Adornments of empire: Early Christian dress and the colonial composition of gender

Abstract

This article considers anti-adornment rhetoric circulating in Roman antiquity and in two of the earliest and most extensive treatments of dress by early Christian writers, namely, treatises by Tertullian of Carthage and Clement of Alexandria. It treats ancient Roman-period discourses of anti-adornment to reveal how configurations of gender were entangled in Roman-imperial race–making and colonial projects. Tertullian’s and Clement’s treatments of adornment, it argues, likewise rehearse Roman colonial imaginaries. Their declamations against luxurious dress and adornment are read here as registering Roman colonial anxieties about the intermingling of populations, the influx of goods and peoples, and the fluctuating dynamics of social belonging and self-display Roman imperial order demanded. It concludes that these Christian authors’ discourse on gendered adornment indicates their investment in and contributions to ancient Roman ethno-racial and imperial formations. Finally, in conversation with Americanist Anne Anlin Cheng’s concept of “ornamentalism,” it offers a brief consideration of how their rhetoric figures in the longue durée of western imaginaries of Asiatic femininity.

Introduction

And do you not know that you are an Eve? . . . Because of your deserved sentence—death—even the son of God had to die. And now you have in mind to cover yourself beyond your tunics of skins (super pelliceas tuas tunicas)? Come now, if from the beginning of the world the Milesians sheared sheep, and the Serians spun silk from trees, and the Tyrians dyed, and the Phrygians embroidered, and the Babylonians made tapestries (Milesii oves tonderent, et Seres arbores nerent, et Tyrii tinguerent, et Phryges insuerent, et Babylonii intexerent) . . . Eve, expelled from paradise and already dead, would have desired these things, I suppose! . . .

—Tertullian, Cult. fem.1.1.1–3 ¹

Ancient Christian literature is strewn with references to dress and objects of adornment. While men’s clothing and grooming appear in our sources, women’s toilette more definitively occupied early Christian writers’ moralizing diatribes, and did so for centuries. ² (While outside the scope of this paper, this concern likewise informs early Jewish sources from the Hellenistic period into late antiquity). ³ When historians have examined early Christian, and other ancient, treatments of women’s fashion, however, we have focused on gender performance, gendered authority, and women’s “agency” as our analytics, and as our conclusions for what, ultimately, animated these early Christians’ investments in things sartorial. ⁴ Tertullian’s infamous quote at the head of this essay, for example, has been rigorously scrutinized (and rightly so!) for its misogyny, its assertion of Eve’s culpability for sin ⁵ —but what often goes without sustained comment is the barrage of ethnic markers that follow Tertullian’s itemization of the dyed, embroidered fine garments that women, all those Eves, covet. Feminist historians especially have been rigorously attentive to gender in early Christian writings; we have, though, been less sensitive to the registers of colonialization and racialization that underwrite constructions of gender in them. In conversation with postcolonial feminisms, Maia Kotrosits has recently prompted us to attend to the constitutive role gender plays in racialization in our ancient sources. “Gender, as we have received it,” she argues, “is effectively a subcategory of colonialism and racialization . . . there is no gendered body outside or apart from the production—and reproduction—of racialized populations.” ⁶

In what follows, I consider early Christian discourses on dress to highlight how the rhetoric of gender worked to sustain ancient ethno-racial configurations. Specifically, my analysis centers on two of our earliest and most extensive treatments of women’s adornment by the late second and early third century writers, Tertullian of Carthage and Clement of Alexandria. Tracing a discourse of anti-adornment as it circulated in antiquity into these early Christian sources, I show how gender was entangled in Roman–imperial race-making ⁷ and colonial projects, as well as the tensions adhering in them. Early Christian authors, like their Roman counterparts, rendered “luxury” alien, a sign of moral depravity, deceit, and “oriental” excess, especially (though not exclusively) manifest in women’s makeup, clothing, and jewelry. ⁸ More than simply repeating earlier fulminations against luxury, though, these early Christian authors amplified and embellished this discourse as a capture for their own fraught affiliations and colonial subjectivities. Their rhetoric surfaces Roman colonial anxieties about the intermingling of populations, the influx of goods and peoples, and the fluctuating dynamics of social belonging and self-display Roman imperial order demanded. My principle aim is to read Tertullian and Clement’s gendered anti-adornment discourse as invested in and contributing to these ancient ethno-racial and imperial formations. In my conclusion, however, I take the argument further by locating their anti-adornment rhetoric, albeit in a preliminary gesture, in the longue durée of western racialization of Asiatic femininity.

