This presentation examines how Clement of Alexandria's dietary prescriptions in the Paedagogus construct and naturalize hierarchies of gender, age, and marital status within early Christian communities. While historiography has emphasized the egalitarian ideal of the Christian "open table," a detailed analysis of Paed. 2.1-2 and 2.7 reveal that Alexandrian alimentary practices operated as effective mechanisms of social stratification.
Clement establishes radically differentiated access to food and drink according to bodily categories presented as "natural": the "hot" bodies of youth require near-total abstinence from wine, while the "cold" bodies of the elderly may drink "more cheerfully" as "medicine." Women, according to Scripture, face additional restrictions: "an intoxicated woman is great wrath" (Paed. 2.2), for "a woman is quickly drawn down to licentiousness" if she chooses pleasures. Unmarried women are explicitly excluded from male banquets as "the extremest scandal," while married women may attend only exceptionally, "well clothed: without by raiment, within by modesty" (Paed. 2.7).
We will also examine how Clement utilizes Galenic humoral theories to justify these differences as divine bodily inscriptions. His prescription of "frugality further reveals class assumptions: this "simplicity" requires economic resources inaccessible to most and contrasts markedly with the actual diet of "domestics and husbandmen," which Clement acknowledges as "most frugal" but does not propose to imitate.
Christian commensality thus emerges not as an egalitarian space but as an arena where differences are negotiated and reinforced: who eats what, with whom, how much, and when reproduces Greco-Roman symposium hierarchies. This analysis contributes to understanding how early Christianity, far from abolishing structural inequalities, reconfigured them through theological and medical discourses that naturalized exclusion as a form of pastoral care for the differentiated body.