Clement of Alexandria: STROMATA (MISCELLANIES), Part II, Complete

Translated by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson.

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Page 73

Now marriage is a help in the case of those advanced in years, by furnishing a spouse to take care of one, and by rearing children of her to nourish one's old age.

"For to a man after death his children bring renown,

Just as corks bear the net,

Saving the fishing-line from the deep." [2427]

according to the tragic poet Sophocles.

Legislators, moreover, do not allow those who are unmarried to discharge the highest magisterial offices. For instance, the legislator of the Spartans imposed a fine not on bachelorhood only, but on monogamy, [2428] and late marriage, and single life. And the renowned Plato orders the man who has not married to pay a wife's maintenance into the public treasury, and to give to the magistrates a suitable sum of money as expenses. For if they shall not beget children, not having married, they produce, as far as in them lies, a scarcity of men, and dissolve states and the world that is composed of them, impiously doing away with divine generation. It is also unmanly and weak to shun living with a wife and children. For of that of which the loss is an evil, the possession is by all means a good; and this is the case with the rest of things.

[2427] The corrections of Stanley on these lines have been adopted. They occur in the Choephorae of Aeschylus, 503, but may have been found in Sophocles, as the tragic poets borrowed from one another.

[2428] i.e., not entering into a second marriage after a wife's death. But instead of monogamiou some read kakogamiou--bad marriage.

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