Against Jovinian 1.41–2.1

We have given enough and more than enough examples of Christian chastity and angelic virginity from the divine books. But since I have understood from my opponent's treatises that we are challenged also to the wisdom of the world, on the ground that this kind of life was never approved in the world and our religion has brought forth a new doctrine against nature, I will run briefly through the Greek, Latin, and barbarian histories, and show that virginity has always held the first place in chastity. The stories tell that Atalanta, the virgin of Calydon, always in the hunt, always in the woods, loved not swelling wombs and the nausea of pregnancy but free and chaste virtue. The famous poet describes Harpalyce too, the Thracian virgin; and Camilla, queen of the Volsci, whom Turnus, to whose help she had come, wishing to praise her, had nothing more to say than to call her virgin: "O glory of Italy, virgin!" Chalcioecus too, the daughter of Leos, a perpetual virgin, is written to have delivered her country from plague by a voluntary death; and the blood of the virgin Iphigenia to have calmed adverse winds. Why should I mention the Sibyls, the Erythraean and the Cumaean and the eight others? For Varro holds that there were ten, whose distinction is virginity, and the reward of virginity, prophecy. And if in the Aeolic dialect the Sibyl is called theoboulē, it is rightly written that virginity alone knows the counsel of God. We read too of Cassandra and Chryseis, prophetesses of Apollo, and of the virgins of Juno. And there have been countless priestesses of the Taurian Diana and of Vesta. One of these, Minucia, was buried alive on suspicion of unchastity: an unjust penalty, I think, unless violated virginity were held a great crime. Certainly how great an honor the Roman people always gave to virgins appears from this, that consuls and generals, and those riding in triumph and bringing back trophies from conquered nations, and every rank of dignity, used to give way to them on the road. Claudia, a Vestal virgin, when she had come under suspicion of unchastity, and the image of the Idaean Mother was stuck in the shallows of the Tiber, is said, to prove her chastity, to have drawn with her girdle the ship that many thousands of men had been unable to pull. "Yet it would have been better for her," says the uncle of the poet Lucan, "if what happened had been the ornament of a chastity already proved rather than the defense of a doubtful one." Nor is this surprising among men, when the error of the Gentiles imagined Minerva and Diana as virgin goddesses, and among the twelve signs of heaven, by which they think the world turns, placed the Virgin. A great insult to marriage, that not even among the scorpions and centaurs and crabs and fishes and goat-horned creatures did they join a wife and husband! When the Thirty Tyrants of Athens had killed Phidon at a banquet, they ordered his virgin daughters to come to them and be stripped like harlots, and to sport with shameless gestures on the floor stained with their father's blood. For a little while they hid their grief; then, when they saw the guests drunk, going out as if for the needs of nature, they embraced one another and threw themselves into a well, to preserve their virginity by death. The virgin daughter of Demotion, chief of the Areopagites, on hearing of the death of her betrothed Leosthenes, who had stirred up the Lamian war, killed herself, declaring that although she was untouched in body, yet if she were forced to take another, she would be taking a second husband, since she had married the first in mind. The Spartans and Messenians long had friendship with each other, so much so that for certain rites they even sent virgins to one another. Once, then, when the Messenians tried to violate fifty Lacedaemonian virgins, of so great a number not one consented to the outrage, but all most willingly died for their chastity. For this reason a grave and very long war was stirred up, and after a long time Mamertia was overthrown. Aristoclides, tyrant of Orchomenus, fell in love with a Stymphalian virgin, who, when her father was killed, fled to the temple of Diana and held fast to her image; and since she could not be torn away by force, she was stabbed on the spot. Because of her death all Arcadia was moved with such grief that it took up war publicly and avenged the virgin's death. Aristomenes the Messenian, a most just man, when the Lacedaemonians had been defeated and were once celebrating the nocturnal rites called the Hyacinthia, carried off fifteen virgins from the dancing choirs, and, fleeing at a rapid pace all night, got out of the Spartans' territory. And when his companions wished to violate them, he warned them as much as he could not to do it, and at last killed some who would not obey, keeping the rest in check by fear. The girls, afterwards ransomed by their relatives, when they saw Aristomenes accused of murder, did not return to their homeland until, falling at the knees of the judges, they saw the defender of their chastity acquitted. With what words are the daughters of Scedasus at Leuctra in Boeotia to be praised? It is related that in their father's absence they received two passing young men by the right of hospitality, who, having indulged much in wine, did violence to the virgins in the night. Unwilling to survive the loss of their chastity, they fell by each other's wounds. It is just not to be silent about the Locrian virgins either, who, though they were sent to Ilium according to custom for about a thousand years, none of them ever gave occasion for any tale of foul rumor or of violated virginity. Who could pass over in silence the seven virgins of Miletus, who, when the onslaught of the Gauls was laying everything waste, escaped disgrace by death, so as not to suffer anything indecent from the enemy, leaving to all virgins the example that to honorable minds chastity is of more concern than life? Nicanor, after Thebes was conquered and overthrown, was overcome by love of one captive virgin. Seeking marriage with her and her willing embraces, which a captive surely ought to have wished, he learned that to chaste minds virginity is more than a kingdom; and, weeping and mourning, the lover held her, slain by her own hand. Greek writers tell also of another Theban virgin whom a Macedonian enemy had violated: that she hid her grief for a little while, and afterwards cut the throat of the violator of her virginity as he slept, and killed herself with the sword, so that she would neither live after losing her chastity nor die before she had avenged herself.

