I am grateful for the opportunity of returning to Clement, a richly human and attractive writer, and making one of his outstanding works more accessible to English readers.

I have written about Clement in my Clement of Alexandria in the Twayne World Authors Series 289 (1974) as well as in reviews and articles, and have occasionally repeated myself. I express elsewhere my thanks to G. W. Butterworth and C. Mondésert.

Here I must say yet another warm vote of thanks to Lesley Roff for incredibly coping with the typing of one of the messiest MSS even she has ever tamed...

We know little of Clement’s youth. His name, Titus Flavius Clemens, is Latin not Greek, and suggests that an ancestor was a freedman of T. Flavius Clemens, a relative of emperors and himself perhaps a Christian convert. Clement must have been born about a.d. 150, in either Athens or Alexandria (Epiphanius, Adversus lxxx haereses 32.6). He was a convert, not a Christian by birth (Paedagogus 1.1.1, 2.8.62; Eusebius, Demonstratio evangelica 2.2.64), and knew the pagan religions from within. Curiously, he tells us little of his conversion; it was perhaps gradual rather than cataclysmic.

(2) He travelled in Magna Graecia, the...

1(1) ...² “for you to read them readily and to be able to keep them.”³ Ought the writings not to be generally available, or only to some people? If the former, what is the point of the writings? If the latter, are they for the worthy or the unworthy? It would be plainly ridiculous to reject the writing of worth-while authors and accept those who are very different in the quality of their composition. (2) Are we to give the right to write this disgraceful stuff to Theopompus and Timaeus with their slanderous fictions, and on top of them Epicurus,...

1(1) The next point would be, since Scripture affirms the Greeks to be “thieves” of foreign¹ philosophy, to grasp how this is to be briefly demonstrated. We shall begin by establishing that in their writings they have copied the miracle stories of our history. We shall further prove that they plagiarized our most important doctrines and debased them—I have already demonstrated that our Scriptures are older than theirs—in matters concerning faith, wisdom, revealed knowledge, and scientific knowledge, hope and love, and concerning repentance, self-control, and above all fear of God (really a swarm² of the virtues of truth)....

1(1) The sect of Valentinus justify physical union from heaven from divine emanations, and approve of marriage. The followers of Basilides say that when the apostles enquired whether it was not better to refrain from marriage, the Lord answered, “It is not everyone who can accept this saying: some are eunuchs from birth, others from necessity.”¹ (2) They explain the saying something as follows. Some men have from birth a physical aversion in relation to women. They follow their physical make-up and do well not to marry. (3) These, they say, are the eunuchs from birth. Those who are eunuchs...