“Advice to Bride and Groom” by Plutarch (C. 100 CE)

When the London newspaper the Athenian Mercury, edited and published by the author and bookseller John Dunton, first answered questions about romance, bodily functions, and the mysteries of the universe in 1691, it may have created the template for the advice column. But the history of advice stretches back even further into the past. Advice—whether unsolicited, unwarranted, or desperately sought—appears in ancient philosophical treatises, medieval medical manuals, and countless books. Lapham’s Quarterly is exploring advice through the ages and into modern times in a series of readings and essays.

Several of the Plutarch works collectively known as Moralia resemble advice columns at times. The Roman historian and philosopher had thoughts on how to educate children, how to tell a true friend from an untrustworthy flatterer, and how a young man should properly study poetry. And he has some advice for the newlywed.

“Advice to Bride and Groom” includes forty-eight lessons on marriage, much of it aggregated from earlier thinkers, that he presented to students after they married. “Plutarch finds less to criticize and fewer potential problems in the husband’s behavior,” scholar Sarah B. Pomeroy noted in a 1999 essay on the work. Instead he concentrated his “advice on training the wife to be a congenial and productive marital partner who is willing to accommodate herself to her husband’s wishes. We must conclude that in the area of marital relations Plutarch was not an original thinker, but rather an industrious and eclectic one.”

 

In music they used to call one of the conventional themes for the flute the “Horse Rampant,” a strain that, as it seems, aroused an ardent desire in horses and imparted it to them at the time of mating. Of the many admirable themes contained in philosophy, that which deals with marriage deserves no less serious attention than any other, for by means of it philosophy weaves a spell over those who are entering together into a lifelong partner­ship and renders them gentle and amiable toward each other. I have therefore drawn up a compendium of what you, who have been brought up in the atmosphere of philosophy, have often heard, putting it in the form of brief comparisons that it may be more easily remembered, and I am sending it as a gift for you both to possess in common; and at the same time I pray that the muses may lend their presence and cooperation to Aphrodite and may feel that it is no more fitting for them to provide a lyre or lute well attuned than it is to provide that the harmony which concerns marriage and the household shall be well attuned through reason, concord, and philosophy. Indeed, the ancients gave Hermes​ a place at the side of Aphrodite in the conviction that pleasure in marriage stands especially in need of reason; and they also assigned a place there to persuasion and the graces, so that married people should succeed in attaining their mutual desires by persuasion and not by fighting and quarrelling.

—Solon​ directed that the bride should nibble a quince before getting into bed, intimating, presumably, that the delight from lips and speech should be harmonious and pleasant at the outset.

—In Boeotia, after veiling the bride, they put on her head a chaplet of asparagus; for this plant yields the finest flavored fruit from the roughest thorns, and so the bride will provide for him who does not run away or feel annoyed at her first display of peevishness and unpleasantness a docile and sweet life together. Those who do not patiently put up with the early girlish disagreements are on a par with those who on account of the sourness of green grapes abandon the ripe clusters to others. Many newly married women get annoyed at their husbands because of their first experiences, and find themselves in like predicament with those who patiently submit to the bees’ stings but abandon the honeycomb.

—Especially in the beginning, married people ought to be on their guard against disagreements and clashes, for they see that such household vessels as are made of sections joined together are at the outset easily pulled apart by any fortuitous cause, but after a time, when their joints have become set, they can hardly be separated by fire and steel.

—Just as fire catches readily in chaff, fiber, and hares’ fur but goes out rather quickly unless it gets hold of some other thing that can retain it and feed it, so the keen love between newly married people that blazes up fiercely as the result of physical attractiveness must not be regarded as enduring or constant unless, by being centered about character and by gaining a hold upon the rational faculties, it attains a state of vitality.

—Fishing with poison is a quick way to catch fish and an easy method of taking them, but it makes the fish inedible and bad. In the same way, women who artfully employ love potions and magic spells upon their husbands, and gain mastery over them through pleasure, find themselves consorts of dull-witted, degenerate fools. The men bewitched by Circe were of no service to her, nor did she make the least use of them after they had been changed into swine and asses, while for Odysseus, who had sense and showed discretion in her company, she had an exceeding great love.

