in Classical Latin was used regularly as a risqué colloquialism for the male organ. Later, penis becomes the standard word in polite Latin, as used for example by the scholiast to Juvenal and by Arnobius, but did not pass into usage among the Romance languages. It was not a term used by medical writers, except for Marcellus of Bordeaux. In medieval Latin, a vogue for scholarly obscenity led to a perception of the dactyl, a metrical unit of verse represented as an image of the penis, with the long syllable (longum) the shaft and the two short syllables (breves) the testicles. The apparent connection between Latin testes, "testicles," and testis, plural testes, "witness" (the origin of English "testify" and "testimony") may lie in archaic ritual. Some ancient Mediterranean cultures swore binding oaths upon the male genitalia, symbolizing that "the bearing of false witness brings a curse upon not only oneself, but one's house and future line". Latin writers make frequent puns and jokes based on the two meanings of testis: it took balls to become a legally functioning male citizen. The English word "testicle" derives from the diminutive testiculum. The obscene word for "testicle" was coleus. Castration and circumcision To Romans and Greeks, castration and circumcision were linked as barbaric mutilations of the male genitalia. When the cult of Cybele was imported to Rome at the end of the 3rd century BC, its traditional eunuchism was confined to foreign priests (the Galli), while Roman citizens formed sodalities to perform honors in keeping with their own customs. It has been argued that among the reasons for the Apostle Paul's exhortation of the Galatians not to undergo circumcision, the practice at the time should be understood not only in the context of Jewish circumcision, but also of the ritual castration associated with Cybele, whose cult was centered in Galatia. Among Jews, circumcision was a marker of the Abrahamic covenant; diaspora Jews circumcised their male slaves and adult male converts, in addition to Jewish male infants. Although Greco-Roman writers view circumcision as an identifying characteristic of Jews, they believed the practice to have originated in Egypt, and recorded it among peoples they identified as Arab, Syrian, Phoenician, Colchian, and Ethiopian. The Neoplatonic philosopher Sallustius associates circumcision with the strange familial–sexual customs of the Massagetae who "eat their fathers" and of the Persians who "preserve their nobility by begetting children on their mothers". During