The Instructor 2.10.109

This clothing is for show, not for covering. Garments embroidered with gold, purple-dyed, and figured with animals (this luxury, surely, is a thing for the wind), that perfume-dyed saffron robe, and the costly, varied cloaks of conspicuous fine membranes, with little figures in the purple, must be dismissed along with the art itself. “For what wise or splendid thing could we women do,” says comedy, “who sit about” decked with flowers, wearing saffron robes and beautified? The Instructor advises expressly: “Do not boast of the clothing you wear, nor be exalted in any glory, since it does not last.” Mocking those clothed in soft garments, he says in the Gospel: “Behold, those in splendid clothing and living in luxury are in kings' courts”: he means earthly courts, perishable ones, where there is love of display, glory-hunting, flattery, and deceit. But those who serve in the heavenly court around the King of all are sanctified in the soul's pure garment, the flesh, and in this way put on incorruption. As the unmarried woman devotes herself to God alone and her care is not divided, while the married woman, if she is self-controlled, divides her life between God and her husband, and the one who behaves otherwise belongs wholly to marriage, that is, to passion; in the same way, I think, the self-controlled wife, devoting herself to her husband, is sincerely godly; but when she loves finery, she falls away both from God and from self-controlled marriage, exchanging her husband for ornament, like the Argive courtesan, I mean Eriphyle, “who took precious gold for her own husband.”