They are your defence as well as your glory; for every gem is turned into a shield.

14. Beware also of a blabbing tongue and of itching ears. Neither detract from others nor listen to detractors. "Thou satest," says the psalmist, "and spakest against thy brother; thou slanderedst thine own mother's son. These things hast thou done and I kept silence; thou thoughtest wickedly that I shall be such an one as thyself, but I will reprove thee and set them before thine eyes." 58 Set what? It means your words, all that you have said about others, so that you may be judged by your own sentence and found guilty yourself of the faults which you blamed in others. It is no excuse to say: "If others tell me things, I cannot be rude to them." No one cares to speak to an unwilling listener. An arrow never lodges in a stone; often it recoils and wounds the shooter. Let the detractor learn from your unwillingness to listen not to be so ready to detract. Solomon says: "Meddle not with them that are given to detraction: for their calamity shall rise suddenly; and who knoweth the destruction of them both?" 59-of the detractor, that is, and of the person who lends an ear to his detraction.

15. It is your duty to visit the sick, to know people's homes, ladies and their children, and to be trusted with the secrets of the great. Count it your duty, therefore, to keep your tongue chaste as well as your eyes. Never discuss a woman's looks nor let one house know what is going on in another. Hippocrates, 60 before he will teach his pupils, makes them take an oath and compels them to swear to his words. He binds them over to silence, and prescribes for them their language, their gait, their dress, their manners. How much more reason have we, to whom the medicine of the soul has been committed, to love the homes of all Christians as though they were our own. Let them know us as comforters in sorrow rather than as guests in time of joy. A clergyman soon becomes an object of contempt if, however often he is asked out to dinner, he never refuses.

16. Let us never seek for presents and rarely accept them when we are asked to do so. Somehow or other the very man who begs leave to offer you a gift holds you the cheaper for your acceptance of it; while, if you refuse it, it is wonderful how much more he will come to respect you. The preacher of

58 Ps. 50 (49):20-21.

59 Prov. 24:21-22.

60 The great physician of the fifth century B.C. The oath may be found in the Loeb Hippocrates, I, 291 ff.

continence must not be a maker of marriages. Why does he who reads the Apostle's words, "it remaineth that they that have wives be as though they had none" 61-why does he press a virgin to marry? Why does a priest who must be a monogamist, urge a widow to be a digamist? 62 How can the clergy be managers and stewards of other men's households and estates, when they are bidden to disregard even their own interests? 63 To wrest a thing from a friend is theft but to cheat the Church is sacrilege. When you have received money to be doled out to the poor, to be cautious or to hesitate while crowds are starving, or-and everyone can see how criminal this isto subtract a portion for yourself, is to be more cruel than any robber. I am tortured with hunger, and are you to judge how much will satisfy my cravings? Either divide immediately what you have received, or, if you are a timid almoner, send the donor off to distribute his own gifts. Your purse ought not to be full while I remain in need. No one can look after what is mine better than I can. He is the best almoner who keeps nothing for himself.

17. You have compelled me, my dear Nepotian, in spite of the castigation which my treatise on Virginity has had to endure -the one which I wrote for the saintly Eustochium at Romeyou have compelled me after ten years have passed once more to open my mouth at Bethlehem and to expose myself to the stabs of every tongue. I could either escape from criticism by writing nothing, a course made impossible by your request; or else I knew that when I took up my pen all the shafts of calumny would be launched against me. I beg my opponents to hold their peace and to desist from calumny, for I have written not as an enemy but as a friend. I have not inveighed against sinners; I have but warned them to sin no more. My judgment of myself has been as strict as my judgment of them. When I wished to remove the mote from my neighbour's eye, I have first cast out the beam in my own. 64 I have injured no one. Not a name has been hinted at. My words have not been aimed at individuals and my criticism of short-comings has been quite general. If any one insists on being angry with me, he will have first to own that he himself suits my description.

61 1 Cor. 7:29.

62 I Tim. 3:2. Monogamist, digamist (not bigamist), marrying once only or twice successively. See Ambrose, Letter 63:62-4 (p. 274) and notes there. 63 There is much early canon law against this practice, often based on II Tim. 2:4. 64 Matt. 7:3-5.

