Page:The age of Justinian and Theodora (Volume 1).djvu/145

 *stood the pronouncements of Trajan and Alexander, the diatribes of the Christian Fathers, and even the laws of Constantius and Valentinian, by which such delinquents are condemned to be burnt alive. Preaching at Antioch a century before this time, the earnest and fearless Chrysostom cannot refrain from expressing his amazement that that metropolis, in its open addiction to this vice, does not meet with the biblical fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. Nor is there any evidence to refute the assumption that Constantinople at the beginning of the sixth century is in this respect less impure than the Syrian capital.

spectacle addressed particularly to the paederasts, against which Chrysostom had vainly launched his declamations; In Psalm xli, 2 (in Migne, v, 157). "Boys, assuming the dress and manners of women, with a mincing gait and erotic gestures, ravished the senses of the observers so that men raged against each other in their impassioned fury. This stain on our manners you obliterated," etc.; Procopius, Gaz. Panegyr., 16. The saint is much warmer and more analytical in his invective.]*
 * [Footnote: to have been somewhat of a purist for his time, abolished a theatrical