ADVICE TO MARRIED COUPLES
|138 B| To Pollianus and Eurydice with Plutarch’s best wishes.
When they were shutting you in your bridal chamber, the ancestral ritual was duly applied to you by the priestess of Demeter. I believe that now, if reason also were to take you in hand and join in the nuptial song, it would prove of some service, and would support the tune as prescribed.
In the musical world they used to call one of the modes for the flute ‘the Horse-and-Mare’, because, apparently, the strains in that key were provocative of union between those animals. Well, philosophy has many excellent sermons to give, but none |C| more worthy of serious attention than that upon marriage. By it she exerts a spell upon those who come together as partners in life, and renders them gentle and tractable to each other. I have, therefore, taken the main points of the lessons which you have repeatedly heard, brought up as you have been in the company of Philosophy. I have arranged them in a series of brief comparisons to make them easier to remember, and am sending them as a present to you both. In doing so I pray that the Muses may graciously lend aid to Aphrodite, since, if it is their province to see that a lyre or a harp shall be in tune, it is no less so to provide that the music of the married home shall be harmonized by reason and philosophy. When people in olden times assigned a seat with Aphrodite to Hermes, it was because |D| the pleasure of marriage stands in special need of reason; when to Persuasion and the Graces, it was in order that the married pair might obtain their wishes from each other by means of persuasion, and not by contention and strife.