Letter 107: To Laeta

INTRODUCTION

AETA BELONGED TO

L

THE GROUP OF HIGH-BORN

Roman ladies to whom Jerome acted as a spiritual director and whom he encouraged to practise a life of asceticism, whether at home or in a monastery. She was the daughter of a pagan, Albinus, but had married the Christian Toxotius, son of the elder Paula. She was also the cousin of Marcella, one of Jerome's closest friends.

While very little can be said of Laeta herself, her daughter Paula appears quite often in Jerome's correspondence. The present letter was successful in its plea that she should be sent to Bethlehem as a consecrated virgin, to be trained in the monastery of her grandmother Paula and her aunt Eustochium. But or so it would seem-Laeta was too affectionate or too prudent a mother to send her there in infancy or early girlhood. There is no mention of the elder Paula ever seeing her, and the first evidence of her presence in Bethlehem comes from Letter 134 (written in 415-416), where Eustochium and Paula send their greetings through Jerome to Augustine, and where we hear of a presbyter, Firmus, who is travelling to Ravenna, Africa and Sicily ob rem earum, that is, presumably, on business concerning their estates. With Eustochium she went through the raids made by the Pelagian party upon her monastery (Letters 134-7), and on her aunt's death in 418-419 she took charge of it, though still very young. In one of Jerome's last letters, written in 419 to Augustine and his friend Alypius, she is described as neptis vestra (grand-daughter), spiritually, of course, but in contrast to Eustochium, filia vestra.

The date of her birth cannot be determined with absolute certainty, but when this letter was written she was still unweaned (813). The letter unquestionably precedes the death of the elder Paula in A.D. 404, and Cavallera argues reasonably

enough that it also precedes her long illness of 402-403, which would otherwise have been mentioned in §13. He places it in 400, concluding from §2 that it ante-dates the destruction of the Temple of Marnas at Gaza in 401; though one might rather infer that Jerome is speaking rhetorically of an event which has recently occurred or at a time when the doom of the temple is known and imminent, and thus in 401 or 402.1 Wright puts Paula's birth in 397 and the letter in 403, but without discussion.

With the substance of the letter we can compare Jerome's letter (128) to Gaudentius, on the education of his daughter. Written in A.D. 413, it is shorter, but similar. Jerome's ideas may then be compared with the almost contemporary tract of John Chrysostom, On the Education of Children 2 (the Golden Book), whose authenticity seems now, after some questioning, to be generally admitted. There is an amusing combination of the three documents in J. G. Davies, Social Life of Early Christians, Chapter 5, where it is justly pointed out that, whatever Christian parents decided to do about sending their sons to the public schools, there were none for girls.

1 Cavallera dates the destruction to 401, without discussion. According to Mark the Deacon, it would be 402. See note on § 2 below.

2 M. L. W. Laistner, Christianity and Pagan Culture in the Later Roman Empire, 1951, contains a translation of Chrysostom's tract.

Letter 107: To Laeta

THE TEXT

1. The blessed apostle Paul, writing to the Corinthians and instructing in sacred discipline a church still untaught in Christ, has among other commandments laid down also this: "The woman which hath an husband that believeth not, and if he be pleased to dwell with her, let her not leave him. For the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the believing wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the brother; else were your children unclean, but now are they holy."1 Should any person have supposed hitherto that the bonds of discipline are too far relaxed and that too great indulgence is conceded by the teacher, let him look at the house of your father, a man of the highest rank and learning, but one still walking in darkness; and he will perceive, as the result of the Apostle's counsel, sweet fruit growing from a bitter stock and precious balsams exhaled from common canes. You yourself are the offspring of a mixed marriage; but you and my friend Toxotius are the parents of Paula. Who could have believed that to the pontiff2 Albinus a granddaughter should be born in answer to a mother's vows; that a delighted grandfather should hear from the little one's faltering lips the song of Alleluia, and that in his old age he should nurse in his arms one of Christ's own virgins? Our expectations have been fully gratified. The one unbeliever is sanctified by his holy and believing family. For, when a man is surrounded by a believing crowd of children and grandchildren, he is a candidate for the faith. (I for my part think that, had he possessed such kinsfolk, even Jove himself might have come to believe in Christ!) For though he may spit upon my letter and laugh at it, and though he may call

1 I Cor. 7:13-4.

2 Pontifex, one of the State priesthoods, indicative rather of social status than religion. The college of pontiffs advised the State on all matters of cultus.