“Making up empire”: ethno-racial imaginaries in the Roman anti-adornment tradition ⁹

While the Roman colonial order differed from its modern European counterparts, it evinced similar logics, as well as fears and fascinations, ¹⁰ ones that reverberated in later European and more contemporary colonial and racial projects. Gender norms and roles, domestic arrangements, sexual decorum, child-rearing, as well as hygiene and clothing, all occupied colonial regimes of the modern period for the ways they served colonial race-making. ¹¹ Distinctions between European colonials and those whom they colonialized, in other words relied on, writes Ann Stoler, “racial difference constructed in gender terms.” ¹² Furthermore, these European regimes routinely rationalized their colonial expansions with reference to the civilizing force of the Roman empire, often borrowing and reworking ethno-racial configurations that circulated in Roman, and earlier Greek, and so too, late antique Christian sources to do so. ¹³ In the Roman context, gender was bound to colonial order, to ethno-racial hierarchies, and its production of “Roman” citizens. And while Rome envisioned its civic identity as expansive and incorporative (citizenship could be acquired, for instance, and Roman ways of being coexisted alongside other ethnic, civic, tribal, or familial customs), it nonetheless shared with its European successors a colonial imaginary that demonstrated an aversion to the exotic other and an erotically charged drive toward its possession. ¹⁴

Eastern luxury, on one side, and uncouth barbarism, on the other, threatened and beckoned as the borders of the empire moved and extended through conquest, or so Roman conservatives warned. ¹⁵ Roman period representations of eastern others could, of course, present a more sanguine picture—the harmonious incorporation of enemies, now friends, a motif we find in Augustan images of the Parthians, or the inclusion of eastern cults, like Cybele, in the center of Roman civic life. ¹⁶ Yet operating alongside images of “friendly foes” was a dualistic binary of barbarism and Asiatic extravagance.

Fraught with anxious tensions, colonial regimes are spectral. In the Roman context, spectrality relied on bodily performances, coded with gender norms, which turned all Roman subjects into voyeurs and objects of visual scrutiny. ¹⁷ Bodily comportment drew attention for what it could signal about ethnic or racial belonging, but more than this, it was thought to reveal affective and moral dispositions. It is perhaps not surprising that in the second century CE when the borders of the Roman empire had expanded to their greatest limits, physiognomy—a pseudo-science claiming that one’s inner virtues and vices were revealed in bodily morphology, gesture and gait—had something of a renaissance among orators and statesman, and early Christians as well. ¹⁸ Physiognomy appealed to the notion that authenticity (just who and what one was) could be made transparent to the trained eye. Its purchase intensified as the empire expanded and enabled even more variable social and material exchanges. ¹⁹

In this Roman colonial context, clothing and objects of adornment took on critical symbolic importance: they could reveal one’s positionality and one’s character, though they could just as easily enable one’s deceit. In fact, the most common complaint Roman authors waged against adornment was its power of deception. ²⁰ Clothing is “protean,” and changes in fashion might not so easily be taken off. ²¹ Clothing and accoutrement additionally occupy colonial fantasy about display because they signify encounter. For instance, as scholars of colonialism in the British Atlantic have noted material commodity goods routinely mediated people’s experiences of empire. ²² While ancient circuits of commercial exchange were more modest, under Roman imperial expansion access to exotic goods did sharply increase in its territories. ²³ While colonial material exchanges are always multi-directional, Roman colonial anxieties emphasized that which is marked as novel, as foreign. Luxurious goods, Romans feared, corrupted the soul and signaled moral decline: “Rome is being shattered (frangitur) by her own prosperity (suis bonis)” laments Propertius (3.13.30). ²⁴ Desire for luxury goods was irrational, the seeking of frivolity and novelty, indicating avarice, Seneca the Younger warns: “The wants of the body are trifling . . . if we covet anything beyond, we toil to serve, not our needs, but our vices” (Helv. 10.2). ²⁵ A common Roman imperial view held that fashion and luxury made their way to Rome after the destruction of Carthage and the colonialization of the “east.” ²⁶ In fact, this anti-adornment discourse emerged in the late Republic—at the very moment when Rome became a colonial power—and it proliferated as a trope into the imperial period and beyond. Moreover, anti-adornment discourse, attended by various visual elaborations (such as we find in statuary and build monuments), ²⁷ expanded alongside the quite literal circulation of luxurious commodities and new populations throughout the empire.

Rome’s luxurious goods did regularly have a foreign provenance often from the eastern peripheries of the empire, a fact that provided Roman writers a ready complaint that sartorial decadence and novel looks were morally corrupting. ²⁸ This connection pertained not just to actual materials and fashion styles made available to wealthy Romans but also to the enslaved ornatrices who created looks for their owners. ²⁹ Roman fears about the arrival of foreign products and styles recycled tropes from the ancient Greeks and established the western genealogy of an orientalizing vision of the east suffused in opulence. ³⁰ This repurposed link provided a capture for fears about the potential social-political changes wrought by the expansion of the empire, the threat that the incorporation of new peoples and goods might harbor.

