43
When the orator Gorgias read to the Greeks at Olympia a speech about concord, Cf. Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, ii. pp. 248-9 (Gorgias, B 7-8). Melanthius said, This fellow is giving us advice about concord, and yet in his own household he has not prevailed upon himself, his wife, and maidservant, three persons only, to live in concord. For there was, apparently, some love on Gorgias’s part and jealousy on the wife’s part towards the girl. A man therefore ought to have his household well harmonized who is going to harmonize State, Forum, and friends. For it is much more likely that the sins of women rather than sins against women will go unnoticed by most people.
44
They say that the cat is excited to frenzy by the odour of perfumes. Now if it happened that women were similarly made furious and frantic by perfumes, it would be a dreadful thing for their husbands not to abstain from perfume, but for the sake of their own brief pleasure to permit their wives to suffer in this way. Now inasmuch as women are affected in this way, not by their husbands’ using perfume, but by their having connexion with other women, it is unfair to pain and disturb them so much for the sake of a trivial pleasure, and not to follow with wives the practice observed in approaching bees (because these insects are thought to be irritable and bellicose towards men who have been with women) A wide-spread ancient superstition; the classical references may be found in Magerstedt, Die Bienenzucht des Altertums, Sondershausen, 1851. —to be pure and clean from all connexion with others when they approach their wives.
