8. Tradition relates, that armies beginning to give way have been rallied by the females, through the earnestness of their supplications, the interposition of their bodies,  54 and the pictures they have drawn of impending slavery,  55 a calamity which these people bear with more impatience for their women than themselves; so that those states who have been obliged to give among their hostages the daughters of noble families, are the most effectually bound to fidelity.  56 They even suppose somewhat of sanctity and prescience to be inherent in the female sex; and therefore neither despise their counsels,  57 nor disregard their responses.  58 We have beheld, in the reign of Vespasian, Veleda,  59 long reverenced by many as a deity. Aurima, moreover, and several others,  60 were formerly held in equal veneration, but not with a servile flattery, nor as though they made them goddesses.  61