In this context, Roman writers embellished visions of chaste matrons who preserved the moral character and exceptionalism of the state, aligning them with the body politic. Through the stalwart chastity of its matrons, they averred, Rome would be protected from the extravagances of foreign influence. Epitaphs, portrait statuary, and literature championed univira, women devoted to one husband, who spun clothes, ran efficient households, raised prolific families, and dressed modestly and austerely. ³¹ Historians, naturalists, and even satirists, waxed romantic about the Roman matrons of the Republican and even more distant past. ³² The lesson to draw from the story of Lucretia, for instance, was that it was better to die than to live as a sexually compromised woman. ³³ These matrons ensured the integrity of the state by way of domestic simplicity and fearsome protection of their chastity. “Here lies Amymone wife of Marcus best and most beautiful, worker of wool, pious, chaste, thrifty, faithful, stayer-at-home,” reads a first century BCE inscription. ³⁴ In this, unornamented dress was seen as a sure indicator of matronal virtue. Thus, Seneca the Younger writes about his mother, Helvia,

Unchastity, the greatest evil of our time, has never classed you with the majority of women; jewels have not moved you, nor pearls; to your eyes the glitter of riches has not seemed the greatest boon of the human race. (Helv. 15.3) ³⁵

Cornelia, long-suffering mother of the Gracchi, notably shamed a female friend, who boasted about jewelry, by pointing to her own children and remarking: “these are my jewels” (ornamenta sunt mea) (Val. Max. 4.4). ³⁶ Likewise the poet Statius offers a compliment about the conservatism of a Roman courtier’s wife: “were you to offer her Babylonian riches or heavy Lydian treasure or alluring wealth of Indians, Chinese, or Arabs, she would have preferred to die in poverty and chastity . . .” (Silvae 5.1.60–63). ³⁷

Gender, thus, was conceptually tied to and secured Roman notions of citizenship as well as its borders, its ethno-racial hierarchies, in short, its biopolitical order. ³⁸ In the age of European discovery, far-away lands were feminized and eroticized, a tradition that gave rise to European “porno-tropics,” images of “monstrous sexualities” populating uncharted territories. ³⁹ But this pattern was already firmly rooted in the Greek and Roman imaginations. Take the Amazonian warrior at the edge of empire: bare breasted (monstrously so—in some renderings she had cut off one breast to better hold her quiver), homoerotic, and murderous (Figure 1). ⁴⁰

Figure 1.

Temple of Apollo Frieze, fifth century BCE, Ancient Bassae (Messenia, Greece). The Greeks fighting the Amazons. British Museum. Author Photo.

Moreover, sexual conquest was written into Rome’s very founding myths, as Celene Lillie has demonstrated, such as the Sabine women, or again, Lucretia (the aftermath of her rape by the tyrant, Sextus Tarquinius, and subsequent suicide birthed the Republic). ⁴¹ Imagery—notably in the reliefs of the Julio-Claudian period Sebasteion—could represent imperial conquest in a gendered language of sexual violence and subjugation. ⁴² Thus, the image of Claudius’ violent suppression of Brittania draws iconographically from earlier, Greek period imagery of the bare-breasted Amazon (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Sebasteion, first century CE, Aphrodisias Museum, Turkey. Claudius subdues Britannia. Photo Dick Osseman, Wikimedia Commons (Licensed for reprint by Creative Commons Attribution–Share Alike 4.0 International).

Roman period anti-adornment discourse and the colonial fantasies to which it was fused pivoted on a link between “woman” as raw matter to be cultivated, to be given structure. Makeup (cultus) ⁴³ at once figured as medicine, potion, and poison, explains Amy Richlin, something vile covering something vile. So Ovid warns a male lover not to happen on a woman at her toilette: the sight and smell of the foul “drugs” (medicamia) she paints on only to “melt and drip into her warm bosom,” will induce nausea, not desire (Am. 350–356). ⁴⁴ This is a link, as we will see, that heightened the degradedness of a woman’s own body; the arts of cultus were nonetheless recommended as necessary to “fixing up” and civilizing that which is out of order. ⁴⁵ In addition, the adorned female body could indicate the fearsome side of empire, writes Maria Wyke, “the visible emblem of a whole network of social vices: luxury, extravagance, corruption and Orientalism.” ⁴⁶ Men could similarly be praised or derided for their avoidance of opulent dress, even so, such characterizations operated on an equation that the predilection for luxury was both feminine and alien. ⁴⁷

Of course this anti-adornment discourse flattens the possible meanings of objects, bracketing other interpretations of these aesthetic items, and ones presumably held by the female owners who used them. ⁴⁸ Bodily accoutrement, most especially jewelry, could, from another point of view, reveal wealth, status, and style; they are, citing Kelly Olson, part of “the construction of the self as a work of art.” ⁴⁹ While I do not ignore such complexities—namely, that material culture can tell us about the self-presentation and tastes of ancient groups who are less represented in extant literature—here I emphasize how, in moralizing about adornment, particularly that enjoyed by women, Roman writers expressed their own anxieties about maintaining ethno-racial hierarchies and the consumptive excesses that Roman imperial expansion enabled.