Among the Gymnosophists of India the authority of this belief is handed down, as from hand to hand, that a virgin gave birth to Buddha, the founder of their doctrine, from her side. Nor is this surprising among barbarians, when most learned Greece imagined that Minerva was born from the head of Jupiter and Father Liber from his thigh. Speusippus too, Plato's sister's son, and Clearchus in his Praise of Plato, and Anaxilides in the second book of his Philosophy, say that Perictione, Plato's mother, was overpowered by an apparition of Apollo, and they think the prince of wisdom was born in no other way than of a virgin's childbearing. Timaeus too writes that Pythagoras's virgin daughter presided over a choir of virgins and instructed them in the teachings of chastity. Diodorus the Socratic is said to have had five daughters, dialecticians, of remarkable chastity, of whom Philo, the teacher of Carneades, writes a very full history. And lest the power of Rome should reproach us that the Lord and Savior was born of a virgin, they believe the founders of their city and nation were born of the virgin Ilia and Mars.

My hurrying discourse has touched on these things about the virgins of the world, running through many histories. I will come to married women who were unwilling to survive their husbands when they died or were killed, lest they be forced to know second unions, and who wonderfully loved their only husbands; so that we may know that second marriage is condemned even among the pagans. Dido, the sister of Pygmalion, gathered a great weight of gold and silver, sailed to Africa, and there founded the city of Carthage; and when she was sought in marriage by Iarbas, king of Libya, she put off the marriage for a while until she had founded the city. Not long after, having built a pyre in memory of her former husband Sychaeus, she preferred to burn rather than to marry. A chaste woman founded Carthage, and the same city in turn ended in the praise of chastity. For the wife of Hasdrubal, when the city was taken and burning, seeing that she was about to be captured by the Romans, seized her little sons on either side and leapt down into the fire of her house below.

Why should I speak of the wife of Niceratus, who, unable to bear the wrong done to her husband, took her own life, so as not to endure the lust of the Thirty Tyrants whom Lysander had imposed on conquered Athens? Artemisia too, the wife of Mausolus, is said to have been of remarkable chastity. Though she was queen of Caria and is praised by noble poets and historians, she is extolled above all for this, that she always loved her dead husband as if he were alive, and built a tomb of wonderful size, so that to this day all costly tombs are called Mausolea after his name. Teuta, queen of the Illyrians, who for a long time ruled very brave men and often broke the Romans, certainly owed this to the wonder of her chastity. The Indians, like nearly all barbarians, have very many wives. Among them there is a law that the most beloved wife be burned with her dead husband. So they contend among themselves for the husband's love, and the highest ambition of the competitors, and the testimony of chastity, is to be judged worthy of death. So the winner, in her former dress and adornment, lies down beside the corpse, embracing and kissing it, and despises the fire set beneath her for the glory of chastity. I think a woman who dies thus does not seek a second marriage. That famous Alcibiades, the disciple of Socrates, when the Athenians had been defeated, fled to Pharnabazus, who, having taken a price from Lysander, the chief of the Lacedaemonians, ordered him to be killed. And when he had been strangled and his head cut off and sent to Lysander as proof that the murder had been done, the rest of his body lay unburied. His concubine alone, then, against the command of a most cruel enemy, among strangers and with danger at hand, paid the funeral rites, ready to die for the dead man whom she had loved alive. Let matrons, and at least Christian matrons, imitate the faithfulness of concubines, and let free women show what a captive kept.

