Conjugalia Praecepta

Plato asserts those cities to be the most happy and best regulated where these expressions, This is mine,

This is not mine, are seldomest made use of. For that then the citizens enjoy in common, so far as is convenient, those things that are of greatest importance. But in wedlock those expressions are utterly to be abolished. For as the physicians say that the right side being bruised or beaten communicates its pain to the left; so indeed the husband ought to sympathize in the sorrows and afflictions of the woman, and much more does it become the wife to be sensible of the miseries and calamities of the husband; to the intent that, as knots are made fast by knitting the bows of a thread one within another, so the ligaments of conjugal society may be strengthened by the mutual interchange of kindness and affection. This Nature herself instructs us, by mixing us in our bodies; while she takes a part from each, and then blending the whole together produces a being common to both, to the end that neither may be able to discern or distinguish what was belonging to another, or lay claim to assured propriety. Therefore is community of estate and purses chiefly requisite among married couples, whose principal aim it ought to be to mix and incorporate their purchases and disbursements into one substance, neither pretending to call this hers or that his, but accounting all inseparable peculiar to both. However, as in a goblet where the proportion of water exceeds the juice of the grape, yet still we call the mixture wine; in like manner the house and estate must be reputed the possession of the husband, although the woman brought the chiefest part.

The question being put by some of his friends to a certain Roman, why he had put away his wife, both sober,

beautiful, chaste, and rich, the gentleman, putting forth his foot and showing his buskin, said: Is not this a new, handsome, complete shoe?—yet no man but myself knows where it pinches me. Therefore ought not a woman to boast either of her dower, her parentage, or beauty; but in such things as most delight a husband, pleasantness of converse, sweetness of disposition, and briskness of humor, there to show nothing of harshness, nothing distasteful, nothing offensive, but from day to day to study behavior jocund, blithe, and conformable to his temper. For as physicians are much more afraid of fevers that proceed from hidden causes, which have been by little and little contracting for a long time together, than those that receive their nourishment from apparent and manifest unconcoctions; thus, if daily continued, the petty snubs and frumps between man and wife, though perhaps unknown to others, are of that force that above all things else they canker conjugal affection, and destroy the pleasure of cohabitation.