Plut. Mor., Greek Questions 49 — Greek Questions

Plut. Mor., Greek Questions 49 — Greek Questions, Plutarch; served verbatim

Question 49. What is the reason that it is a custom amongst the Chalcedonian women, that, if at any time they happen to meet with other women’s husbands, especially magistrates, they cover one cheek?Solution. The Chalcedonians warred against the Bithynians, being provoked thereto by every kind of injury. And Zipoetus being king of the Bithynians, they brought out all their forces, with the addition of Thracian auxiliaries, and were wasting the country with fire and sword. Zipoetus then pitching his camp against them at a place called Phalium, the Chalcedonians, fighting ill through desperateness and disorder, lost about eight thousand soldiers, but were not all cut off, Zipoetus in favor of the Byzantines yielding to a cessation of arms. Now, there being a great scarcity of men in the city of Chalcedon, most of the women were necessitated to marry their freedmen and aliens; others that chose widowhood rather than marriage to such, if they had any occasion to go before judges or magistrates, managed their own affairs, only withdrawing their veil from one side of their face. Then the married women, imitating these as their betters, for modesty’s sake took up the same custom.

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

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Greek Questions, Plutarch — translated by Isaac Chauncy (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)