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Translated by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson.
Clement of Alexandria in Print
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128 Pages
Page 111
Chapter IV.--How to Conduct Ourselves at Feasts.
Let revelry keep away from our rational entertainments, and foolish vigils, too, that revel in intemperance. For revelry is an inebriating pipe, the chain [1400] of an amatory bridge, that is, of sorrow. And let love, and intoxication, and senseless passions, be removed from our choir. Burlesque singing is the boon companion of drunkenness. A night spent over drink invites drunkenness, rouses lust, and is audacious in deeds of shame. For if people occupy their time with pipes, and psalteries, and choirs, and dances, and Egyptian clapping of hands, and such disorderly frivolities, they become quite immodest and intractable, beat on cymbals and drums, and make a noise on instruments of delusion; for plainly such a banquet, as seems to me, is a theatre of drunkenness. For the apostle decrees that, "putting off the works of darkness, we should put on the armour of light, walking honestly as in the day, not spending our time in rioting and drunkenness, in chambering and wantonness." [1401] Let the pipe be resigned to the shepherds, and the flute to the superstitious who are engrossed in idolatry. For, in truth, such instruments are to be banished from the temperate banquet, being more suitable to beasts than men, and the more irrational portion of mankind. For we have heard of stags being charmed by the pipe, and seduced by music into the toils, when hunted by the huntsmen. And when mares are being covered, a tune is played on the flute--a nuptial song, as it were. And every improper sight and sound, to speak in a word, and every shameful sensation of licentiousnes--which, in truth, is privation of sensation--must by all means be excluded; and we must be on our guard against whatever pleasure titillates eye and ear, and effeminates. For the various spells of the broken strains and plaintive numbers of the Carian muse corrupt men's morals, drawing to perturbation of mind, by the licentious and mischievous art of music. [1402]
[1400] The reading halusis is here adopted. The passage is obscure.
[1401] Rom. xiii. 12, 13.
[1402] [He distinguishes between the lewd music of Satanic odes (Tatian, cap. xxxiii. p. 79, supra), and another art of music of which he will soon speak.]
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