Indeed, in this anti-adornment discourse “woman,” a metonymy for the empire, was figured not just as a consumer but also strangely elided with the commodities she enjoyed: “You are at home yourself, Galla, but you are made in the middle of Suburba,” bemuses the poet Martial; “your hair is manufactured in your absence (fiant absentes . . . comae). You lay your teeth aside at night . . . stored in a hundred caskets (pyxidibus). Your face does not sleep with you . . .” (Epigram. 9.37). ⁵⁰ So tight was the link between “woman” and decorative object that it could be materially expressed in the tools of a woman’s actual cultus. The exquisite silver Projecta Casket, part of the Esquiline treasure now housed at the British Museum, provides a striking example (Figure 3). It features a Christian bride, to whom this toiletry box was likely gifted, appearing at her toilet, adorned with the various accoutrement her own cosmetic box would have held.

Figure 3.

Projecta Casket, fourth century CE. British Museum. Lower front panel with women at her toilette. (Registration # 1866,1229.1). Author Photo.

Such circular referentiality—that conflates the tools of adornment with the female bodies they adorn (operating on the view that both are objects for male viewing pleasure) ⁵¹ —appears in other examples too, notes Wyke, like hairpins whose decorative detail is the bust of a woman with a coiffed head (Figure 4). ⁵² As Amy Richlin has argued, such conflations could render the tools of a woman’s toilette “sexualized, abjected,” ⁵³ the contents of so many cosmetic boxes (pyxides) a misogynistic semiotic that likened her face and mouth to her genitalia. ⁵⁴ Her cultus covers over that which is degraded, and so too her pyxides reveal that which is the abominable and foul.

Figure 4.

Left, Bone Hairpin, second century CE, with Women’s Coiffed Head. British Museum (GR 1772.3.11–105). Author Photo.

No figure in classical antiquity better represented this fusion between cosmetic objects, affectation and foreignness, however, than the “courtesan.” Marked as hailing from the “east” and aligned with theatricality she was conceived as a decorative art object, “a commodity spectacle.” ⁵⁵ She was the symbol of artificial decadence. ⁵⁶ Indeed, her link to exoticism and affectation made her an especially rich subject of comedy and philosophical dialogue. ⁵⁷ She could be used as a shaming tactic too; her unbounded body a synecdoche for the empire without boundary. For instance, in a scathing account of Messalina, wife of Claudius, Juvenal imagines her in a brothel, outfitted with a blonde wig, bearing the Greek name Lyciscae (“She-wolf”) that tie “her with the barbarian and the bestial . . .,” writes Sandra Joshel, in an image that collapses “the distinction between Roman and barbarian, empire and its frontier.” ⁵⁸ This meretricious woman of ancient polemics and satire likewise haunted early Christian rhetoric against adornment to which I now turn.

Making up “Christian” women

Tertullian’s comments on women’s dress and ornamentation appear principally (though not exclusively) ⁵⁹ in his two short homilies De cultu feminarum. The first book deals with women’s ornatus (jewelry) and, the second, cultus (makeup and coiffure) (on the distinction, see Cult. fem. 1.4.1–2). ⁶⁰ Clement’s elaborate instructions on grooming and adornment appear in his ethical instruction book, the Paedagogus; clothing is one of the main topics along with gourmandizing, sleep, sexual activity, and other matters of bodily decorum. ⁶¹ While Tertullian and Clement target their sartorial advice to a Christian audience, their concerns about such matters are not wholly novel. These writings might best be described as encyclopedic bits (often quite literally taken from earlier sources) on women’s, and to a lesser degree men’s, ⁶² toilette and dress, threaded with Christian moralizing and scriptural proof-texts. Their declamations against adornment registers an imperial epistemology inherent in their efforts to catalog luxurious objects through literary citations. ⁶³ Tertullian’s and Clement’s knowledge of gems and their origins, of women’s toilette and its repugnant character, of fears that women, in their penchant for jewels, make-up, and affected appearance, assault simplicity and humility and act the part of “whores” (e.g., Paed. 3.13.1 and Cult. fem. 2.9.4) rehearse the Roman tropes that I have traced above: adornment signals luxurious excess, foreign corruption, artifice and moral degradation (Paed 3.11.1–3; Cult. fem. 2.5.5), and are predilections associated especially with women (e.g., Cult. fem. 1.1.1–13 and 1.6.1; Paed. 3.29.1–3).Yet, as I will go on to argue, their deployment of anti-adornment rhetoric recites as well as magnifies the stakes attached to ornamentation, and reflect the colonial positionality from which they write. Tertullian specifically draws on the sermonizing of the Elder and Younger Seneca ⁶⁴ with the gut-punching humor of Juvenal’s Sixth Satire, and images of trumped–up “courtesans” drawn from comedy and satire. ⁶⁵ Clement is even more capacious in his source materials: he mines tragedy, philosophy, and epigrams to elaborate the same. ⁶⁶ Tertullian, thus, advises Christian women to obtain “your whiteness from simplicity, your red cheeks from modesty (pudicitia ruborem) . . . paint . . . your mouth with silence . . . occupy your hands with spinning (manus lanis occupate)” (Cult. fem. 2.13.7). Clement, not to be outdone, champions a simple look: “eyes anointed by the word and ears pierced to hear are ready to contemplate heavenly things . . .” he claims (Paed. 2.129.1–3). Furthermore, he advises,