Strato, the petty king of Sidon, wishing to stab himself with his own hand so as not to be made sport of by the Persians who were approaching (whose treaty he had neglected for alliance with the king of Egypt), was held back by fear, and looking around at the sword he had seized, awaited the enemy's coming in terror. His wife, seeing that he was about to be captured at any moment, wrested the scimitar from his hand and pierced his side; and having laid out the corpse according to custom, she threw herself, dying, upon it, so as not to endure another's intercourse after her virgin vows. Xenophon writes in his account of the boyhood of Cyrus the Elder that when Abradatas was killed, Panthea his wife, who had loved him with wonderful love, laid herself beside his mangled body, stabbed herself in the breast, and poured her own blood into her husband's wounds. A wife whom her husband had shown naked to his friend without her knowledge thought it just cause to kill the king; for she judged that she was not loved, since she could be shown to another. Rhodogune, the daughter of Darius, after her husband's death killed the nurse who was urging her to a second marriage. The stories tell that Alcestis died of her own accord for Admetus; and Penelope's chastity is Homer's song. Laodamia too is sung by the mouths of the poets as unwilling to survive when Protesilaus was killed at Troy.

Let me pass to Roman women; and first I will put Lucretia, who, unwilling to survive her violated chastity, wiped out the stain of her body with her blood. Duillius, who first triumphed at Rome for a naval battle, married Bilia, a virgin of such chastity that she was an example even in that age when unchastity was a monster, not a vice. When he was already old and his body trembling, he heard himself reproached in some quarrel with foul breath, and went home sad. And when he complained to his wife that she had never warned him so that he could cure this fault, she said: "I would have, had I not thought that all men's mouths smell so." The chaste and noble woman deserves praise either way: whether she did not know her husband's fault, or bore it patiently, and her husband learned of his bodily misfortune not from the disgust of his wife but from the abuse of an enemy. Certainly a woman who takes a second husband cannot say this. Marcia, the younger daughter of Cato, when asked why after losing her husband she did not marry again, answered that she could not find a man who wanted her more than her property. By this saying she showed that wealth is usually chosen in wives rather than chastity, and that many marry wives not with their eyes but with their fingers. An excellent thing indeed, which avarice procures! The same woman, when she was mourning her husband and the matrons asked her what day would be the last of her mourning, said: "The same as of my life." I think that a woman who so sought her absent husband was not thinking of a second marriage. Brutus married Porcia as a virgin; Cato married Marcia not a virgin. But Marcia passed back and forth between Hortensius and Cato, and Marcia could live without Cato; Porcia could not live without Brutus. For women attach themselves more to husbands who are their only ones; and to have known no other is a great bond of closer affection. When a relative advised Annia to marry another husband (for she was of full age and had a good face), she said: "By no means will I do so. For if I find a good man, I do not want to fear losing him; if a bad one, what need is there to endure the worst after the best?" Porcia the younger, when a certain woman of good character who had a second husband was praised in her presence, answered: "A happy and chaste matron never marries more than once." Marcella the elder, asked by her mother whether she was glad she had married, answered: "So very glad that I want no more." Valeria, sister of the Messallas, after losing her husband Servius, would marry no one. Asked why she did so, she said that for her, her husband Servius was always alive.

