Plut. Mor., Conjugal Precepts 28 — Conjugal Precepts

Plut. Mor., Conjugal Precepts 28 — Conjugal Precepts, Plutarch; served verbatim

Plato observing the morose and sour humor of Xenocrates, otherwise a person of great virtue and worth, admonished him to sacrifice to the Graces. In like manner, I am of opinion that it behooves a woman of moderation to crave the assistance of the Graces in her behavior towards her husband, thereby (according to the saying of Metrodorus) to render their society mutually harmonious to each other, and to preserve her from being waspishly proud, out of a conceit of her fidelity and virtue. For it becomes not a frugal woman to be neglectful of decent neatness, nor one who has great respect to her husband to refrain complacency in her conversation; seeing that, as the over-rigid humor of a wife renders her honesty irksome, so sluttery begets a hatred of her sparing and pinching housewifery.

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

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Filed here — the addresses this episode attests; counted by the house’s first pass

Metrodorus — a candidate entry Xenocrates — a candidate entry

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)