A Christian teacher in Alexandria sets out to shame the old religion by publishing its secrets, among them the password of the Eleusinian initiates: 'I fasted, I drank the kykeon.'
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Clement wrote the Exhortation to win educated Greeks away from their gods. In Chapter 2 he turns on the mystery cults, the initiations that were never supposed to be written down: the rites of Demeter at Eleusis, the toys the Titans used to lure the infant Dionysus, the secret of the Kabeiroi, the mysteries of Aphrodite. He meant to scandalize his readers, and without him we would know far less about what went on inside. The press starts with Chapter 2. Nothing is readable here yet; support it and it will be.
Clement taught in Alexandria in the late 2nd century AD and probably wrote the Exhortation around AD 195. He knew Greek poetry and philosophy deeply, and the book quotes a great many older writers, some of whose lines survive nowhere else.
The Eleusinian password survives because Clement printed it: 'I fasted, I drank the kykeon, I took from the chest, I worked, I laid it in the basket, and from the basket into the chest.' Scholars still argue about what was in the chest.
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