I am aware that in this catalogue of women I have said much more than the custom of giving examples allows, and that a learned reader may justly blame me. But what am I to do, when the women of our time thrust the Apostle's authority at me, and before the funeral of their first husband has even gone out, recite from memory the precepts on second marriage? So that those who despise the faithfulness of Christian chastity may at least learn chastity from the pagans. There is said to be a golden little book of Theophrastus, On Marriage, in which he asks whether a wise man should marry. And having laid down that the wise man may sometimes marry if the woman is beautiful, of good character, of honorable parents, and he himself healthy and rich, he at once added: "But these things rarely all agree in a marriage. So a wise man should not marry a wife. For, first, the study of philosophy is hindered, and no one can serve books and a wife equally. Many things are necessary for the uses of matrons: costly clothes, gold, jewels, expenses, maidservants, all kinds of furniture, litters and gilded carriages. Then all night long there are chattering complaints: 'That woman goes out better dressed; this one is honored by everybody; I, poor thing, am despised in the gathering of women. Why were you looking at the neighbor? What were you saying to the maid? What did you bring me from the forum?' We cannot have a friend or a companion. She suspects that love of another is hatred of her. If there is a very learned teacher in any city, we can neither leave our wife nor go with that burden. To support a poor wife is hard; to bear a rich one is torture. Add that there is no choosing a wife, but she must be kept whatever she turns out to be. If she is ill-tempered, foolish, ugly, proud, smelly, whatever her fault, we learn it after the wedding. A horse, an ass, an ox, a dog, and the cheapest slaves, clothes too, and kettles, a wooden seat, a cup, and an earthenware pitcher are tried first and so bought; only a wife is not displayed, lest she displease before she is married. Her face must always be attended to and her beauty praised, lest, if you look at another woman, she think she displeases you. She must be called mistress, her birthday celebrated, oaths sworn by her health, wishes made that she may survive you; her nurse must be honored, and her nursemaid, her father's slave, her foster child, her handsome attendant, her curled steward, and the eunuch gelded for her long and safe lust: under these names adulteries lie hidden. Whomever she loves must be loved against your will. If you entrust the whole house to her rule, you must be her slave. If you keep anything in your own control, she will think she is not trusted, and will turn to hatred and quarrels; and unless you take care quickly, she will prepare poisons. If you let in old women and soothsayers and diviners and sellers of jewels and silk clothes, there is danger to her chastity; if you forbid them, there is the injury of suspicion. But what good is even careful watching, when an unchaste wife cannot be guarded and a chaste one ought not to be? For necessity is an unfaithful guardian of chastity, and she is truly to be called chaste who was free to sin if she wished. A beautiful woman is quickly loved; an ugly one easily desires. What many love is hard to guard; what no one thinks worth having is a nuisance to possess. Yet an ugly wife is kept with less misery than a beautiful one is guarded. Nothing is safe for which the desires of a whole people sigh. One tempts with beauty, another with wit, another with charm, another with generosity. What is attacked on every side is somehow or sometime taken. But if wives are married for the management of the house, the comfort of sickness, and escape from loneliness, a faithful slave manages much better, obeying his master's authority and following his arrangements, than a wife, who thinks herself mistress in this, that she acts against her husband's will, that is, does what pleases her, not what she is told. Friends, and home-born slaves bound by kindnesses, can sit by a sick man better than she who charges her tears to our account, and for hope of the inheritance sells her flood of tears, and, parading her anxiety, troubles the sick man's mind with despair. And if she herself is sick, one must be sick with her and never leave her bedside. Or if she is a good and pleasant wife (which is nevertheless a rare bird), we groan with her in labor and are tortured when she is in danger. But a wise man can never be alone. He has with him all who are and ever were good, and he moves his free mind wherever he wishes. What he cannot embrace with the body he embraces in thought. And if there is a lack of people, he speaks with God. He will never be less alone than when he is alone. Further, to marry a wife for the sake of children, so that our name may not perish, or that we may have support in old age and certain heirs, is most stupid. For what is it to us, as we depart from the world, if another is called by our name, when a son does not at once bear his father's name, and there are countless people called by the same name? Or what support in old age is it to bring up at home one who may die before you, or be of the most perverse character? Or certainly, when he has come to mature age, you will seem to him slow to die. Friends and relatives whom you choose by judgment are better and surer heirs than those you are forced to have whether you will or not. A surer inheritance, though, is to use up your property well while you live than to leave what you acquired by your labor to uncertain uses."

