Advice to Bride and Groom (39-43)

At all times and in all places a wife ought to try to avoid any clash with her husband, and a husband with his wife, but they ought to be especially on their guard against doing this in the privacy of their bedchamber. The woman in travail and pain kept saying to those who were trying to make her go to bed, How can the bed cure this ailment which I contracted in bed? But the disagreements, recriminations, and angry passions which the bed generates are not easily settled in another place and at another time.

Hermione seems to speak the truth when she says,[*]

Bad women’s visits brought about my fall.

A man whose slave had run away, on catching sight of the fugitive some time later, ran after him; but when the slave got ahead of him by taking refuge in a treadmill, the master said, Where else could I have wished to find you rather than here? [*] So then let the woman who, on account of jealousy, is entering a writ of divorce, and is in a high dudgeon, say to herself, Where else would my rival like better to see me, what would she rather have me do, than feel aggrieved with my husband and quarrel with him and abandon my very home and chamber?

The Athenians observe three sacred ploughings: the first at Scirum [*] in commemoration of the most ancient of sowings; the second in Raria,[*] and the third near the base of the Acropolis, the so-called Buzygius [*] (the ox-yoking). But most sacred of all such sowings is the marital sowing and ploughing for the procreation of children. It is a beautiful epithet

When the orator Gorgias read to the Greeks at Olympia a speech about concord,[*] Melanthius said, This fellow is giving us advice about concord, and yet in his own household he has not prevailed upon himself, his wife, and maidservant, three persons only, to live in concord. For there was, apparently, some love on Gorgias’s part and jealousy on the wife’s part towards the girl. A man therefore ought to have his household well harmonized who is going to harmonize State, Forum, and friends. For it is much more likely that the sins of women rather than sins against women will go unnoticed by most people.