Matthew 5, 31 ff.; id. 19, 3 ff. Mark 10, 2-12. Luke 16, 18.
Plutarch lived in the second century A.D.; but he has inherited the Greek point of view and advises a wife to bear with meekness the infidelities of the husband—see Praecep. Coniug., 16. His words are often curiously similar to those of the Apostles, e.g., Coniug. Praecep., 33: "The husband shall rule the wife not as if master of a chattel, but as the soul does the body." Id. 37: "Wives who are sensible will be silent when their husbands are angry and vent their passion; when their husbands are silent, then let them speak to them and mollify them." However, like the Apostles, he enjoins upon husbands to honour their wives; his essay on the "Virtues of Women"—γυναικων αρεται—is an affectionate tribute to their worth.
Some of the respectable Puritan gentlemen at Rome also held that a wife be content to be a humble admirer of her husband (e.g., Pliny, Paneg., 83, hoc efficiebat, quod mariti minores erant ... nam uxori sufficit obsequii gloria, etc.). But Roman law insisted that what was morally right for the man was equally so for the woman; just as it compelled a husband himself to observe chastity, if he expected it from his wife.
Ecclesiasticus 42, 14.
Leviticus xii, 1-5.