Excellent marriage advice from Plutarch.
Fishers of Men
Fishing with poison is a quick and easy way to catch fish, but it makes the fish inedible and bad. In the same way women who employ love-potions and magic spells upon their husbands, and gain the mastery over them through pleasure, find themselves consorts of dull-witted, degenerate fools. The men bewitched by Circe were of no service to her, after they had been changed into swine and asses, while for Odysseus, who had sense and showed discretion in her company, she had an exceeding great love.
Horsemanship in Marriage
Men who through weakness or effeminacy are unable to vault upon their horses teach the horses to kneel of themselves. Similarly, some with wives of noble birth or wealth, instead of making themselves better, depress and degrade their wives. They thought to gain more authority by reducing their wives to a state of humility, thus vaunting in domestic tyranny.
The Pinching Shoe
Friends of a Roman admonished him for having divorced a virtuous, wealthy, lovely and fruitful wife. He reached out his shoe and said, “This is beautiful to look at, well-made and new, but nobody knows where it pinches me”. A wife, then, ought not to rely on her dowry or birth or beauty, but on things in which she gains the greatest hold on her husband, namely conversation, character, and comradeship. These she must render not perverse or vexatious day by day, but accommodating, inoffensive, and agreeable.
For, as physicians fear fevers that originate from obscure causes and gradual accretion more than those of manifest and weighty causes, so it is the petty, continual, daily clashes between man and wife, unnoticed by the great majority, that disrupt and mar married life, whereas great and open faults have often led to no separation.
Against Gift-giving in Marriage
Solon’s law stipulates that bequests are invalid if a man is constrained by force or persuaded by his wife. He excepts force as overriding free will, and pleasure as misleading judgement, rendering bequests of wives and husbands suspect.
Giving is an utterly worthless token of affection, for even strangers and persons with no kindly feelings give gifts. Marriage should be rid of this pleasure, so that affection might be unbought and free, existing for its own sake.
Both the husbands’ property should be held in common with their wives and the wives’ with their husbands. By giving a little to each other, they deprive each other of all else that they own.
References:
- Plutarch. “Conjugale Praecepta (Advice to Bride and Groom)”. Perseus Digital Library. Accessed April 10, 2018. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:2008.01.0181.
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