Hierocles Exalts Wedlock

Hierocles · Down to Earth Series · 10 pages

From the “Ethical Fragments of Hierocles” in Political fragments of Archytas, Charondas, Zaleucus, and other Ancient Pythagoreans, preserved by Stobæus, translated from the Greek by Thomas Taylor in 1822, pages 95–105. Its companion in this series, “How to conduct ourselves towards our parents,” comes from the same volume, pages 83–89.

The fragment opens by calling the discussion of wedlock a thing most necessary, on the ground that the whole of our race is naturally adapted to society and that the first and most elementary of all associations is the one effected by marriage. Cities, Hierocles argues, could not exist without households, and the household of an unmarried man is imperfect where that of the married man is perfect and full; he refers back to his own treatise On Families for the conclusion that a life accompanied by wedlock is to be chosen by the wise man in preference, and the single life only where particular circumstances require it. He then turns from the wise man to Nature, who he says incites us to marriage before philosophy does, having made us both gregarious and adapted to copulation, and having set the procreation of children and the stability of life as the one common work of wedlock. The argument closes with a comparison between plants, which live agreeably to the life imparted to them and make use of nature alone because they do not participate of soul, and animals, which are led to investigate what is proper for them by imaginations and desires — with man placed above both by the reasoning he brings to the same choice.

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