Note 95 — X. CHRYSOSTOM. 347–407 A.D.

The male sex, according to our ideas, might have been more properly apostrophised; and St. Chrysostom may seem, in this passage and elsewhere, to be somewhat partial in his invective. Candour, indeed, forces us to remark that the “Golden-mouthed,” in common with many others of the Fathers, and with the Greek and Eastern world in general, depreciated the qualities, both moral and mental, of the feminine sex. That the weaker are what the stronger choose to make them, is an obvious truth generally ignored in all ages and countries—by modern satirists and other writers, as well as by a Simonides or Solomon. The partial severity of the Archbishop of Constantinople, it is proper to add, may be justified, in some measure, by the contemporary history of the Court of Byzantium, where the beautiful and licentious empress Eudoxia ruled supreme.