Plut. Mor., Roman Questions 29 — Roman Questions

Plut. Mor., Roman Questions 29 — Roman Questions, Plutarch; served verbatim

Question 29. Why do they not permit the new married woman herself to step over the threshold of the house, but the bridemen lift her over? Solution. What if the reason be that they, taking their first wives by force, brought them thus into their houses, when they went not in of their own accord? Or is it that they will have them seem to enter into that place as by force, not willingly, where they are about to lose their virginity? Or is it a significant ceremony to show that she is not to go out or leave her dwelling-place till she is forced, even as she goes in by force? For with us also in Boeotia they burn the axletree of a cart before the doors, intimating that the spouse is bound to remain there, the instrument of carriage being destroyed.

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

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Roman 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)