it is never right for women who live in obedience to God to go about adorned with articles bought at the market . . . it is a heart-warming sight to see a woman clothe herself and her husband with the garments she herself has made (τοῖς ἰδίοις περιβάλλουσα κοσμήμασι). (Paed. 3.67.2) ⁶⁷

“These flimsy and luxurious things,” Clement writes, as he complains about silk from India, “are proof of shallow character . . . they do nothing more than disgrace the body (τὴν αἶσχύνηντοῦ σώματος), inviting prostitution” (Paed. 2.107.5). ⁶⁸

For Tertullian and Clement alike, jewelry and luxurious goods are marked by their exoticism ⁶⁹ : dyes from Phoenicia, embroidery from Babylon, pearls from the Indian Ocean (Cult. fem. 1.7.1–2; Paed. 2.107.1–110.2 and 3.30.4), as well as perfumes from Egypt and every region of Greece (Paed. 2.64.1–65.2). ⁷⁰ It is only because of their rarity and foreign character (peregrinitate) that these objects (i.e., gold, pearls, and Tyrian purple) obtain their glory . . . ” Tertullian chimes (Cult. fem.1.7.1). The dangers of pearl fishing, and the strange allure of some shell’s offing, are inspired by Pliny the Elder musings on gems and pearls (Cult. fem.1.6.2). ⁷¹ His insult about women who dress too well, who abandon all that is decent, and seduce men to the same, draws from Roman conservative moralizing: “as soon as he has felt lust for your beauty (tuam forman concupierit) . . . you have been made the sword (gladius) that destroys him” (Cult. fem. 2.2.4), Tertullian chastises. ⁷² Clement, likewise, worries over clothing made purple from “the blood of shellfish” off the coast of Phoenician Tyre and Sidon (Paed. 2.115.1–2). An adorned woman is covered in the marks of avarice that fuel imperial expansion. “One fragile neck bears forests and islands. The delicate ear lobes expend a fortune . . .” Tertullian retorts (Cult. fem.1.9.3). ⁷³ Clement likewise concludes: “. . . those who love gold and purple and jewels would not be content with all that is upon the earth or under it . . . or all the cargo ships from India or Ethiopia” (ὁ φόρτος ὁ ἀπ᾽ Ἰνδῶν καὶ Αἰθιόπων) (Paed. 3.10.1).

In their visions, the adorned woman belies the opposite of modest virtue; her body is weighed down with ornament so that she will not rise to the heavens on the day of judgment: “I will see if you will rise with your white paint (cerussa) rouge (purpurisso) and saffron (croco), and in all that circuit of head-decor” (Cult. fem. 2.7.3), Tertullian taunts. ⁷⁴ They evoke the image of the courtesan: foreign pedigree signals not only artificiality and deception but also enslavement. The conflation of women and avaricious empire was, of course, already articulated in an early Christian image of the whore of Babylon sitting atop a beast in book of Revelation; she is a metonymy for an empire enslaved to its own economic success; she dons the stereotyped markers of luxury, purple, gold, gems, and pearls, but she is also tattooed as a slave (Rev 17:1–6). It is little wonder that Tertullian references her to illustrate that adornment makes a woman the whore. God even has himself given her this very name “prostitute” (cum prostitutae appellationem a domino) as a result of her opulent appearance (Cult. fem. 2.12.2), he concludes.

Both writers decry the falsity of painted faces and worry over dolled-up coiffures, which employ wigs and false hair—the origin of which a woman does not even know—and associate her with degradation: “Banish away from your free head all of the slavery of ornamentation (ornatus servitutem)!” Tertullian warns (Cult. fem. 2.7.2). For, writes Clement, “. . . it is unholy for them [women] to add someone else’s hair to their own, putting dead locks (νεκροῖς) in with their own. In this case, on whom does the priest lay his hands?” (Paed. 3.63.1). ⁷⁵ Ornamentation dangerously elides woman and object. To dye the hair with saffron renders the head an altar, quips Tertullian (Cult. fem. 2.6.2). Clement likewise casts the adorned woman as a foreign and deadly object, likening her to an Egyptian temple, and even, the rapacious animal inside:

women, busy with making their appearances beautiful, allowing their interior to lie uncultivated, are in reality decorating themselves, without realizing it, like Egyptian temples (κατὰ τοὺς Αἰγυπτίων κοσμοῦσαι ναούς) . . . the beauty within will turn out to be nothing more than a beast . . . a deceitful serpent . . . [it] has transformed women into harlots (ἑταίρας) (Paed. 3.4.2 and 3.5.4). ⁷⁶

