Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists
C. D. Yonge, B.A., Ed.

---

After Laurentius had said all this, Leonidas, finding fault with the name of wife (γαμετὴ), quoted these verses out of the Soothsayers of Alexis— [p. 894] Oh wretched are we husbands, who have sold

All liberty of life, all luxury,
And live as slaves of women, not as freemen.
We say we have a dowry; do we not
Endure the penalty, full of female bile,
Compared to which the bile of man's pure honey?
For men, though injured, pardon: but the women
First injure us, and then reproach us more;
They rule those whom they should not; those they should
They constantly neglect. They falsely swear;
They have no single hardship, no disease;
And yet they are complaining without end.

And Xenarchus, in his Sleep, says—

Are then the grasshoppers not happy, say you?
When they have wives who cannot speak a word.

And Philetærus, in his Corinthiast, says—

O Jupiter, how soft and bland an eye
The lady has! 'Tis not for nothing we
Behold the temple of Hetæra here;
But there is not one temple to a wife
Throughout the whole of Greece.

And Amphis says in his Athamas—

Is not a courtesan much more good-humour'd
Than any wedded wife? No doubt she is,
And 'tis but natural; for she, by law,
Thinks she's a right to sulk and stay at home:
But well the other knows that 'tis her manners
By which alone she can retain her friends;
And if they fail, she must seek out some others.