Socrates was wont to give this advice to young men that accustomed themselves to their mirrors:—if ill-favored, to correct their deformity by the practice of virtue; if handsome, not to blemish their outward form with inward vice. In like manner, it would not be amiss for a mistress of a family, when she holds her mirror in her hands, to discourse her own thoughts:—if deformed, thus, Should I prove lewd and wicked too?—on the other side, thus the fair one, What if chaste beside? For it adds a kind of veneration to a woman not so handsome, that she is more beloved for the perfections of her mind than the outside graces of her body.

Dionysius, the tyrant of Sicily, sent several costly presents of rich apparel, necklaces, and bracelets to the daughters of Lysander, which however the father would never permit the virgins to accept, saying: These gaudy presents will procure more infamy than honor to my daughters. And indeed, before Lysander, Sophocles in one of his tragedies had uttered the following sentence to the same effect: Mistake not, silly wretch; this pompous trim Rather disgraces than proclaims thee great, And shows the rage of thy lascivious heat.

For, as Crates said, that is ornament which adorns; and that adorns a woman which renders her more comely and decent. This is an honor conferred upon her, not by the lustre of gold, the sparkling of emeralds and diamonds, nor splendor of the purple tincture, but by the real embellishments of gravity, discretion, humility, and modesty.

They who offer to Juno as the Goddess of Wedlock never consecrate the gall with the other parts of the sacrifice, but having drawn it forth, they cast it behind the altar. Which constitution of the lawgiver fairly implies that all manner of passionate anger and bitterness of reproach should be exterminated from the thresholds of nuptial cohabitation. Not but that a certain kind of austerity becomes the mistress of a family; which however should be like that of wine, profitable and delightful, not like aloes, biting and medicinally ungrateful to the palate.

Plato observing the morose and sour humor of Xenocrates, otherwise a person of great virtue and worth, admonished him to sacrifice to the Graces. In like manner, I am of opinion that it behooves a woman of moderation to crave the assistance of the Graces in her behavior towards her husband, thereby (according to the saying of Metrodorus) to render their society mutually harmonious to each other, and to preserve her from being waspishly proud, out of a conceit of her fidelity and virtue. For it becomes not a frugal woman to be neglectful of decent neatness, nor one who has great respect to her husband to refrain complacency in her conversation; seeing that, as the over-rigid humor of a wife renders her honesty irksome, so sluttery begets a hatred of her sparing and pinching housewifery.