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.
23
King Philip was enamoured of a Thessalian woman who was accused of using magic charms upon him. Olympias accordingly made haste to get the woman into her power. But when the latter had come into the queen’s presence and was seen to be beautiful in appearance, and her conversation with the queen was not lacking in good-breeding or cleverness, Olympias exclaimed, Away with these slanders! You have your magic charms in yourself. Much the same story is told of the wife of Hystaspes by Satyrus in his Life of Euripides (Oxyrhynchus Papyri, ix. p. 157). And so a wedded and lawful wife becomes an irresistible thing if she makes everything, dowry, birth, magic charms, and even the magic girdle Homer, Il. xiv. 214. itself, to be inherent in herself, and by character and virtue succeeds in winning her husband’s love.
