109
Yeast is itself also the product of corruption, and produces corruption in the dough with which it is mixed: for the dough becomes flabby and inert, and altogether the process of leavening seems to be one of putrefaction Cf.Moralia, 659 b.; at any rate if it goes too far, it completely sours and spoils the flour.
110
Why is this priest also forbidden to touch raw flesh?
110
Is this custom intended to deter people completely from eating raw meat, or do they scrupulously repudiate flesh for the same reason as flour? For neither is it a living creature nor has it yet become a cooked food. Now boiling or roasting, being a sort of alteration and mutation, eliminates, the previous form; but fresh raw meat does not have a clean and unsullied appearance, but one that is repulsive, like a fresh wound.
111
Why did they bid the priest avoid the dog and the goat, neither touching them nor naming them?
111
Did they loathe the goat’s lasciviousness and foul odour, or did they fear its susceptibility to disease? For it is thought to be subject to epilepsy beyond all other animals, and to infect persons who eat itContrast Pliny, Natural History, xxviii. 16 (226), who says that goat’s meat was given for epilepsy. or touch it when it is possessed of the disease. The reason, they say, is the narrowness of the air passages, which are often suddenly contracted; this they deduce from the thinness of its voice. So also in the case of men, if they chance to speak during an epileptic fit, the sound they make is very like a bleat.