Plut. Mor., Roman Questions 65 — Roman Questions

Plut. Mor., Roman Questions 65 — Roman Questions, Plutarch; served verbatim

Question 65. Why doth not a man lie at first with a bride in the light, but when it is dark? Solution. Is it not for modesty’s sake, for at the first congress he looks upon her as a stranger to him? Or is it that he may be inured to go into his own wife with modesty? Or, as Solon hath written, Let the bride go into the bed-chamber gnawing a quince, that the first salutation be not harsh and ungrateful. So did the Roman lawgiver command that, if there should be any thing absurd and unpleasant in her body, she should hide it? Or was it intended to cast infamy upon the unlawful use of venery by causing that the lawful should have certain signs of modesty attending it?

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

Solon — a life

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)