True chastity proves charming enough if a woman aims only to please her husband (Cult. 2.4.1–2). What other purpose could ornamentation hold but seduction and vanity? What purpose has a woman appearing all over the town in theaters, at temples, but to celebrate her own glory and moral ruin (Cult. fem. 2.11.1–3; Paed. 3.10.3)? Christian women, they caution, are called to embody simplicity and modesty in all things (Cult. fem. 2.13.1–7; Paed. 3.56.1–2). The most becoming look is a downcast gaze and a scrupulously veiled head: “In vain you summon the most skilled makers of false hair. God commands you: ‘be veiled!’ (Deus vos iubet velari),” councils Tertullian (Cult. fem. 2.7.2). ⁷⁷ Clement advises Christians “to be clothed entirely in white clothing from the tops of our heads to the soles of our feet (ὃλον δὲ λευκωθέντα δι᾽ ὃλων ἀπὸ κεφαλῆς ἄκρας ἄκρι ποδῶν)” (Paed 3.54.1), ⁷⁸ and what is more that women veil not only their heads, but their entire face as well (3.79.5).

Ancient Roman moralizing on modesty and the performance of virtue, as we have seen, was linked to anxieties and shifts from the Republic into the early empire. Roman imperial expansion, as Shadi Bartsch has argued, unsettled a “scopic paradigm” that, in the Republic, had governed the performance of virtue for the senatorial class who, under the empire, found themselves facing the withering gaze and the whims of the emperor and his coterie. ⁷⁹ The moral economy had changed, its rules and benefits had become less certain, and perhaps even death-dealing (for those caught in the emperor’s near orbit). Such upheaval lead figures like the Younger Seneca to dream of opting out of the spectral regime altogether, as when he counseled his protégé, Lucilius, to trust only his own self-judgment: “You yourself be the watcher; you yourself offer yourself praise” (Ep. 78.21). ⁸⁰

Yet Clement and Tertullian deploy this rhetoric under a different set of imperial conditions. They stand some distance from Seneca, not only temporally but also in relation to imperial power (Seneca was Nero’s own tutor, a definitionally precarious position to occupy). While their moral arguments draw from this same Stoic ethical tradition, they give it a different inflection. ⁸¹ Where Seneca champions self-scrutiny over the evaluation of others, Clement and Tertullian register an existential crisis of authority and truth, but they respond by grounding these in Christ and his Law (Paed. 1.9.4) and in God’s own juridical gaze (Cult. fem. 2.13.3 and 2.13.7). ⁸² They, therefore, add their own spin on the anti-adornment theme. By peppering declamations on luxurious dress with biblical language, they turn adornment and simplicity into a binary of cosmic proportions, with existential stakes. Accoutrement is not only problematic because it derives from foreign reaches of the empire. Its strangeness is diabolical: the arts of dyeing, metallurgy, the stuff of cosmetics and face paints were introduced by those fallen angels “who rushed from heaven” to copulate with the “daughters of men,” Tertullian argues, with reference to 1 Enoch (Cult. fem. 2.3.1; Paed. 3.14.2). All accoutrement derives from the devil; all of it an attempt to destroy the perfected order of creation (Cult. fem. 2.5.1–5). Who could improve on God’s design, Tertullian and Clement ponder? If God wanted purple wool, he would have made purple sheep (Cult. fem. 1.8.2)! Such sermonizing weaves Roman anti-adornment tropes with Christian scriptures: Eve’s calamitous avarice (Tertullian’s version of a Pandora, which I cite at the outset; also Paed. 2.123.3), narratives of biblical harlotry (e.g., Cult. fem. 2.12.2–3), ⁸³ and of course, pedantic counsel from various epistles, notably 1 Cor 7:25–40 (also Cult fem. 2.4.1–2 and 2.9.6) and 11:2–16 (Paed. 3.63.2),1 Tim 2:8–15 (e.g., Paed. 2.127.2–3), and 1 Peter 3:1–6 (Paed. 3.66.2).

