s seem to love their sons best as able to help them, and
fathers their daughters as needing their help; perhaps also it is in
compliment to one another, that each prefers the other sex in their
children, and openly favours it. This, however, is a matter perhaps of
little importance. But it looks very nice in the wife to show greater
respect to her husband's parents than to her own, and if anything
unpleasant has happened to confide it to them rather than to her own
people. For trust begets trust,[174] and love love.

Sec. XXXVII. The generals of the Greeks in Cyrus's army ordered their men
to receive the enemy silently if they came up shouting, but if they came
up silently to rush out to meet them with a shout. So sensible wives, in
their husband's tantrums, are quiet when they storm, but if they are
silent and sullen talk them round and appease them.

Sec. XXXVIII. Rightly does Euripides[175] censure those who introduce the
lyre at wine-parties, for music ought to be called in to assuage anger
and grief, rather than to enervate the voluptuous still more than
before. Think, therefore, those in error who sleep together for
pleasure, but when they have any little difference with one another
sleep apart, and do not then more than at any other time invoke
Aphrodite, who is the best physician in such cases, as the poet, I ween,
teaches us, where he introduces Hera, saying:

"Their long-continued strife I now will end,
For to the bed of love I will them send."[176]

Sec. XXXIX. Everywhere and at all times should husband and wife avoid
giving one another cause of offence, but most especially when they are
in bed together. The woman who was in labour and had a bad time said to
those that urged her to go to bed, "How shall the bed cure me, which was
the very cause of this trouble?"[177] And those differences and quarrels
which the bed generates will not easily be put an end to at any other
time or place.

Sec. XL. Hermione seems to speak the truth where she says:

"The visits of bad women ruined me."[178]

But this case does not happen naturally, but only when dissension and
jealousy has made wives open not only their doors but their ears to such
women. But that is the very time when a sensible wife will shut her ears
more than at any other time, and be especially on her guard against
whisperers, that fire may not be added to fire,[179] and remember the
remark of Philip, who, when his friends tried to excite him ag