Not at a feast of Gods from five-branched treewould teach us to keep the feast when we are already cleansed from such things as these, and not in the solemnities themselves to use purgation or removal of excrementitious superfluities. But now flax springs up from an immortal being, the earth, and bears an eatable fruit, and affords a simple and cleanly clothing, not burdensome to him that is covered with it, and convenient for every season of the year, and which besides (as they tell us) is the least subject to engender vermin; but of this to discourse in this place would not be pertinent.
With sharp-edged steel to part the green from dry,
1
For the greater part of men are ignorant even of this
most common and ordinary thing, for what reason priests
lay aside their hair and go in linen garments. Some are
not at all solicitous to be informed about such questions;
and others say their veneration for sheep is the cause why
they abstain from their wool as well as their flesh, and that
they shave their heads in token of mourning, and that
they wear linen because of the bloomy color which the
flax sendeth forth, in imitation of that ethereal clarity that
environs the world. But indeed the true reason of them
all is one and the same. For it is not lawful (as Plato
saith) for a clean thing to be touched by an unclean; but
now no superfluity of food or excrementitious substance
can be pure or clean; but wool, down, hair, and nails
come up and grow from superfluous excrements. It would
[p. 68]
be therefore an absurdity for them to lay aside their own
hair in purgations, by shaving themselves and by making
their bodies all over smooth, and yet in the mean time to
wear and carry about them the hairs of brutes. For we
ought to think that the poet Hesiod, when he saith,
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