Library Pseudo-Clement Recognitions

Chapter 22: Customs of the Gelones

Amongst the Geli also there is a custom, that women cultivate the fields, build, and do every manly work; and they are also allowed to have intercourse with whom they please, and are not found fault with by their husbands, or called adulteresses: for they have promiscuous intercourse everywhere, and especially with strangers; they do not use ointments; they do not wear dyed garments, nor shoes. On the other hand, the men of the Gelones are adorned, combed, clothed in soft and various-colored garments, decked with gold, and besmeared with ointments, and that not through lack of manliness, for they are most warlike, and most keen hunters. Yet the whole women of the Gelones had not at their birth the unfavourable Venus in Capricornus or Aquarius; nor had all their men Venus placed with Mars in Aries, by which configuration the Chaldean science asserts that men are born effeminate and dissolute.

English translation by Thomas Smith, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. VIII (eds. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe; Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1886). Public domain. Digital text via New Advent Church Fathers.