Volume 1

The plague of lust : being a history of venereal disease in classical antiquity ... / by Julius Rosenbaum ; translated from the 6th (unabridged) German edition by an Oxford M.A.

  • Georg August Wilhelm Julius Rosenbaum
Date:
1901
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The plague of lust : being a history of venereal disease in classical antiquity ... / by Julius Rosenbaum ; translated from the 6th (unabridged) German edition by an Oxford M.A. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    in intensity, as does the general strength. But that passion which makes men subservient or effeminate, grows stronger and more serious as the body grows old and stirs the sufferers with yet more abominable lustfulness,—and not without a reason. For at other ages, the body being still strong and capable of performing the natural offices of love, there is no division of lust into double forms of wantonness, through their mind being tossed to and fro now by passive now by active lewdness. But in such as have failed from age, and become incapable of the manly office of love, all the wantonness of the mind is directed on the appetite for the opposite form of gratification; and for this cause a woman demands love more strongly than a man. In fact many conjecture it is for this reason that boys also are tormented by this passion. For they resemble old men in lacking power for the virile function. It is not yet born in boys; old men have lost it.) To leave on one side for the present the many inferences of various sorts that this passage of Cae/zus Aurelianus must necessarily lead us to, as they will find a more suitable place later on, and to return to our question,—the mere fact of Herodotus mentioning posterity at all ought of itself to be sufficient to negative any idea of actual eunuchs, of loss of the generative power. For had the Scythians returning from Ascalon lost this power, they could have had no more descendants, and therefore the votdog InAsıa could not have passed on to these, but must have become extinct with the original sufferers. On the other hand children already begotten by them before that period could have been in no way influenced by a disease com- municable through the act of generation. Accordingly the voöcog InAsıa cannot possibly have affected these Scythians so as to annihilate the power of generation. Both must have co-existed side by side; and the contrary can never be proved from anything Herodotus says. As to another passage of Herodotus
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