Sec. XXXVII. The generals of the Greeks in Cyrus's army ordered their men to receive the enemy silently if they came up shouting, but if they came up silently to rush out to meet them with a shout. So sensible wives, in their husband's tantrums, are quiet when they storm, but if they are silent and sullen talk them round and appease them. Sec. XXXVIII. Rightly does Euripides[175] censure those who introduce the lyre at wine-parties, for music ought to be called in to assuage anger and grief, rather than to enervate the voluptuous still more than before. Think, therefore, those in error who sleep together for pleasure, but when they have any little difference with one another sleep apart, and do not then more than at any other time invoke Aphrodite, who is the best physician in such cases, as the poet, I ween, teaches us, where he introduces Hera, saying: "Their long-continued strife I now will end, For to the bed of love I will them send."[176] Sec. XXXIX. Everywhere and at all times should husband and wife avoid giving one another cause of offence, but most especially when they are in bed together. The woman who was in labour and had a bad time said to those that urged her to go to bed, "How shall the bed cure me, which was the very cause of this trouble?"[177] And those differences and quarrels which the bed generates will not easily be put an end to at any other time or place. Sec. XL. Hermione seems to speak the truth where she says: "The visits of bad women ruined me."[178] But this case does not happen naturally, but only when dissension and jealousy has made wives open not only their doors but their ears to such women. But that is the very time when a sensible wife will shut her ears more than at any other time, and be especially on her guard against whisperers, that fire may not be added to fire,[179] and remember the remark of Philip, who, when his friends tried to excite him against the Greeks, on the ground that they were treated well and yet reviled him, answered, "What will they do then, if I treat them ill?" Whenever, then, calumniating women come and say to a wife, "How badly your husband treats you, though a chaste and loving wife!" let her answer, "How would he act then, if I were to begin to hate him and injure him?" Sec. XLI. The master who saw his runaway slave a long time after he had run away, and chased him, and came up with him just as he had got to the mill, said to him, "In what more appropriate place could I have wished to find you?"[180] So let the wife, who is jealous of her husband, and on the point of writing a bill of divorce in her anger, say to herself, "In what state would my rival be better pleased to see me in than this, vexed and at variance with my husband, and on the point of abandoning his house and bed?"