As Crates used to say, ‘Adornment is that which adorns,’ and that which adorns is that which adds to a woman’s seemliness. This is not done by gold or jewels or scarlet, but by whatever invests her with the badges of dignity, decorum, and modesty.
27. In sacrificing to Hera as goddess of marriage, the gall is not burned with the other portions of the sacrifice, but is |F| taken out and thrown down at the side of the altar—an indirect injunction of the legislator that gall and anger should have no place in the married state. The austerity of the lady of the house, like the dryness of wine, should be wholesome and palatable, not bitter like aloes or unpleasant like a drug.
28. Xenocrates being somewhat harsh in character, though otherwise a high type of man, Plato recommended him to sacrifice to the Graces. Now I take it that a woman of strict morals stands in special need of the graces in dealing with her |142| husband, so that—as Metrodorus used to say—she may live with him on pleasant terms and not ‘in a temper because she is chaste’. A woman should no more forget to be amiable because she is faithful, than to be neat because she is thrifty. Decorum in a woman is rendered as disagreeable by harshness as frugality is by sluttishness.
29. A wife who is afraid to laugh and joke with her husband for fear of seeming bold and wanton, is as bad as the woman who, from fear of being thought to use ointments on her head, does not even oil it,[[39]] and, to avoid seeming to rouge her face, does not even wash it. We find that when poets and orators avoid appealing to the vulgar by bad taste and affectation in |B| respect of their diction, they practise every art to attract and stir the hearer with their matter, their treatment, and their moral quality. So the lady of the house, because she avoids and deprecates—as she is quite right to do—extravagant or meretricious demonstration, ought all the more to bring the graces of character and conduct into play in dealing with her husband, thus habituating him to proper ways, but in a pleasurable manner. If, however, a wife shows herself strait-laced and rigidly austere, her husband must put the best face upon it. When Antipater required Phocion to perform an improper and |C| degrading action, he answered, ‘I cannot serve you both as your friend and your toady.’ In the same way, when a woman is staid and strait-laced, our reflection should be, ‘The same woman cannot behave to me as both a wife and a mistress.’
30. By a national custom the Egyptian women wore no shoes, so that they might keep at home all day. In the case of most women, to deprive them of gold-worked shoes, bangles, anklets, purple, and pearls, is to make them stay indoors.
31. Theano, in putting on her mantle, once showed a glimpse of her arm. Upon some one saying, ‘A beautiful forearm!’ she retorted, ‘But not for the public!’ A well-conducted woman will keep, not only her forearm, but her speech, from |D| publicity. She will be as shy and cautious about her utterances to the outside world as if they were an exposure of her person, inasmuch as, when she talks, they are a revelation of feelings, character, and disposition.
32. Pheidias, in representing the Elean Aphrodite with her foot upon a tortoise, meant women to take it as a symbol of home-keeping and silence. A woman should talk either to, or through the medium of, her husband; nor should she resent it if, like a player on the clarinet, she finds a more impressive utterance through another tongue than through her own.
33. When rich or royal persons pay respect to a philosopher, they do honour both to themselves and to him. But when a philosopher pays court to rich people, he is not conferring |E| distinction upon them, but lowering his own. The same is the case with women. By submission to their husbands they win regard; by seeking to govern them they demean themselves worse than the men so governed. Meanwhile it is only right that the husband, in controlling the wife, should not be like an owner dealing with a chattel, but like the mind dealing with the body—sympathetic with the sympathy of organic union. It is possible to care for the body without being a slave to its pleasures and desires, and it is possible to rule a wife and yet do things to please and gratify her.
34. Compound objects are classified by philosophers as follows. In some the parts are distinct, as in a fleet or army. |F| In some they are conjoined, as in a house or ship. In others they form an organic unity, as in all living creatures. We may say much the same of marriage. The marriage of love is the ‘organic unity’; the marriage for a dowry or for children is that of persons ‘conjoined’; marriage without sharing the same couch is that of persons ‘distinct’, who may be said to |143| dwell together, but not to live together. With persons marrying, there should be a mutual blending of bodies, means, friends, and relations, in the same way as, according to the scientists, when liquids are mixed, the mixture runs through the whole. When the Roman legislator forbade married couples to exchange presents, he did not mean that they should not impart to each other, but that they should look upon everything as joint property.
35. At Leptis in Africa it is a traditional custom for the bride, on the day after marriage, to send to the bridegroom’s mother to borrow a pot. The latter refuses, saying she has none. The intention is that the bride may realize from the first the ‘step-mother’ attitude of her mother-in-law, so that, if anything more disagreeable happens afterwards, she may not be vexed or irritated. The wife should understand this fact and apply |B| treatment to its cause, which is, that the mother is jealous of her son’s affections. There is but one treatment for this state of mind. While winning the special affection of her husband for herself, she must avoid detaching or lessening his affection for his mother.