Plut. Mor., Conjugal Precepts 25 — Conjugal Precepts

Plut. Mor., Conjugal Precepts 25 — Conjugal Precepts, Plutarch; served verbatim

Socrates was wont to give this advice to young men that accustomed themselves to their mirrors:—if ill-favored, to correct their deformity by the practice of virtue; if handsome, not to blemish their outward form with inward vice. In like manner, it would not be amiss for a mistress of a family, when she holds her mirror in her hands, to discourse her own thoughts:—if deformed, thus, Should I prove lewd and wicked too?—on the other side, thus the fair one, What if chaste beside? For it adds a kind of veneration to a woman not so handsome, that she is more beloved for the perfections of her mind than the outside graces of her body.

The Greek stands ready in the workroom; the English is served. Both faces will read together.

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Conjugal Precepts, Plutarch — translated by John Philips (rev. W. W. Goodwin), 1874
Apparatus shelf + pinned Perseus TEI — Plutarch's Morals (the Moralia), ed. William W. Goodwin, five volumes · 'Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by William W. Goodwin, Ph. D.', with an introduction by R. W. Emerson; Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1874 (five volumes; a minority of the TEI transcriptions were keyed from the same publisher's 1878 reprint)
license: public-domain (US: the Goodwin edition is an 1874 Boston publication of a 1684-1694 translation — title pages verified on all five shelf scans at acquisition; Perseus digital editions CC BY-SA 4.0, attribution recorded per ops/corpus-staging/SOURCES.md pattern)