expose their persons among the
citizens"--Ennius, ap. Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., iv. 33.]

should have called to mind, that, as in the mysteries of the Bona Dea,
all masculine appearance was excluded, he did nothing, if he did not geld
horses and asses, in short, all nature:

"Omne adeo genus in terris, hominumque, ferarumque,
Et genus aequoreum, pecudes, pictaeque volucres,
In furias ignemque ruunt."

["So that all living things, men and animals, wild or tame,
and fish and gaudy fowl, rush to this flame of love."
--Virgil, Georg., iii. 244.]

The gods, says Plato, have given us one disobedient and unruly member
that, like a furious animal, attempts, by the violence of its appetite,
to subject all things to it; and so they have given to women one like a
greedy and ravenous animal, which, if it be refused food in season, grows
wild, impatient of delay, and infusing its rage into their bodies, stops
the passages, and hinders respiration, causing a thousand ills, till,
having imbibed the fruit of the common thirst, it has plentifully bedewed
the bottom of their matrix. Now my legislator--[The Pope who, as
Montaigne has told us, took it into his head to geld the statues.]--
should also have considered that, peradventure, it were a chaster and
more fruitful usage to let them know the fact as it is betimes, than
permit them to guess according to the liberty and heat of their own
fancy; instead of the real parts they substitute, through hope and
desire, others that are three times more extravagant; and a certain
friend of mine lost himself by producing his in place and time when the
opportunity was not present to put them to their more serious use. What
mischief do not those pictures of prodigious dimension do that the boys
make upon the staircases and galleries of the royal houses? they give the
ladies a cruel contempt of our natural furniture. And what do we know
but that Plato, after other well-instituted republics, ordered that the
men and women, old and young, should expose themselves naked to the view
of one another, in his gymnastic exercises, upon that very account? The
Indian women who see the men in their natural state, have at least cooled
the sense of seeing. And let the women of the kingdom of Pegu say what
they will, who below the waist have nothing to cover them but a cloth
slit before, and so strait, that what decency and modesty soever they
pr