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Question 7. Why is a husband forbid to receive a gift
from his wife, and a wife from her husband?
Solution. What if the reason be as Solon writes it,—describing gifts to be peculiar to dying persons, unless a
man being entangled by necessity or wheedled by a woman
be enslaved to force which constrains him, or to pleasure
which persuades him,—that thus the gifts of husbands
and wives became suspected? Or is it that they reputed
a gift the basest sign of benevolence (for strangers and
they that have no love for us do give us presents), and so
took away such a piece of flattery from marriage, that to
love and be beloved should be devoid of mercenariness,
should be spontaneous and for its own sake, and not for
any thing else? Or because women, being corrupted by
receiving gifts, are thereby especially brought to admit
strangers, did it seem to be a weighty thing to require
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them to love their own husbands that give them nothing?
Or was it because all things ought to be common between
them, the husbands' goods being the wives', and the wives'
goods the husbands'? For he that accepts that which is
given learns thereby to esteem that which is not given the
property of another; so that, by giving but a little to each
other, they strip each other of all.
Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by. William W. Goodwin, PH. D. Boston. Little, Brown, and Company. Cambridge. Press Of John Wilson and son. 1874. 2.
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