Book III, Epigram 24 (Ker)

Guilty of having gnawed a vine, a he-goat, doomed to die, stood at the altar, a victim, Bacchus, welcome to thy rites. When the Tuscan soothsayer was minded to sacrifice this to the god, he chanced to bid a country clown quickly to sever with his sharp sickle the testicles of the beast that the foul odour of unclean flesh should pass away. While he himself, leaning over the turf altar, was cutting with his knife the throat of the struggling beast and pressing it down with his hand, a huge hernia was revealed to the scandal of the rites; this the clown at once seized and severed, thinking that the ritual's ancient mode required this offering, and that by such entrails the old-world deities were honoured. So you, just lately a Tuscan soothsayer, now a Gaul, in slaughtering a he-goat have been made a gelding.