_Stark_ indeed gives the following note on the passage: “Ego quidem impotentiam virilem et illam morbosam in sexum sequiorem degenerationem, quae per animi mollitiem aeque ac per corporis mutationem se prodit, hic accipiendam esse credo, nec video, cur interpres labem illam qua muliebris tolerantiae viri maculantur, intellectam velit.” (In fact I consider we must take to be here meant impotence and that morbid degeneration towards the inferior sex which betrays itself at once by effeminacy of mind and bodily deterioration; at the same time I see no reason for a commentator thinking that specific pollution to be signified whereby men are affected who suffer themselves to be treated as women.) However if only _Stark_ had chanced to read through the succeeding 13th. chapter of _Herodian_ as well, he would have found _Antoninus_ only meant to put upon the man an ordinary coarse jest; for he there makes the very same reproach against the Centurion _Martialis_, whose brother he had had executed a few days previously; αὐτῷ τε τῷ Μαρτιαλίῳ ἐνύβρισεν, _ἄνανδρον αὐτὸν καὶ ἀγεννῆ καλῶν_ καὶ _Μακαρίνου φίλον_, (And he insulted Martialis himself, _calling him unmanly and ignoble and a friend of Macarinus_.) In any case the passage shows that even at that period Paederastia was held to be dishonourable and the name of Pathic involved an insult.
The Church Historian _Eusebius Pamphili_ (264-340 A.D.) relates in his Life of _Constantine_[378] that on a part of the peak of Mount Lebanon stood a Temple of Venus: “Therein was a school of vice for licentious persons of every description, for all such as dishonoured their bodies in various ways; womanish men, that are no men at all, abrogated their natural dignity and propitiated the goddess by θήλεια νοῦσος (feminine disease); and again unlawful unions of women, lecherous embraces, abominable and abominated acts, were indulged in in this Temple, as in a spot where neither law nor religion held good. And there was no one to overlook their doings, for no respectable man dared go near the place.” Now to any one examining the whole drift of the passage, it cannot for a single moment remain doubtful that by θήλεια νοῦσος is here meant some particular form of vice; and the words of the text are such that, even if the expression only occurred here and nowhere else at all, absolutely no other meaning could be assigned to it but that of the vice of the Pathic. We have already shown that the words ἀκόλαστος (licentious person), πράξις, πράττειν (action, to act) are used of the Pathic, whilst the phrase τὸ σεμνὸν τῆς φύσεως (natural dignity) finds its explanation in the τὸ φύσεως νόμισμα (custom of nature) of _Philo_, and γύννιδες (womanish men) is interpreted in _Zonaras_[379] by ἀνδρόγυνος (man-woman), μαλακός (soft, effeminate), and in Eustathius[380] by θηλυδρίας μὴ εὖ διακέιμενος πρὸς τὰ ἀφροδίσια (womanish man, one not properly behaved with regard to love),—meanings the real force of which we have elsewhere verified, but which most certainly are not to be taken as implying actual castration, as _Stark_ (§ 16) thinks. Indeed the last named says, commenting on the passage of Eusebius: “Haec verba non solum de mera morum atque cultus mutatione muliebri rationi magis congrua, intelligi posse, sed etiam per veram evirationem genitalium truncatione confectam aptissime explicanda esse, cum verborum series et Eustathii, Hesychii ac Zonarae atque Valesii auctoritas me suadet, tum multo magis illud monet, quod in cultu Veneris virorum exsectionem solemnem fuisse compertum habemus. Sin autem contenderis, viros tales exsectos et effeminatos etiam muliebria passos esse, ego quidem non repugno, exploratam vero rem esse atque ratam, ex ipsis auctoris verbis non liquet.” (That these words may be understood not merely of a simple change of mode of life and habit to one more closely assimilated to the female type, but that they are most suitably to be explained as implying an actual effemination of the individual produced by amputation of the genitals, both the context of the passage and the authority of Eustathius, Hesychius, Zonaras and Valesius induces me to believe, and still more am I led to this view by the fact we already know, viz. that the castration of men was customary in connection with the cult of Venus. But if you further maintain that such men so castrated and effeminated submitted to the treatment proper to women, I do not deny it; I only say that this point is not duly ascertained and certified on the showing of the Author’s own words.)