t thirty be the bridegroom's age,
The bride be in the fifth year of her womanhood:'[72]

if we thus marry a lad hardly old enough for marriage to a woman so many
years older, than himself, as dates and figs are forced. You will say
she loves him passionately: who prevents her, then, from serenading at
his doors, singing her amorous ditty, putting garlands on his statues,
and wrestling and boxing with her rivals in his affections? For all
these are what people in love do. And let her lower her eyebrows, and
give up the airs of a coquette, and assume the appearance of those that
are deeply smitten. But if she is modest and chaste, let her decorously
stay at home and await there her lovers and sweethearts; for any
sensible man would be disgusted and flee from a woman who took the
initiative in love, far less would he be likely to marry her after such
a barefaced wooing."

Sec. IX. When Protogenes had done speaking, my father said, "Do you see,
Anthemion, that they force us to intervene again, who have no objection
to dance in the retinue of conjugal Love?" "I do," said Anthemion, "but
pray defend Love at some length, as you are on his side, and moreover
come to the rescue of wealth,[73] with which Pisias seeks to scare us."
Thereupon my father began, "What on earth will not be brought as a
charge against a woman, if we are to reject Ismenodora because she is in
love and has money? Granted she loves sway and is rich? What then, if
she is young and handsome? And what if she plumes herself somewhat on
the lustre of her race? Have not chaste women often something of the
morose and peevish in their character almost past bearing? Do they not
sometimes get called waspish and shrewish by virtue of their very
chastity? Would it be best then to marry off the street some Thracian
Abrotonus, or some Milesian Bacchis, and seal the bargain by the present
of a handful of nuts? But we have known even such turn out intolerable
tyrants, Syrian flute-girls and ballet-dancers, as Aristonica, and
Oenanthe with her tambourine, and Agathoclea, who have lorded it over
kings' diadems.[74] Why Syrian Semiramis was only the servant and
concubine of one of king Ninus's slaves, till Ninus the great king
seeing and falling in love with her, she got such power over him that
she thought so cheap of him, that she asked to be allowed one day to sit
on the royal throne, with the royal diadem on her head, and to transact
state affairs. And Ninus having g