Whereas feminist readings of Clement and Tertullian on women’s adornment have emphasized their attempts to delimit the meanings of adorned bodies and constrain the roles of women inside Christ assemblies (both certainly true), in this discussion, I have foregrounded how Tertullian and Clement’s gendered rhetoric on adornment additionally registers tensions adhering in their own colonial positionalities. Reciting Roman ethno-racial imaginaries, they speak to the shifting landscape of empire, in which the provinces, from which they write, Africa Proconsularis and Roman Egypt, once peripheries and sources of foreign luxuries derided by earlier Roman writers, ⁸⁴ were being recast in relation to its center, Rome. Tertullian, for example, lived under the Severan dynasty, whose founder, Septimius Severus, hailed from Leptis Magna in Roman North Africa. This emperor was known for never having lost his Punic accent, and simultaneously for marrying a Syrian elite, Julia Domna. ⁸⁵ It is not surprising that this same dynasty would extend Roman citizenship to all free men in 212 CE—a move that made Roman citizenship more available, and more fluid. ⁸⁶

Ancient Christians did not simply engage ethno-racial logics; they were part of Rome’s many ethnic and tribal communities, and they could tout, in true Roman fashion, multiple, sometimes conflicting affiliations. Tertullian presents himself invariably as Carthaginian, African, Roman, and of course, Christian. ⁸⁷ Clement, too, is deeply invested in showing his Alexandrian and Greek pedigree, alongside his credentials as a teacher of Christlike ethics and philosophical formation. ⁸⁸ The relationship of these affiliations to one another proves more complex than our historical accounts often permit, and in the second and third centuries, these relations became increasingly dynamic and uncertain. Perhaps, following a useful suggestion by Peter Brown, for these writers, and the audiences whom they courted, Christian belonging appealed because it evaded the confounding nature of ethnic, civic, and imperial belonging in the later empire “even if,” notes Kotrosits, “the escape was more desired than accomplished.” ⁸⁹ As Tertullian and Clement draw on the ethno-racial logics of the anti-adornment tradition carefully indexing various ethne and their sartorial habits, they additionally conjure a Christian subject that smooths over such distinctions. “Christian” in their treatise stands as an aspirational mode of being, untainted by vice, oriented to a god-like virtue (Paed. 1.1.1–2). This identification speaks back to the conflicted colonial dynamics facing Rome’s provincial subjects. We can see this clearly when Tertullian turns to Paul’s ethnicizing rhetoric to cast “gentile” as the figure of exotic excess (e.g., Cult. fem. 2.4.1), while locating “Christian” (a term not precisely Paul’s own) as its positive opposite. ⁹⁰ Just as earlier Romans presented chaste matrons, and her immodest inverse, as indicating the health of the body politic, Tertullian, in a similar operation, treats the unadorned woman as the signifier of Christian exceptionalism: “How unworthy of the Christian name (nomini christiano), to carry about a false face (faciem fictam), on whom simplicity of every kind is appointed” he quips (Cult. 2.5.5). ⁹¹ Her opposite, the adorned woman, marked as gentile, signifies falsity, adulteration, and affectation: “(in) whom true modesty is absent, because there is nothing true (quia nihil verum) in those who do not know God, the guardian (praesidem) and master of truth (magistrum veritatis),” he lambasts (Cult. 2.1.2).

Clement too frames indulgence in luxurious commodities as signs of the slavish, effeminate, and barbarous, and even, the animalistic. ⁹² He repeats Roman ethno-racial logics and reveals how much power it derived from classical Greek conceptions of the idealized, male citizen subject. ⁹³ Clement sounds an ontology that reflects what linguist Mel Chin calls “animacy hierarchies,” ⁹⁴ which ascribe various gradations of aliveness to “the particularized bodies of . . . animals, objects, humans.” ⁹⁵ Clement’s rhetoric, which he traces back to Aristotle’s own civic vision (Paed. 3.84.1–2), evokes animals as a pedagogic warning for behavior that stands outside human respectability: gourmandizing likens one to swine and dogs (Paed. 2.11.4); sexual rapaciousness to rabbits, over-sexed hyenas, and wild boars (Paed. 1.55.2 and 2.83.4–2.85.4). And yet, Clement positively uses a bucolic metaphor when he compares Christ, the Logos, to a shepherd who leads his little lambs (Paed. 1.15.4). Clement, in this, plays on ancient conceptions of paideia as formation of the moral self, as beginning in infancy and early childhood, first with the care of the body in the formation of the intellect. ⁹⁶ Those who do not submit to Christ’s pedagogy align themselves with barbarism and suspect effeminacy; their incivility undermines their fitness for human sociality entirely. “The Scythians, Celts, Iberians, and Thracians engage in drunkenness freely, for all of them are warrior nations (πολεμικὰ),” Clement muses when advising against too much wine (Paed. 2.32.1). Regarding adornment, which occupies my argument here, he declares: “Women who deck themselves out . . . do not realize the mistake they make hanging countless chains about themselves ‘as criminals are bound with gold by the barbarians’” (Paed. 2.122.2). ⁹⁷ He adds that ornaments and soft clothing are permissible in restrained amounts “lest they drive us into an effeminate (ἁβροδίαιτον) way of life” (Paed. 3.53.1). “Debotched passion” (τὸ ἐταιρικὸν πάθος), he concludes, puts humanity in peril and “makes a person resemble a boar or a pig” (Paed. 2.98.3).

