[12] Excellent also are the other injunctions laid down by the law on the relation of the sexes. It commands abstinence not only from the wives of others but also from widows in cases where the union is forbidden by the moral law.
[13] To the Persian custom it at once shows its aversion and abhorrence and forbids it as a very grave offence against holy living. For the Persian magnates marry their mothers and regard the children of the marriage as nobles of the highest birth, worthy, so it is said, to hold the supreme sovereignty.
[14] What form of unholiness could be more impious than this: that a father’s bed, which should be kept untouched as something sacred, should be brought to shame: that no respect should be shown for a mother’s ageing years: that the same man should be son and husband to the same woman, and again the same woman wife and mother to the same man: that the children of both should be brothers to their father and grandsons to their mother: that she should be both mother and grandmother of those whom she bore and he both father and half-brother of those whom he begot?
[15] Even, among the Greeks these things were done in old days in Thebes in the case of Oedipus the son of Laïus. They were done in ignorance, not by deliberate intention, and yet the marriage produced such a harvest of ills that nothing was wanting that could lead to the utmost misery.
[16] For a succession of wars civil and foreign was left to be passed on as a heritage to children and descendants from their fathers and ancestors. The greatest cities in Greece were sacked, and armed forces both of natives and allied contingents were destroyed: the bravest leaders on both sides fell one after the other; brothers slew brothers in the deadly feud engendered by ambition for sovereign power. In consequence not only families and independent territories, but also the largest part of the Greek world perished involved in the general destruction. For cities formerly well populated were left stripped of their inhabitants as monuments of the disasters of Greece, a sinister sight to contemplate.
[17] Nor are the Persians either who follow these practices exempt from similar troubles, for they are always engaging in campaigns and battles, slaying and being slain. Sometimes they are attacking the neighbouring populations, sometimes defending themselves against insurrection. For of insurgents many appear from many quarters, as the barbarian nature can never remain in quietude. Thus before the sedition of the hour is put down another springs up, so that no season of the year is reserved for a tranquil life, but summer and winter, day and night they are bearing arms, and so rarely does peace reign that they spend more time enduring the hardships of encampment in the open air than dwelling in their cities.
[18] I put on one side the great and magnificent triumphs of kings whose first exploit when they succeed to the throne is that worst of sacrileges fratricide—murders which they try to vindicate as reasonable by predicting that their brothers will probably attack them.
[19] All these things appear to me to be the result of the ill-matched matings of sons with mothers. For justice who watches over human affairs avenges the unholy deeds on the impious, and the impiety extends beyond the perpetrators of the deed to those who voluntarily range themselves with the perpetrators.
[20] But such careful precautions has our law taken in these matters that it has not even permitted the son of a first marriage to marry his stepmother after the death of his father, both on account of the honour due to his father and because the names of mother and stepmother are closely akin, however different are the feelings called up by the two words.
[21] For he who has been taught to abstain from another’s wife because she is called his stepmother, will a fortiori abstain from taking his natural mother; and if the memory of his father makes him respect her who was once his father’s wife, the honour which he pays to both his parents will certainly keep him from entertaining the idea of violating his mother in any way. For it would be the height of folly while acknowledging the claims of a half parentage to appear to treat with contempt the full and complete whole.