Book 5
11
But our countryman Favorinus, when that syllogism which Bias had employed happened to be mentioned, of which the first premise is: You will marry either a beautiful or an ugly woman, declared that this was not a fact, and that it was not a fair antithesis, since it was not inevitable that one of the two opposites be true, which must be the case in a disjunctive proposition. For obviously certain outstanding extremes of appearance are postulated, ugliness and beauty. That is, in Bias' syllogism. But there is, said he, a third possibility also, lying between those two opposites, and that possibility Bias did not observe or regard. For between a very beautiful and a very ugly woman there is a mean in appearance, which is free from the danger to which an excess of beauty is exposed, and also from the feeling of repulsion inspired by extreme ugliness. A woman of that kind is called by Quintus Ennius in the Melanippa 253, Ribbeck3. by the very elegant term ' normal,' and such a woman will be neither unfaithful nor a punishment. This moderate and modest beauty Favorinus, to my mind most sagaciously, called conjugal. Moreover Ennius, in the tragedy which I mentioned, says that those women as a rule are of unblemished chastity who possess normal beauty.
12
On the names of the gods of the Roman people called Diovis and Vediovis.
