. Now if paederastia had not been a disease, how should they have come to call a man φιλόξενος, when guessing the form his sickness took? For the rest there was a well-known cinaedus Philoxenus, to whom allusion is made. The scholiast quotes a very noteworthy line from Eupolis (in the “Urbes”) or else from Phrynichus (“in the Satyrs”) as follows:
ἔστι δέ τις θήλεια Φιλόξενος ἐκ Διομείων.
(And there is a certain female Philoxenus of Diomeia);
The healthy good sense of the Greeks could not possibly regard the vice of the Pathic otherwise than as a deviation from Nature, an unnatural appetite; and every unnatural appetite (ἀκολασία—“intemperance”) was a νόσος or πάθος (disease, or suffering, passion), or a consequence of these, as the passages quoted from Aristotle and elsewhere show conclusively. From the point of view of the paederast reasons perhaps were to be discovered, that appeared to justify his peculiar taste; and the mode in which he obtained the titillation of sensual pleasure was looked upon merely as one way of getting rid of the semen, as a figura Veneris (mode of Love) standing in close relationship with Onanism. The paederast was relegated to the category of voluptuaries, but without his incurring any special condemnation. On the other hand for the pathic who lent himself as subject of the vice, no excuse of this sort was forthcoming. His lust was not seen (this was impossible at the time) to have a bodily origin in “prurigo ani” (itching of the anus), and could only be regarded as springing from a depraved imagination (ἀνίατον νόσον ψυχῆς ἡγούμενος—deeming it an incurable disease of the soul); it must be that a demon had dragged him along irresistibly in his train, and drove his victim who was incapable of helping himself (ἀσθενής—“weak”) to degradation.
All men thus held in thrall by evil demons were supposed to have offended against the gods, to have roused their anger, and were avoided and shunned by their fellows. If in addition they showed any traces of mental aberration, madness, epileptic convulsions, or the like, rude peoples saw in these the manifestation of a god’s influence, and took the victim’s sayings and dreams for oracles. So Herodotus relates (IV. 67.) that the Scythians considered the ἐναρέες to have received the gift of prophecy from Aphrodité,—οἱ δὲ ἐναρέες οἱ ἀνδρόγυνοι, τὴν Ἀφροδίτην σφισι λέγουσι μαντικὴν δοῦναι (now the ἐναρέες, the men-women, declare that Venus brought madness on the object of her anger), and held the vice of the pathic to be due to the goddess’s wrath, or at a later time to be an (incurable) disease of the soul (ψυχή),—as is proved again by the passage of Caelius Aurelianus already quoted; but they did not ascribe to such men the power of prophecy, though in a certain sense every actual madman was supposed to possess it[349]. For the vice of the pathic was not in the eyes of the Greeks actual madness, but rather a vice (νόσος—disease) that robbed the sufferer of the power of governing himself[350], in the same sense as they called sexual love a madness. From this point of view therefore the commentators who saw in the νοῦσος θήλεια a mental affliction, had some grounds for their view; but should not have lost sight of the fact of its being a vice at the same time.
But why did the νοῦσος (disease) receive the epithet θήλεια (feminine)? Taking the word to be used passively,—as obviously is done by those who make out the νοῦσος θήλεια to have been an affection similar in character to menstruation,—we might find its explanation in the dictum of Tiresias, who, as is well known, ascribed to the woman the greater pleasure in the act of coition. From this fact,—if it is a fact,—a greater longing on the part of the woman for coition may be deduced; for which reason Plato compared the uterus (womb) to a wild beast. Thus the νοῦσος θήλεια would be feminine concupiscence. Just as the woman longs intensely for natural coition with the man, in the same way and with a like intensity does the pathic long after unnatural[351]. Thus the punishment inflicted by Venus would have consisted in the goddess having implanted in the man the concupiscence of a woman.