21. Helen loved wealth, and Paris loved pleasure: Odysseus was wise, and Penelope discreet. Hence the union of the latter [Sidenote: 141] pair was happy and enviable, while that of the former brought upon Greeks and Asiatics an ‘Iliad of Woes’.
22. When the Roman was admonished by his friends for having divorced a wife who was chaste, rich, and beautiful, he stretched out his shoe and remarked: ‘Yes, and this looks fine and new, but no one knows where it chafes me.’ The wife must not rely upon her dowry, her birth, or her beauty. The matters in which she touches her husband most closely are conversation, character, and companionship. Instead of making these harsh and vexatious day after day, she must render them [Sidenote: B] compatible, soothing, and grateful. Physicians are more afraid of fevers which spring from vague causes gradually accumulating, than of those for which there is a great and manifest reason. So it is these little, continual, daily frictions between man and wife, which the world knows nothing of, that do most to create the rifts which ruin married life.
23. King Philip was once enamoured of a Thessalian woman who was charged with bewitching him. Olympias thereupon became eager to get this person into her power. When, upon presenting herself, she not only turned out to be a handsome woman, but spoke with considerable nobility and good sense, [Sidenote: C] Olympias said: ‘Those calumnies are all nonsense! Your witchcraft lies in yourself.’ How irresistible a thing is a married and lawful wife, if, by treating everything—dowry, birth, philtres, the very girdle[38] of Aphrodite—as lying in herself, she conquers affection by means of character and virtue!
24. On another occasion, when a youthful courtier had married a handsome woman of bad repute, Olympias remarked, ‘The fellow has no judgement; otherwise he would not have married with his eyes.’ Marriage should not be made with the eyes; neither should it with the fingers, as it is in the case of some, who reckon up the amount of the dower, instead of calculating the companionable quality, of the wife they are [Sidenote: D] marrying.
25. To young men who are fond of looking at themselves in the mirror Socrates recommended that the ugly should correct their defects by virtue, while the handsome should avoid spoiling their beauty by vice. It is a good thing for the married woman also, while she is holding the mirror, to talk to herself, and, if she is plain, to ask, ‘And what if I show myself indiscreet?’ if beautiful, ‘And what if I show myself discreet as well?’ The plain woman may pride herself on being loved for her character, and the handsome woman on being loved more for her character than her beauty.