Clement and Marcion

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Secret Alias
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Clement and Marcion

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Clement Stromata 4

For we do not train our women like Amazons to manliness in war; since we wish the men even to be peaceable. I hear that the Sarmatian women practise war no less than the men; and the women of the Sacae besides, who shoot backwards, feigning flight as well as the men. I am aware, too, that the women near Iberia practise manly work and toil, not refraining from their tasks even though near their delivery; but even in the very struggle of her pains, the woman, on being delivered, taking up the infant, carries it home. Further, the females no less than the males manage the house, and hunt, and keep the flocks: "Cressa the hound ran keenly in the stag's track."

Tertullian Against Marcion intro

The Euxine Sea, as it is called, is self-contradictory in its nature, and deceptive in its name.8 As you would not account it hospitable from its situation, so is it severed from our more civilised waters by a certain stigma which attaches to its barbarous character. The fiercest nations inhabit it, if indeed it can be called habitation, when life is passed in waggons. They have no fixed abode; their life has9 no germ of civilization; they indulge their libidinous desires without restraint, and for the most part naked. Moreover, when they gratify secret lust, they hang up their quivers on their car-yokes,10 to warn off the curious and rash observer. Thus without a blush do they prostitute their weapons of war. The dead bodies of their parents they cut up with their sheep, and devour at their feasts. They who have not died so as to become food for others, are thought to have died an accursed death. Their women are not by their sex softened to modesty. They uncover the breast, from which they suspend their battle-axes, and prefer warfare to marriage. In their climate, too, there is the same rude nature.11 The day-time is never clear, the sun never cheerful;12 the sky is uniformly cloudy; the whole year is wintry; the only wind that blows is the angry North. Waters melt only by fires; their rivers flow not by reason of the ice; their mountains are covered13 with heaps of snow. All things are torpid, all stiff with cold. Nothing there has the glow14 of life, but that ferocity which has given to scenic plays their stories of the sacrifices15 of the Taurians, and the loves16 of the Colchians, and the torments17 of the Caucasus. [4] Nothing, however, in Pontus is so barbarous and sad as the fact that Marcion was born there, fouler than any Scythian, more roving than the waggon-life18 of the Sarmatian, more inhuman than the Massagete, more audacious than an Amazon, darker than the cloud,19 (of Pontus) colder than its winter, more brittle than its ice, more deceitful than the Ister, more craggy than Caucasus. Nay20 more, the true Prometheus, Almighty God, is mangled21 by Marcion's blasphemies. [5] Marcion is more savage than even the beasts of that barbarous region.
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