—Men who through weakness or effeminacy are unable to vault upon their horses teach the horses to kneel and crouch down. In like manner, some who have won wives of noble birth or wealth, instead of making themselves better, try to humble their wives, with the idea that they shall have more authority over their wives if these are reduced to a state of humility. But as one pays heed to the size of his horse in using the rein, so in using the rein on his wife he ought to pay heed to her position.

—Whenever the moon is at a distance from the sun we see her conspicuous and brilliant, but she disappears and hides herself when she comes near him. Contrariwise, a virtuous woman ought to be most visible in her husband’s company and to stay in the house and hide herself when he is away.

—Herodotus was not right in saying​ that a woman lays aside her modesty along with her undergarment. On the contrary, a virtuous woman puts on modesty in its stead, and husband and wife bring into their mutual relations the greatest modesty as a token of the greatest love.

—Whenever two notes are sounded in accord the tune is carried by the bass; and in like manner every activity in a virtuous household is carried on by both parties in agreement but discloses the husband’s leader­ship and preferences.

—Cato expelled from the senate​ a man who kissed his own wife in the presence of his daughter. This perhaps was a little severe. But if it is a disgrace (as it is) for man and wife to caress and kiss and embrace in the presence of others, is it not more of a disgrace to air their recriminations and disagreements before others and, granting that his intimacies and pleasures with his wife should be carried on in secret, to indulge in admonition, fault-finding, and plain speaking in the open and without reserve?

—Just as a mirror, although embellished with gold and precious stones, is good for nothing unless it shows a true likeness, so there is no advantage in a rich wife unless she makes her life true to her husband’s and her character in accord with his. If the mirror gives back a gloomy image of a glad man or a cheerful and grinning image of a troubled and gloomy man, it is a failure and worthless. So, too, a wife is worthless and lacking in sense of fitness who puts on a gloomy face when her husband is bent on being sportive and gay and again, when he is serious, is sportive and mirthful. The one smacks of disagreeableness, the other of indifference. Just as lines and surfaces in mathematical parlance have no motion of their own but only in conjunction with the bodies to which they belong,​ so the wife ought to have no feeling of her own, but she should join with her husband in seriousness and sportiveness and in soberness and laughter.

—Men who do not like to see their wives eat in their company are thus teaching them to stuff themselves when alone. So those who are not cheerful in the company of their wives, nor join with them in sportiveness and laughter, are thus teaching them to seek their own pleasures apart from their husbands.

—The lawful wives of the Persian kings sit beside them at dinner and eat with them. But when the kings wish to be merry and get drunk, they send their wives away and send for their music girls and concubines.​ They are right in what they do, because they do not concede any share in their licentiousness and debauchery to their wedded wives. If therefore a man in private life, who is incontinent and dissolute in regard to his pleasures, commits some peccadillo with a paramour or a maidservant, his wedded wife ought not to be indignant or angry, but she should reason that it is respect for her which leads him to share his debauchery, licentiousness, and wantonness with another woman.

—Kings fond of the arts make many persons incline to be artists, those fond of letters make many want to be scholars, and those fond of sport make many take up athletics. In like manner a man fond of his personal appearance makes a wife all paint and powder, one fond of pleasure makes her meretricious and licentious, while a husband who loves what is good and honorable makes a wife discreet and well-behaved.

—A wife ought not to make friends of her own but enjoy her husband’s friends in common with him. The gods are the first and most important friends. It is becoming for a wife to worship and to know only the gods that her husband believes in, and to shut the front door tight upon all queer rituals and outlandish superstitions. For with no god do stealthy and secret rites performed by a woman find any favor.

—Helen was fond of wealth and Paris of pleasure; Odysseus was sensible and Penelope virtuous. Therefore the marriage of the latter pair was happy and enviable, while that of the former created an “Iliad of woes” for Greeks and barbarians.

—The Roman,​ 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 to rely not 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 that 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.

 

Read the previous entries in this series: Inez Milholland and Eugen Boissevain and George Washington.

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