Learned writers through at least 450 CE used the evil-communication phrase to warn against practices associated with high social status, including characteristic verbal practices. Tertullian used the evil-communication phrase twice in a long letter written in Latin about 200 CE. Tertullian’s letter is formally to his wife in her widowhood after Tertullian’s death. Immediately after his first use of the evil-communication phrase, Tertullian wrote:

Chattering, idle, wine-bibbing gossip-mongerers do the very greatest harm to widowhood. Through chattering creep in words unfriendly to modesty; through idleness they seduce one from a disciplined spiritual life; through wine-bibbing they insinuate any and every evil; through prurient gossip they incite others to compete in lustful conduct.^

Tertullian’s second use of the evil-communication phrase was in the context of considering his widow marrying a Gentile. This citation presents “fellowship of life and indivisible intimacy” as an intensification of communication.^ He described possible consequences of such communication:

For in obeying a Gentile she will carry out Gentile practices, — attention to bodily attractiveness, elaborate hairstyles, worldly elegancies, seductive blandishments, the very secrets even of matrimony done for all to see: not, as among Christians, where the duties of sex are discharged with honor and as a very necessity, performed with modesty and temperance, as under the eyes of God.^

Both contexts in Tertullian allude to practices of social elites gathered at banquets and festivals. Both of Tertullian’s uses of the evil-communication phrase warn about high-status practices.

Jerome, whose Latin translation of the Bible was the primarily western European communication of Christian scripture for more than a millennium, likewise used the evil-communication phrase to warn about high-status practices. In Rome in 384 CE in a letter formally to a young, unmarried woman named Eustochium, Jerome declared:

Idle persons and busybodies, whether virgins or widows; such as go from house to house calling on married women and displaying an unblushing effrontery greater than that of a stage parasite, cast from you as you would the plague. For {evil-communication phrase, which might here be translated as “the seductions of the socially prominent corrupt virtuous family life”}, and women like these care for nothing but their lowest appetites. They will often urge you, saying, “My dear creature, make the best of your advantage, and live while life is yours,” and “Surely you are not laying up money for your children.” Given to wine and wantonness, they instill all manner of mischief into people’s minds, and induce even the most austere to indulge in enervating pleasures.^

Jerome’s reference to a “stage parasite” indicates an actor playing the role of a flatterer, which was a common character in Menander’s plays. As a young man, Jerome wrote in the same way that other ambitious young men did:

as I was still aglow with the methods and maxims of the rhetoricians, I decked {my letters} out a good deal with the flourishes of the schools.^

Jerome, however, came to reject worldly success and became a fervent exponent of monastic asceticism. In 394 CE in a formal letter offering advice to a young friend who had joined the clergy, Jerome declared:

Welcome poor men and strangers to your homely board, that with them Christ may be your guest. A clergyman who engages in business, and who rises from poverty to wealth, and from obscurity to a high position, avoid as you would the plague. For {evil-communication phrase, which might here be translated as “striving for worldly success corrupts Christian virtue”}. You despise gold. He loves it. You spurn wealth; he eagerly pursues it. You love silence, meekness, privacy; he takes delight in talking and effrontery, in squares and streets, and apothecaries’ shops.^

Jerome understood the evil-communication phrase to concern being seduced by persons enjoying worldly pleasures, social prominence, and wealth. That’s broadly consistent with the probable context of the evil-communication phrase in Menander’s Thais.