Conjugalia Praecepta

The Persian kings, when they contain themselves within the limits of their usual banquets, suffer their married wives to sit down at their tables; but when they once design to indulge the provocations of amorous heats and wine, then they send away their wives, and call for their concubines, their gypsies, and their songstresses, with their lascivious tunes and wanton galliards. Wherein they do well, not thinking it proper to debauch their wives with the tipsy frolics and dissolute extravagances of their intemperance.

If therefore any private person, swayed by the unruly motions of his incontinency, happen at any time to make a trip with a kind she-friend or his wife’s chambermaid, it becomes not the wife presently to lower and take pepper in the nose, but rather to believe that it was his respect to

Princes that be addicted to music increase the number of excellent musicians; if they be lovers of learning, all men strive to excel in reading and in eloquence; if given to martial exercises, a military ardor rouses straight the drowsy sloth of all their subjects. Thus husbands effeminately finical only teach their wives to paint and polish themselves with borrowed lustre. The studious of pleasure render them immodest and whorish. On the other side, men of serious, honest, and virtuous conversations make sober, chaste, and prudent wives.

A young Lacedaemonian lass, being asked by an acquaintance of hers whether she had yet embraced her husband, made answer, No; but that he had embraced her. And after this manner, in my opinion, it behooves an honest woman to behave herself toward her husband, never to shun nor to disdain the caresses and dalliances of his amorous inclinations, when he himself begins; but never herself to offer the first occasion of provocation. For the one savors of impudent harlotry, the other displays a female pride and imperiousness void of conjugal affection.

It behooves a woman not to make peculiar and private friendships of her own, but to esteem only her husband’s acquaintance and familiars as hers. Now as the Gods are our chiefest and most beneficial friends, it behooves her to worship and adore only those Deities which her husband reputes and reverences for such. But as for quaint opinions and superstitious innovations, let them be exterminated from her outermost threshold. For no sacrifices or services can be acceptable to the Gods, performed by women, as it were, by stealth and in secret, without the knowledge of the husband.