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Why do they, as they conduct the bride to her
home, bid her say, ‘Where you are Gaius, there am
I Gaia’
1?
Is her entrance into the house upon fixed terms,
as it were, at once to share everything and to control
jointly the household, and is the meaning, then,
‘Wherever you are lord and master, there am I lady
and mistress’? These names are in common use
also in other connexions, just as jurists speak of
Gaius Seius and Lucius Titius,2 and philosophers of
Dion and Theon.3
Or do they use these names because of Gaia
Caecilia,4 consort of one of Tarquini sons, a fair and
virtuous woman, whose statue in bronze stands in the
temple of Sanctus?5 And both her sandals and her
spindle were, in ancient days, dedicated there as
tokens of her love of home and of her industry
respectively.
[p. 55]
2 ‘John Doe and Richard Roe.’
3 Cf. Moralia, 1061 c.
4 Probably not the same as Tanaquil, wife of Tarquinius Priscus; but cf. Pliny, Natural History, viii. 48 (194).
5 We should probably emend to Sancus; the same mistake is made in the mss. of Propertius, iv. 9. 71-74, where see the excellent note of Barber and Butler.
Plutarch. Moralia. with an English Translation by. Frank Cole Babbitt. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. London. William Heinemann Ltd. 1936. 4.
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