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.
1 Cf. Plutarch's Life of Aemilius Paulus, chap. v. (p. 257 B), and Hieronymus, Adversus Iovinianum, i. chap. xlviii. (vol. ii. p. 292 of Migne's edition).