Concluding thoughts: the adorned woman and her future

I have argued that Tertullian and Clement’s anti-adornment discourse reflects and is entangled in the complexities of Roman imperial dynamics. Their moral and theological programs cannot be extricated from the ancient ethno-racial fears and fascinations that fill them out. Modesty and simplicity—exemplified in the Christian mode of life they variously articulate—offer stalwarts against the corrupting influence of luxury. Yet, luxury holds their attention as the necessary evil against which moral disposition and Christ-like apatheia are tested. Like the Roman conservatives before them, Tertullian and Clement cannot fully let the pleasure of empire go; they too establish their own proximity to imperial abundance; they display a curated kind of knowledge, patiently cataloging luxury goods and commodity items, just as they warn against their enjoyment. The pleasures of empire, they suggest, beckon in the city, at the baths, over a meal, and yet, they caution that such indulgence entails moral ruin. The adorned woman surfaces the threat and the allure of imperial extravagance. She is frightening and fantastic; she traffics in Asiatic excess, with her coterie of catamites (Paed. 3.29.2–3); in her paints and dyes, she threatens to corrupt the natural order of things (e.g., Paed. 2.53.4; Cult. fem. 1.8.1–5). She is a voracious consumer who turns her own body into a foreign commodity object. For Tertullian and Clement both, the adorned woman points up the death-dealing and consumptive excesses of empire.

In their declamations against luxury, Tertullian and Clement pitch Christian belonging as skillfully navigating the adulterating threats of empire that rustic barbarism and Asiatic excess portend. This binary had a robust afterlife in European orientalizing and race-making, conceptions of the human poised between the primitive “para-humanity” of “blackness,” ⁹⁸ on the one side, and the decorated “perihumanity of Asiatic femininity, a peculiar state of being produced out of the fusion between ‘thingness’ and ‘personness,’” ⁹⁹ on the other, argues Americanist Ann Anlin Cheng. Her study Ornamentalism examines various contexts in which this “synthetic” Asiatic subject appears in modern western culture in law, in film, in fashion, in food, in technology. For Cheng “ornamentalism” connotes “a theory of being,” of subjectivity achieved through an association with “objects, synthetic inventions and designs.” ¹⁰⁰ Integral to racial logics from the nineteenth century, this synthetic Asiatic femininity (what she calls “the yellow woman”) indicates that western registers of racialization function beyond the “skin” and “flesh.” ¹⁰¹

By moving from Roman late antiquity to the nineteenth century, I do not suggest that the racializing modes are equivalent over these vastly different periods. Rather, following Cheng, my point is to highlight (albeit in an initial gesture) how the patterns of racialization reiterated over Greek, Roman, and then, ancient Christian ethno-racial discourse inserted itself, however subtly, into a longer trajectory of western figurations of Asiatic femininity. The racial logics of the nineteenth century that gave rise to the “yellow woman,” whom Cheng names, depended on a “modernist, masculinist and nationalist” aesthetic set against an anchronistic, feminized, and “eastern” ornamentality. ¹⁰² In fact, negative appraisals of ornamentation already punctuated the sensibilities of the centuries of early modernity, coinciding with France and England’s burgeoning imperial economies. Evidenced in Puritan sermonizing against luxurious garb, ¹⁰³ artistic disputes in France (e.g., color vs. drawing, the “effeminacy” of the made-up Rococo), ¹⁰⁴ as well as Enlightenment meditations on utility over embellishment, we find repeated and various arguments for an aesthetic against “excess.” ¹⁰⁵ The resultant minimalism of nineteenth century modernism, with its racializing vision, ¹⁰⁶ was build up from these early modern valuations, ones, critically, that not only echoed ancient “apprehension about the seduction of the ornament,” ¹⁰⁷ but also directly cited Greek, Roman, and early Christian discourse of the same. ¹⁰⁸

In this way, the ancient Christian image of the adorned woman bears more than an analogical similarity to Cheng’s racialized figure; she helped underwrite its production. The contemporary thingified subject, the “yellow woman,” so central to modern race-making, in other words, derives semiotic potency from its ancient antecedent. ¹⁰⁹ Her antique corollary is the ornamented, rapacious “eastern” femininity circulating in Classical Greek, later Roman and ancient Christian ethno-racial configurations treated here. Cheng’s Asiatic femininity recites a racializing pattern with an ancient pedigree, the elision of woman and “excessively” ornamented object. In Tertullian and Clement’s moralizing, we trace the antecedent of Cheng’s “thingified subject”: a woman at her toilette whose objects of beautification threaten her very subjectivity: “Behold all of these things,” writes Tertullian, “are the gear of a woman dead and damned, created as if for the pomp of her funeral” (Ideo omnia ista damnatae et mortuae mulieris impendimenta sunt, quasi ad pompam funeris constituta) (Cult. fem.1.1.3).