When Theophrastus discusses such things, whom of the Christians would he not put to shame, whose citizenship is in heaven, who say every day, "I desire to depart and be with Christ"? Will a fellow heir of Christ want a human heir? Will he wish for children and delight in a line of grandchildren, whom perhaps Antichrist will seize, when we read that Moses and Samuel preferred others to their own sons and did not count as their children those whom they saw displeasing to the Lord? Cicero, asked by Hirtius to marry his sister after his divorce from Terentia, declined altogether, saying that he could not give his attention equally to a wife and to philosophy. Meanwhile that excellent wife, who had drunk wisdom from Tully's fountains, married Sallust, his enemy, and thirdly Messalla Corvinus, and rolled down, as it were, by certain steps of eloquence. Socrates had two wives, Xanthippe and Myrto, the granddaughter of Aristides. When they often quarreled with each other, and he used to laugh at them because they disputed over him, a most ugly man, with snub nose, bald forehead, hairy shoulders, and bandy legs, at last they turned their attack on him, beat him badly, and chased him a long way as he fled. Once, when he had stood up to Xanthippe as she heaped endless abuse on him from a higher place, he was drenched with dirty water, and answered nothing more than, wiping his head, "I knew that rain would follow that thunder." Lucius Sulla the Fortunate (had he not had a wife!) had as his wife Metella, who was openly unchaste; and (since we are the last to learn our own ills) it was being sung at Athens and Sulla did not know; he first learned the secrets of his own house from the abuse of the enemy. To Gnaeus Pompey, when the others thought he was knowingly tolerating his unchaste wife Mucia, whom the eunuchs of Pontus and the bands of Mithridates courted, a fellow soldier on campaign revealed it, and dismayed the conqueror of the whole world with sad news. Marcus Cato the Censor had as his wife Actoria Paula, of low birth, a drunkard, uncontrolled, and (what no one could believe) haughty to Cato. I say this so that no one may think that if he marries a poor woman he has sufficiently provided for harmony. Philip, king of the Macedonians, against whom Demosthenes' Philippics thunder, was shut out by his angry wife as he was entering their bedroom according to custom; shut out, he kept silent and consoled himself for the wrong with a tragic verse. The rhetorician Gorgias recited at Olympia a very fine book on concord to the Greeks, who were then at odds with each other. His enemy Melanthius said: "This man gives us precepts on concord, who could not make himself, his wife, and his maid, three people, agree in one house." For his wife was jealous of the maid's beauty and harassed her most chaste husband with daily quarrels. Whole tragedies of Euripides are curses on women. That is why Hermione too says: "The counsels of evil women have deceived me." In Leptis, a half-barbarous city set in a desert, it is the custom that on the second day the daughter-in-law asks her mother-in-law for the loan of a pot; she at once refuses, so that you may know that saying of Terence is true, which he deliberately put ambiguously: "What is this? All mothers-in-law hate their daughters-in-law." We read of a certain nobleman among the Romans who, when his friends reproached him for divorcing a beautiful, chaste, and rich wife, stretched out his foot and said to them: "This shoe too, which you see, seems to you new and elegant; but no one but me knows where it pinches me." Herodotus writes that a woman puts off her modesty with her clothes. And our comic poet thinks him fortunate who has never married a wife. Why should I mention Pasiphae, Clytemnestra, and Eriphyle? The first, wallowing in luxury, being a king's wife, is said to have sought union with a bull; the second to have killed her husband for love of an adulterer; the third to have betrayed Amphiaraus and preferred a golden necklace to her husband's life. Whatever the tragedies swell with, and whatever overthrows houses, cities, and kingdoms, is the rivalry of wives and concubines. Parents' hands are armed against their children; unspeakable feasts are served; and for the rape of one little woman Europe and Asia clash in a ten-year war. We read of some women who, divorced on the second day of their marriage, at once married again. Both husbands are to be blamed: the one whom she displeased so quickly, and the one whom she pleased so quickly. Epicurus, the champion of pleasure (though his disciple Metrodorus had Leontion as his wife), says that the wise man should rarely marry, because many troubles are mixed with marriage. And as riches, honors, bodily health, and the other things we call indifferent are neither good nor bad, but, set as it were in the middle, become good or bad by use and outcome, so wives too are placed on the border between good and bad. But it is grievous for a wise man to fall into doubt whether he is going to marry a good or a bad one. Chrysippus ridiculously advises the wise man to marry, lest he offend Jupiter Gamelius and Genethlius. For on that reasoning the Latins will not have to marry, because they have no nuptial Jupiter. And if, as he thinks, the names of the gods prejudge the lives of men, then he who sits down willingly will offend Jupiter Stator.

