Miscellanies 2.23.141

The comic poet Menander, at any rate, while running down marriage, also sets its advantages against this, answering the one who said, “I am badly off with regard to the matter”: “(B.) That is because you take it from the left side.” Then he adds: “You see the troubles and the things that will grieve you in it, but you do not look at the good things,” and so on. Marriage helps also those advanced in years, presenting a wife to care for them and raising the children from her to support them in old age. “Children are the glory of a man who has died; like corks they hold up the net, saving the twisted line of flax from the deep,” according to the tragic poet Sophocles. And lawgivers do not allow the highest offices to be held by the unmarried. For example, the lawgiver of the Spartans set a penalty not only for not marrying, but for marrying badly, marrying late, and living alone. And the noble Plato commands the one who does not marry to pay the cost of a wife's maintenance to the public treasury and to render the proper expenses to the magistrates. For if they do not marry and do not beget children, they will, as far as it rests with them, create a scarcity of men and destroy both cities and the world made up of them.