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

Translated by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson.

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Page 75

Then by the practice of temperance men seek health: and by cramming themselves, and wallowing in potations at feasts, they attract diseases.

There are many, too, that dread inscriptions set up. Very cleverly Diogenes, on finding in the house of a bad man the inscription, "Hercules, for victory famed, dwells here; let nothing bad enter," remarked, "And how shall the master of the house go in?"

The same people, who worship every stick and greasy stone, as the saying is, dreads tufts of tawny wool, and lumps of salt, and torches, and squills, and sulphur, bewitched by sorcerers, in certain impure rites of expiation. But God, the true God, recognises as holy only the character of the righteous man,--as unholy, wrong and wickedness.

You may see the eggs, [3542] taken from those who have been purified, hatched if subjected to the necessary warmth. But this could not take place if they had had transferred to them the sins of the man that had undergone purification. Accordingly the comic poet Diphilus facetiously writes, in comedy, of sorcerers, in the following words:--

"Purifying Proetus' daughters, and their father

Proetus Abantades, and fifth, an old wife to boot,

So many people's persons with one torch, one squill,

With sulphur and asphalt of the loud-sounding sea,

From the placid-flowing, deep-flowing ocean.

But blest air through the clouds send Anticyra

That I may make this bug into a drone."

[3542] Which were used in lustrations, hota. The text has hoa.

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