_νόσον_ γὰρ ὁ πατὴρ ἀλλόκοτον αὐτοῦ _νοσεῖ _, ἣν οὐδ’ ἂν εἷς γνοίη ποτ’ οὐδὲ ξυμβάλῃ, 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.