[Sidenote: 138 B] TO POLLIANUS AND EURYDICE WITH PLUTARCH’S BEST WISHES.
When they were shutting you in your bridal chamber, the ancestral ritual
was duly applied to you by the priestess of Demeter. I believe that now,
if reason also were to take you in hand and join in the nuptial song, it
would prove of some service, and would support the tune as prescribed.
In the musical world they used to call one of the modes for the flute
‘the Horse-and-Mare’, because, apparently, the strains in that key were
provocative of union between those animals. Well, philosophy has many
excellent sermons to give, but none [Sidenote: C] more worthy of serious
attention than that upon marriage. By it she exerts a spell upon those
who come together as partners in life, and renders them gentle and
tractable to each other. I have, therefore, taken the main points of the
lessons which you have repeatedly heard, brought up as you have been in
the company of Philosophy. I have arranged them in a series of brief
comparisons to make them easier to remember, and am sending them as a
present to you both. In doing so I pray that the Muses may graciously
lend aid to Aphrodite, since, if it is their province to see that a lyre
or a harp shall be in tune, it is no less so to provide that the music
of the married home shall be harmonized by reason and philosophy. When
people in olden times assigned a seat with Aphrodite to Hermes, it was
because [Sidenote: D] the pleasure of marriage stands in special need of
reason; when to Persuasion and the Graces, it was in order that the
married pair might obtain their wishes from each other by means of
persuasion, and not by contention and strife.