Nicene and Post-Nicene Church Fathers Series 2 - The Still Small ...

craftsmen, skilled in every art that can minister to necessity or to enjoyment and luxury;
cooks, confectioners, butlers, huntsmen, sculptors, painters, devisers and creators of pleasure
of every kind. Look at the herds of camels, some for carriage, some for pasture; troops of
horses, droves of oxen, flocks of sheep, herds of swine with their keepers, land to feed all
these, and to increase men’s riches by its produce; baths in town, baths in the country; houses
shining all over with every variety of marble,—some with stone of Phrygia, others with slabs
of Spartan or Thessalian. 632 There must be some houses warm in winter, 633 and others
cool in summer. The pavement is of mosaic, the ceiling gilded. If any part of the wall escapes
the slabs, it is embellished with painted flowers.…You who dress your walls, and let your
fellow-creatures go bare, what will you answer to the Judge? You who harness your horses
with splendour, and despise your brother if he is ill-dressed; who let your wheat rot, and
will not feed the hungry; who hide your gold, and despise the distressed? And, if you have
a wealth-loving wife, the plague is twice as bad. She keeps your luxury ablaze; she increases
your love of pleasure; she gives the goad to your superfluous appetites; her heart is set on
stones,—pearls, emeralds, and sapphires. 634 Gold she works and gold she weaves, 635 and
increases the mischief with never-ending frivolities. And her interest in all these things is
no mere by-play: it is the care of night and day. Then what innumerable flatterers wait
upon their idle wants! They must have their dyers of bright colours, their goldsmiths, their
perfumes their weavers, their embroiderers. With all their behests they do not leave their
husbands breathing time. No fortune is vast enough to satisfy a woman’s wants,—no, not
if it were to flow like a river! They are as eager for foreign perfumes as for oil from the
market. They must have the treasures of the sea, shells and pinnas, 636 and more of them
than wool from the sheep’s back. Gold encircling precious stones serves now for an ornament
for their foreheads, now for their necks. There is more gold in their girdles; more gold
fastens hands and feet. These gold-loving ladies are delighted to be bound by golden fetters,—only
let the chain be gold! When will the man have time to care for his soul, who has
to serve a woman’s fancies?”
Homily VIII., on the Famine and Drought, belongs to the disastrous year 368. The
circumstances of its delivery have already been referred to. 637 The text is Amos iii. 8, “The
632 A precious, red-streaked marble was quarried in Phrygia. The Spartan or Tænarian was the kind known
as verde antico. cf. Bekker, Gallus. p. 16, n. The taste for the “Phrygian stone” was an old one. cf. Hor., Carm.
III. i. 41.
633 The Cappadocian winters were severe. cf. Ep. cxxi., cxcviii., cccxlix.
634 ὑακίνθους. See L. and S., s.v., and King’s Antique Gems, 46.
635 i.e. she must have ornaments of wrought gold and stuff embroidered with gold.
636 cf. Hexaemeron, p. 94.
637 p. xxi.
Homiletical.
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