ainst the
Greeks, on the ground that they were treated well and yet reviled him,
answered, "What will they do then, if I treat them ill?" Whenever, then,
calumniating women come and say to a wife, "How badly your husband
treats you, though a chaste and loving wife!" let her answer, "How would
he act then, if I were to begin to hate him and injure him?"

Sec. XLI. The master who saw his runaway slave a long time after he had
run away, and chased him, and came up with him just as he had got to the
mill, said to him, "In what more appropriate place could I have wished
to find you?"[180] So let the wife, who is jealous of her husband, and
on the point of writing a bill of divorce in her anger, say to herself,
"In what state would my rival be better pleased to see me in than this,
vexed and at variance with my husband, and on the point of abandoning
his house and bed?"

Sec. XLII. The Athenians have three sacred seedtimes: the first at Scirus,
as a remembrance of the original sowing of corn, the second at Rharia,
the third under Pelis, which is called Buzygium.[181] But a more sacred
seedtime than all these is the procreation of children, and therefore
Sophocles did well to call Aphrodite "fruitful Cytherea." Wherefore it
behoves both husband and wife to be most careful over this business, and
to abstain from lawless and unholy breaches of the marriage vow, and
from sowing in quarters where they desire no produce, or where, if any
produce should come, they would be ashamed of it and desire to conceal
it.[182]

Sec. XLIII. When Gorgias the Rhetorician recited his speech at Olympia
recommending harmony to the Greeks, Melanthius cried out, "He recommend
harmony to us! Why, he can't persuade his wife and maid to live in
harmony, though there are only three of them in the house!" Gorgias
belike had an intrigue with the maid, and his wife was jealous. He then
must have his own house in good order who undertakes to order the
affairs of his friends and the public, for any ill-doings on the part of
husbands to their wives is far more likely to come out and be known to
the public than the ill-doings of wives to their husbands.

Sec. XLIV. They say the cat is driven mad by the smell of perfumes. If it
happens that wives are equally affected by perfumes, it is monstrous
that their husbands should not abstain from using perfumes, rather than
for so small a pleasure to incommode so grievously their wives. And
since they suffer quite a