Many others will occur to the reader who is familiar with the lighter utterances of the ancients. But in Greece, as in China, India, and Japan, and wherever else men and women have been joined in wedlock, there have been marriages in which husband and wife have lived on terms nobler than those contemplated by the law or demanded by usage. Where could we find a juster view of the duties of husband and wife than in that passage of Xenophon's dialogue on Economy where Ischomachus tells Socrates how he had taken his young wife into his confidence, and come to a clear understanding with her as to the share each should take in carrying on the household? Goethe must have had this passage in his mind when he wrote the fine tribute to the dignity of housekeeping in "Wilhelm Meister." Ischomachus had married a girl of fifteen, who came to him as wives in Greece usually came to their husbands--an absolute stranger to him. He had to get acquainted with her after marriage, as, indeed, he says, "When we were well enough acquainted, and were so familiar that we began to converse freely with one another, I asked her why she thought I had taken her for my wife." Much is revealed in that sentence. He tells her that, being married, they are now to have all things in common, and each should only strive to enhance the good of the household. She stares with wonder. Her mother had told her that her fortune would be wholly her husband's, and all that she had to do was to live virtuously and soberly. Ischomachus assents, but he proceeds to show her that, in the nature of things, husband and wife must be equal co-operators, he getting the money, she administering it; he fighting the battle of life out-of-doors, she within the house. At great length this model husband illustrates his point, and entirely in the spirit of the noble passage in Goethe. She catches the idea at length. "It will be of little avail," she says, "my keeping at home unless you send such provisions as are necessary." "True," he replies, "and of very little use my providing would be if there were no one at home to take care of what I send; it would be pouring water into a sieve." This fine presentation of household economy, like that of the German poet, is, unhappily, only a dialogue of fiction. It was merely Xenophon's conception of the manner in which a philosopher of prodigious wisdom _might_ deal with a girl of fifteen, whom he had married without having enjoyed the pleasure of a previous acquaintance with her. Doubtless there was here and there in ancient Greece a couple who succeeded in approximating Xenophon's ideal.