Miscellanies 2.23.143

Marriage makes a father, as a husband makes a mother. Homer too sets as the greatest prayer “a husband and a home,” but not simply, rather “with noble like-mindedness.” For the marriage of others agrees in self-indulgence, but that of those who philosophize leads to the like-mindedness that is according to reason; it bids wives adorn not their appearance but their character, and commands husbands not to treat their wives as mistresses, making bodily wantonness their aim, but to make marriage a help for the whole of life and a means of the best self-restraint. For more precious, I think, than wheat and barley sown in their proper seasons is the human being who is sown, for whom all things grow; and farmers sow those seeds when sober. Every filthy and polluted practice, then, must be purged from marriage, so that we may not be reproached that the union of irrational animals agrees with nature better than human wedlock, according to the accepted definition.