The Museum of Fine Arts at Boston also obtained in 1914 a masterpiece surreptitiously excavated and smuggled out of Crete, an exquisite gold and ivory statuette of the snake goddess or her votary.
A grown-up daughter might wish to become a votary, perhaps in preference to an uncongenial marriage, and it seems that her father could not refuse her wish.
We here catch a glimpse of the circumstances which were winning over good men to monasticism in the West, though the evidence of an enthusiastic votary of the solitary life, such as Severus was, is probably not free from exaggeration.