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This post suggests to me a simple but adequate answer to this interesting question (perhaps what earlier posts have also been driving at). Because Venus and Diana took the babes from Chrysogonee she never nursed them at all. And then also they, as their foster mothers, gave them "uncommon" food in lieu of that nourishment. Jane Hedley At 08:59 AM 2/2/2006 -0500, you wrote: >In the strange intermingling of sacred allegory with something much more >visceral, even secular, that is at work in the description of the twins' >birth, the twisting of normal temporal sequence, having the babes suck >seemingly at once before and after they're born, seems crucial. It makes >me think of that most peculiar and plangent example of (I think) >hyperbaton, when Venus and Diana, not waking Chrysogenee out of her >"heavy swowne," together agreed "from her loving side the tender babes to >take" -- where the love Chrysogenee will never show to the children she >never sees is lent to her body (here merest "side"!) at the very moment >she loses them. > >Ken