God’s Breast versus Hecuba’s Breast in the Paedagogus of Clement of Alexandria

In the Greco-Roman world, lactation and breastfeeding were notions related almost exclusively to women, whether the mother, who gives birth, or a nurse/surrogate mother, who undertakes the newborn’s care. This paper focuses on a passage from Clement of Alexandria in which lactation and breastfeeding are used metaphorically and are, paradoxically, associated with the figure of God, the Father. In the first book of the Paedagogus Clement depicts the Church as a surrogate Mother that maintains access to the milk of the Son, which, in turn, is suckled from the breast of his Father. The metaphor, which is marshalled as a visual response to the Gnostics’ insistence on the inequality of Christians, is striking, not only because of its language of gender-reversal but also because of Clement’s decision to enrich it with a Homeric quotation. Albeit acknowledged, this Homeric allusion has hardly received any attention from researchers. My intention is to examine in more depth the purposes that it fulfils.