A wife ought not to make friends of her own, but to enjoy her husband’s friends in common with him. The gods are the first and most important friends. Wherefore it is becoming for a wife to worship and to know only the gods that her husband believes in, and to shut the front door tight upon all queer rituals and outlandish superstitions. For with no god do stealthy and secret rites performed by a woman find any favour. Plato Republic , p. 462 C. Cf. also Plutarch, Moralia , 484 B and 767 D. asserts that the state is prosperous and happy in which the people hear mine and not mine most rarely uttered, the reason being that the citizens, so far as in them lies, treat all things of real importance as common property. Much more should such expressions be eliminated from the married state; save that, as physicians tell us that blows on the left side of the body record the sensation on the right side, so, in the same way, it is a lovely thing for the wife to sympathize with her husband’s concerns and the husband with the wife’s, so that, as ropes, by being intertwined, get strength from each other, thus, by the due contribution of goodwill in corresponding measure by each member, the copartnership may be preserved through the joint action of both. For Nature unites us through the commingling of our bodies, in order that, by taking and blending together a portion derived from each member of a pair, the offspring which she produces may be common to both, so that neither can define or distinguish his own or the other’s part therein. Such a copartnership in property as well is especially befitting married people, who should pour all their resources into a common fund, and combine them, and each should not regard one part as his own and another part as the other’s, but all as his own and nothing as the other’s. As we call a mixture wine, although the larger of the component parts is water, so the property and the estate ought to be said to belong to the husband even though the wife contribute the larger share. Helen was fond of wealth and Paris of pleasure; Odysseus was sensible and Penelope virtuous. Therefore the marriage of the latter pair was happy and enviable, while that of the former created an Iliad of woes for Greeks and barbarians. The Roman, Cf. Plutarch’s Life of Aemilius Paulus , chap. v. (p. 257 B), and Hieronymus, Adversus Iovinianum , i. chap. xlviii. (vol. ii. p. 292 of Migne’s edition). on being admonished by his friends because he had put away a virtuous, wealthy, and lovely wife, reached out his shoe and said, Yes, this is beautiful to look at, and new, but nobody knows where it pinches me. A wife, then, ought not to rely on her dowry or birth or beauty, but on things in which she gains the greatest hold on her husband, namely conversation, character, and comradeship, which she must render not perverse or vexatious day by day, but accommodating, inoffensive, and agreeable. For, as physicians have more fear of fevers that originate from obscure causes and gradual accretion than of those which may be accounted for by manifest and weighty reasons, so it is the petty, continual, daily clashes between man and wife, unnoticed by the great majority, that disrupt and mar married life. King Philip was enamoured of a Thessalian woman who was accused of using magic charms upon him. Olympias accordingly made haste to get the woman into her power. But when the latter had come into the queen’s presence and was seen to be beautiful in appearance, and her conversation with the queen was not lacking in good-breeding or cleverness, Olympias exclaimed, Away with these slanders! You have your magic charms in yourself. Much the same story is told of the wife of Hystaspes by Satyrus in his Life of Euripides ( Oxyrhynchus Papyri , ix. p. 157). And so a wedded and lawful wife becomes an irresistible thing if she makes everything, dowry, birth, magic charms, and even the magic girdle Homer, Il. xiv. 214. itself, to be inherent in herself, and by character and virtue succeeds in winning her husband’s love.