Plutarch, Conjugalia Praecepta
Frank Cole Babbitt, Ed.

The Roman,¹ on being admonished by his friends because he had put away a virtuous, wealthy, [p. 315] and lovely wife, reached out his shoe and said, ‘Yes, this is beautiful to look at, and new, but nobody knows where it pinches me.’ A wife, then, ought not to rely on her dowry or birth or beauty, but on things in which she gains the greatest hold on her husband, namely conversation, character, and comradeship, which she must render not perverse or vexatious day by day, but accommodating, inoffensive, and agreeable. For, as physicians have more fear of fevers that originate from obscure causes and gradual accretion than of those which may be accounted for by manifest and weighty reasons, so it is the petty, continual, daily clashes between man and wife, unnoticed by the great majority, that disrupt and mar married life.