Clement of Alexandria · a new plain-English translation from the original language
But indeed, carried along by the current of my discourse, I had unwittingly sailed past a sequence to which I must now run back again, and I must censure the multitude of possessions in household servants. For fleeing from working with their own hands and serving themselves, people take refuge in attendants, buying up a great crowd of cooks and table-servers and those who skillfully carve meat into portions. Their servitude is divided into many branches: some labor over their masters' gluttony — carvers, sauce-makers, and the confectioners and honey-cake makers and the preparers and craftsmen of soups and gruels; others busy themselves with superfluous garments; others guard gold like griffins; others keep watch over the silver and scour the drinking-cups and make ready the preparations for banquets; others groom the pack-animals; a whole company of wine-pourers is trained among them, and flocks of comely young men are kept like cattle, from whom their beauty is milked. Hairdressers, male and female, wait upon the women — some holding the mirrors, some the hairnets, others the combs... and eunuchs too, many of them, act as procurers, ministering without suspicion, on the trustworthy pretext that they cannot themselves enjoy pleasure, to those who wish to indulge idly in pleasures. But the true eunuch is not the one who is unable, but the one who is unwilling to love pleasure. At any rate, the word solemnly testifies through the prophet Samuel to the transgressing Jews, when the people asked for a king: it does not promise them a benevolent lord, but threatens them with some self-willed, luxury-loving tyrant, 'he,' it says, 'shall seize your daughters to make ointments, to bake, and to cook' — governing under a soldier's harsh code, not a peaceable rule. Then there are the many Celts who lift the litters of the women on high and carry them borne aloft; but spinning and wool-working and weaving and the work proper to the women's quarters and the keeping of the house are nowhere to be found — instead, the men who corrupt these women with falsehood spend the whole day with them, chattering love-stories, and wearing away both their bodies and their souls with false dealing and false speech. 'You shall not be with the many,' it says, 'unto evil, nor shall you add yourself to the multitude,' because wisdom is found among the few, but disorder shows itself plainly among the many. And those women who hire the litter-bearers do so not out of modesty, not wishing to be spied upon (for that would be welcome, if it were with this disposition that they sought the covering), but rather, given to affectation, they ride upon their servants because they long to make a display. At any rate, when the curtain is drawn back, as they gaze about rather too sharply at those who look upon them, they betray their own character; and often they even peep out from within, disgracing their surface-modesty by their slippery inquisitiveness. 'Do not gaze about,' it says, 'in the streets of the city, nor wander in its deserted places' — for truly it is a desert, even if there be a crowd of the unrestrained there, wherever no self-controlled person is present. These women are carried about to the temples, offering sacrifices and consulting oracles, processing daily together with begging priests and priests of the Mother of the Gods and scurrilous old women who ruin households, tolerating the old-wives' whisperings over their cups, learning from sorcerers certain love-charms and incantations for the ruin of marriages. Some of these they already have as husbands, others they pray for, and still others the diviners promise them. Being deceived, they do not realize that they are handing themselves over like a vessel of pleasure to those who wish to indulge their lust, and that in exchanging their own chastity for the most shameful outrage they are treating their disgraceful corruption as a business transaction. Many are the ministers of this harlot-like licentiousness, slipping in from one place or another; for the unrestrained are easily carried toward wantonness, just as pigs are carried toward the sinking side of a ship. Hence the scripture very forcefully counsels: 'Do not bring every man into your house, for many are the ambushes of the deceitful man'; and elsewhere it says, 'Let righteous men share your table, and let your pride stay fixed on reverence toward the Lord.' Let fornication be thrown to the crows! 'Understand this clearly,' the apostle warns, 'no one given to fornication, nor the covetous, since such a person is an idolater, holds any share in the kingdom of Christ and God.' And there are women who delight in the company of effeminate men; there flow in among them crowds of loose-tongued perverts, foul in body and foul in speech, made bold for wanton services, ministers of adultery, giggling and whispering and sounding through their noses without restraint the harlot-like snorting prelude to lewdness, trying to give pleasure with unrestrained words and postures and provoking to laughter, the forerunner of fornication; and sometimes, inflamed by some chance passion, being themselves either fornicators or eager for the ruin of a crowd of perverts, they click with their noses like frogs, as though they kept bile lodged in their nostrils. But the more refined among these women rear Indian birds and Median peacocks and recline together with dwarfs at play, delighting in grotesque, misshapen monstrosities; and while they laugh to hear of Thersites, they themselves purchase Thersites at great cost and boast not of husbands who are their equals but of these creatures, which are indeed a burden upon the earth. They look past a chaste widow, far superior to a little Maltese lapdog, and they overlook a righteous old man, more comely, I think, than a purchased monstrosity; but these women who rear parrots and plovers will not even take in an orphan child — rather they expose the children conceived at home and take up the fledglings of birds instead, preferring irrational creatures to rational ones, when they ought instead to be supporting elderly men who profess self-control, men more handsome, I think, than apes and able to utter something better than nightingales. 'Whatever,' he says, 'you did for a single one of these lowly ones, you did for me.' Other women, conversely, have preferred ignorance to self-control, turning their own wealth to stone in pearls and Indian emeralds; indeed they squander and scatter their money on fading dyes and on slaves bought with silver, like well-fed birds scratching through the dung-heap of life. 'Poverty,' it says, 'humbles a man'; and by poverty he means stinginess, by which the rich are poor in generosity, as though they had nothing.
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