Yet for all he says, it is far from being demonstrated that this pleonasm _is_ useless and silly. The sequence of thought is evidently this: Common Eros (Love) infects the soul (ψυχή) with the νοῦσος θήλεια, rousing the insatiable craving to play the part of the woman, to be pathic in fact; and then, this craving being indulged, the man becomes a man-woman (ἀνδρόγυνος). As long as he goes on practising the vice of the pathic, he is sick of the νοῦσος θήλεια, and so it is perfectly correct to speak of the νοῦσος θήλεια ἀνδρογύνων (feminine disease of men-women). A man-woman, that is a person who suffers coition to be consummated with him as with a woman, and concurrently also consummates coition with women as a man, or at any rate has the ability to do so,—this anyone may quite well be, without suffering for all that from the νοῦσος θήλεια. For instance he may be constrained by force to be a pathic, or may regard it as a way of earning money, like the male prostitutes of Greece and Rome; and in that case has no interest further in the vice of the pathic as such. On the other hand if he is urged to it by _prurigo ani impudica_ (lascivious itch of the anus), this is sheer lubricity, not to be expected in a sensible, healthy-minded man. It can only be the consequence of a morbid condition of temperament and body. Such a man is the victim of νοῦσος θήλεια, the craving to be a woman! This is just the position taken in the fifth passage, as the subsequent words show quite plainly.
But granted that _Philo_ actually wrote in this fifth passage τὴν ἀληθῆ νόσον ἀνδρογύνων (the true disease of men-women), would a bodily defect, castration, be signified by the expression? Certainly not. We could then take it in no other way but this, “he began with the men-women, who suffered from the true disease,” and should be constrained to ask, “_what_ disease?”,—a definite disease being manifestly intended, as the addition of the definite article (τὴν) shows. But this would imply that men-women who were not suffering from this particular disease were _not_ excluded from visiting the Temple. Yet most certainly _Philo_ would never make any such statement. However _Stark_ translates with _Mangey_: _Exorsus a vero semivirorum morbo laborantibus_ that is, “he began with those suffering from the true disease of men-women”, from which it would follow that there were other persons who suffered from the _apparent_ disease of the men-women, or no reason exists for the special emphasis the definite article gives.