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

fleeing from the sirens’ songs. 661 Familiarity with evil words is a sure road to evil deeds,
wherefore every possible precaution must be taken to prevent our souls from unconsciously
imbibing evil influences through literary gratification, like men who take poison in honey.
We shall not therefore praise the poets when they revile and mock, or when they describe
licentious, intoxicated characters, when they define happiness as consisting in a laden table
and dissolute ditties. Least of all shall we attend to the poets when they are talking about
the gods, specially when their talk is of many gods, and those in mutual disagreement. For
among them brother is at variance with brother, parent against children, and children wage
a truceless war against parents. The gods’ adulteries and amours and unabashed embraces,
and specially those of Zeus, whom they describe as the chief and highest of them all,—things
which could not be told without a blush of brutes,—all this let us leave to actors on the
stage. 662
I must make the same remark about historians, specially when they write merely to
please. And we certainly shall not follow rhetoricians in the art of lying.…I have been taught
by one well able to understand a poet’s mind that with Homer all his poetry is praise of
virtue, and that in him all that is not mere accessory tends to this end. A marked instance
of this is his description of the prince of the Kephallenians saved naked from shipwreck.
No sooner did he appear than the princess viewed him with reverence; so far was she from
feeling anything like shame at seeing him naked and alone, since his virtue stood him in the
stead of clothes. 663 Afterwards he was of so much estimation among the rest of the Phæacians
that they abandoned the pleasures amid which they lived, all looked up to him and imitated
him, and not a man of the Phæacians prayed for anything more eagerly than that he might
be Ulysses,—a mere waif saved from shipwreck. Herein my friend said that he was the interpreter
of the poet’s mind; that Homer all but said aloud, Virtue, O men, is what you have
to care for. Virtue swims out with the shipwrecked sailor, and when he is cast naked on the
coast, virtue makes him more noble than the happy Phæacians. And truly this is so. Other
belongings are not more the property of their possessors than of any one else. They are like
dice flung hither and thither in a game. Virtue is the one possession which cannot be taken
away, and remains with us alike alive and dead.
It is in this sense that I think Solon said to the rich,
᾽Αλλ᾽ ἡμεῖς αὐτοῖς οὐ διαμειψόμεθα
661 Hom., Od. xii. 158. cf. Letter i. p. 109.
662 This shews that the shameless and cruel exhibitions of earlier days had not died out even in the fourth
century. cf. Suetonius, Nero xi., xii., Tertullian, Apol. 15. On the whole subject, see Bp. Lightfoot’s note on St.
Clem. Rom., Ep. ad Cor. vi., where Δαναΐδες καὶ Δίρκαι is probably a misreading for νεάνιδες παιδισκαι. He
refers for illustrations to Friedländer, Sittengeschichte Roms, ii. 234.
663 Od. vi. 135 κ.τ.λ.
Homiletical.
115
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