Conjugalia Praecepta
Plutarch
Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals, Vol. II. Goodwin, William W., editor; Philips, John, translator. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company; Cambridge: Press of John Wilson and Son, 1874.
Phidias made the statue of Venus at Elis with one foot upon the shell of a tortoise, to signify two great duties of a virtuous woman, which are to keep at home and be silent. For she is only to speak to her husband, or by her husband. Nor is she to take amiss the uttering her mind in that manner, through another more proper organ.
Princes and kings honor themselves in giving honor to philosophers and learned men. On the other side, great personages admired and courted by philosophers are no way honored by their flatteries, which are rather a prejudice and stain to the reputation of those that use them. Thus it is with women, who in honoring and submitting to their husbands win for themselves honor and respect, but when they strive to get the mastery, they become a greater reproach to themselves than to those that are so ignominiously henpecked. But then again, it behooves a husband to control his wife, not as a master does his vassal, but as the soul governs the body, with the gentle hand of mutual friendship and reciprocal affection. For as the soul commands the body, without being subject to its pleasures and inordinate desires, in like manner should a man so exercise his authority over his wife, as to soften it with complaisance and kind requital of her loving submission.
Philosophers assert that, of bodies which consist of several parts, some are composed of parts distinct and separate, as a navy or army royal; others of contiguous parts, as a house or a ship; and others of parts united at the first conception, equally partaking of life and motion and growing together, as are the bodies of all living creatures.
Thus, where people wed for pure affection, that marriage may be said to resemble those bodies whose parts are solidly fixed together. They who marry for the sake of great portions, or else desirous of offspring, are like to bodies whose parts are contiguous and cleave close to one another; and they who only bed together, if there be any such, resemble bodies whose parts are distinct and without dependency. Now, as physicians say that liquids are the only bodies which most easily intermix without any difference of propriety or respect one with another; so should it be said of people joined together in matrimony, that there is a perfect mixture of bodies and estates, of friends and relations. Therefore the Roman law prohibits new married people from giving and receiving mutual presents one from another; not that they should not participate one with another, but to show that they were not to enjoy any thing but what they possess in common.In Leptis, a city of Libya, it was an ancient custom for the bride, the next day after the nuptial solemnity, to send home to the mother of the bridegroom to borrow a boiler, which she not only refused to lend, but sent back word that she had none to spare; to the end that the new married woman, having by that means tried the disposition of her mother-in-law, if afterwards she found her humor peevish and perverse, might with more patience brook her unkindness, as being no more than what she expected. Rather it becomes the daughter to avoid all occasions of distaste. For it is natural to some mothers to be jealous that the wife deprives her of that filial tenderness which she expects from her son. For which there is no better cure than for a wife so to contrive the gaining of her husband’s love as not to lessen or withdraw his affection from his mother.