Aristotle and Plutarch and our Seneca wrote books on marriage, from which some of the foregoing also comes, and what we add here: "Love of beauty is forgetfulness of reason and close to madness; a foul vice, wholly unbecoming a sound mind. It confuses counsels, breaks lofty and noble spirits, drags them down from great thoughts to the lowest; it makes men querulous, irritable, rash, harshly domineering, slavishly fawning, useless to all, and at last to love itself. For while it burns insatiably with the desire for enjoyment, it wastes more time in suspicions, tears, and complaints; it makes itself hated, and at last is hateful to itself." The whole attack on love is set out in Plato, and Lysias explains all its drawbacks, that it is led not by judgment but by frenzy; and above all that a most troublesome guardian lies in wait over the beauty of wives. Seneca reports moreover that he knew a certain distinguished man who, when about to go out in public, used to tie his wife's breastband around his chest, and could not do without her presence even for a moment of an hour; and husband and wife would drink no draught unless it had been touched by the lips of each in turn; and they did other things no less silly, into which the improvident force of burning affection broke out. The origin of the love was honorable, but its excess was ugly. And it makes no difference from how honorable a cause one goes mad. That is why Xystus too says in his Sentences: "He who loves his own wife too ardently is an adulterer." For with another's wife all love is shameful; with one's own, excessive love. A wise man ought to love his wife with judgment, not with passion. Let him govern the impulses of pleasure and not be carried headlong into intercourse. Nothing is fouler than to love a wife like an adulteress. Certainly those who say they join themselves to wives and raise children for the sake of the state and the human race should at least imitate the cattle, and when their wives' bellies have swelled, not destroy their children; nor show themselves to their wives as lovers but as husbands. Some marriages have grown out of adulteries; and, shameful thing! the same men taught chastity to those from whom they had taken it away. So satiety quickly dissolves such marriages. As soon as the allurement of lust is gone, what pleased has become cheap. "For what shall I say," says Seneca, "of poor men, a great many of whom are hired to take the name of husband in order to evade the laws passed against the unmarried? How can a man who has been married govern morals, prescribe chastity, and keep a husband's authority?" It is the saying of a most learned man that chastity must above all be preserved, for when it is lost every virtue falls. In it lies the chief place among women's virtues. It commends the poor woman, exalts the rich, redeems the ugly, adorns the beautiful; it deserves well of ancestors, whose blood it does not corrupt with stolen offspring; well of children, who need neither blush for their mother nor doubt their father; well above all of itself, which it protects from the outrage of a stranger's body. There is no greater calamity of captivity than to be dragged to another's lust. The consulship makes men illustrious; eloquence carries them to an eternal name; military glory and a triumph consecrate a new family. There are many things that ennoble outstanding talents. A woman's virtue is properly chastity. This made Lucretia equal to Brutus, and perhaps preferred her, since Brutus learned from a woman that he could not be a slave. This made Cornelia equal to Gracchus, this Porcia to the other Brutus. Tanaquil is better known than her husband. Antiquity has already hidden him among the many names of kings; her a virtue rare among women has fixed too deeply in the memory of all ages for her to fall out of it. Let married women imitate, then, Theano, Cleobulina, Gorgo, Timoclea, the Claudias and the Cornelias; and when they see the Apostle pardoning second marriage to evil women, let them read that before our religion shone in the world, the once-married always had honor among matrons; that through them the rites of Female Fortune were usually performed; that no priest was twice married, no flamen had two wives; that the hierophants of Athens even to this day are castrated by drinking hemlock, and once chosen for the pontificate cease to be men.

His second proposition is that those who have been baptized cannot be tempted by the devil. And lest he seem to say this foolishly, he added: "But whoever have been tempted, I have shown were baptized with water only and not with the Spirit, as we read of Simon Magus. That is why John too says: 'Everyone who is born of God does not commit sin, because his seed remains in him, and he cannot sin, because he is born of God. By this the children of God and the children of the devil are made manifest.' And at the end of the letter: 'Everyone who is born of God does not sin; but his birth from God keeps him, and the evil one does not touch him.'"