the poets also pity a marriage half-perfect and childless, but pronounce the fruitful one happy. But it is the diseases of the body that principally show marriage to be necessary. For a wife's care and the assiduity of her constancy appear to exceed the endurance of all other relations and friends, as much as to excel them in sympathy; and most of all, she takes kindly to patient watching. And in truth, according to Scripture, she is a needful help.[1] The comic poet then, Menander, while running down marriage, and yet alleging on the other side its advantages, replies to one who had said:
"I am averse to the thing,
For you take it awkwardly."
Then he adds:
"You see the hardships and the things which annoy you in it.
But you do not look on the advantages."
And so forth.
Now marriage is a help in the case of those advanced in years, by furnishing a spouse to take care of one, and by rearing children of her to nourish one's old age.
"For to a man after death his children bring renown,
Just as corks bear the net,
Saving the fishing-line from the deep,"[2]
according to the tragic poet Sophocles. Legislators, moreover, do not allow those who are unmarried to discharge the highest magisterial offices. For instance, the legislator of the Spartans imposed a fine not on bachelorhood only, but on monogamy,[3] and late marriage, and single life. And the renowned Plato orders the man who has not married to pay a wife's maintenance into the public treasury, and to give to the magistrates a suitable sum of money as
- ↑ Gen. ii. 18.
- ↑ The corrections of Stanley on these lines have been adopted. They occur in the Choeph of Æschylus, 503, but may have been found in Sophocles, as the tragic poets borrowed from one another.
- ↑ i.e. not entering into a second marriage after a wife's death. But instead of μονογαμίου some read κακογαμίου—bad marriage.
