[474] Cantacuzenus, i, 41; this could easily be done, as the clerical staff of each church was very numerous—over five hundred in St. Sophia; Novel iii, 1.
[475] Chrysostom, In Epist. I Tim., ii, Hom. viii, 1 (in Migne, xi, 541); In Psal. xlviii, 5 (in Migne, vi, 507).
[476] Chrysostom, De Virgin., 61 (in Migne, i, 581).
[477] Chrysostom, In Matth. Hom. lxxiii, 3 (in Migne, vii, 677). “In the temple of God,” says he, “you commit fornication and adultery at the very time you are admonished against such sins.”
[478] Chrysostom, In Epist. I Tim., ii, Hom. viii, 9 (in Migne, xi, 543).
[479] Chrysostom, Epist. ad Innocent., Bishop of Rome, 3 (in Migne, iii, 533). He here describes how the women had to fly naked from the Baptistery during the riots connected with his deposition from the see of Constantinople. It must be noted, however, that the severe modesty of modern times had scarcely been developed amid the simplicity of the ancient world, as it has not among some fairly civilized peoples even at the present day.
[480] I had almost said piety, one of the words destined, with the extinction of the thing, to become obsolete in the future, or to be applied to some other mental conception.
[481] Chrysostom, In Matth. Hom. xvii, 2 (in Migne, vii, 256). He inveighs against the farce of ascetics taking virgins to live with them, who are supposed to remain intact; cf. De Virginitate (in Migne, i, 533); also Cod. Theod., XVI, ii, 20, to which Godefroy supplies practical illustrations.
[482] Chrysostom, In Epist. ad Coloss., iii, Hom. vii, 5 (in Migne, xi, 350); in Matth. Hom. lxxxiii, 4 (in Migne, vii, 750). Or even of more costly materials, gold, crystal; Plutarch, Adv. Stoic., 22; Clement Alex. Paedag., ii, 3. The notion of unparalleled luxury has been associated with the Theodosian age, but without sufficient reason. It was rather the age of a man of genius who denounced it persistently and strenuously, and whose diatribes have come down to us in great bulk, viz., Chrysostom. The period of greatest extravagance was, in fact, during the last century of the Republic and the first of the Empire, and the names of Crassus, Lucullus, Nero, Vitellius, etc., are specially connected with it.
[483] Chrysostom, In Epist. ad Coloss., i, Hom. 4 (in Migne, xi, 304).