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İngilizce İngilizce Yunanca

21 Helen was fond of wealth and Paris of pleasure; Odysseus was sensible and Penelope virtuous. Therefore the marriage of the latter pair was happy and enviable, while that of the former created an Iliad of woes for Greeks and barbarians.

22 The Roman, Cf. Plutarch’s Life of Aemilius Paulus, chap. v. (p. 257 B), and Hieronymus, Adversus Iovinianum, i. chap. xlviii. (vol. ii. p. 292 of Migne’s edition). on being admonished by his friends because he had put away a virtuous, wealthy, and lovely wife, reached out his shoe and said, Yes, this is beautiful to look at, 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, which she must render not perverse or vexatious day by day, but accommodating, inoffensive, and agreeable. For, as physicians have more fear of fevers that originate from obscure causes and gradual accretion than of those which may be accounted for by manifest and weighty reasons, so it is the petty, continual, daily clashes between man and wife, unnoticed by the great majority, that disrupt and mar married life.