Life & Wisdom Quote by Euripides

A slap of domestic realism dressed up as advice, Euripides uses the intimacy of "my girl" to make the line land like common sense rather than doctrine. It sounds protective, even tender, but the tenderness is doing rhetorical work: it smuggles a hard claim about women’s survival into a familiar patriarchal script. In a world where marriage was often a woman’s primary social security, "keep a husband" isn’t romantic; it’s economic and civic. The verb keep is transactional, closer to holding a position than sustaining a bond.

The contrast between "beauty" and "fine qualities" plays as moral uplift, yet it also concedes something bleak about the marketplace he’s describing. Beauty is currency, but it’s unstable currency, liable to depreciation by time, childbirth, rivalry, gossip. Fine qualities are pitched as the longer-term asset: restraint, loyalty, competence, discretion, the skills that make a household run and a man’s reputation look solid. The compliment is barbed because it frames virtue not as self-realization but as strategy.

Euripides, the tragedian who loved pulling at the seams of Athenian self-certainty, lets the audience feel both the prudence and the trap. The line can be read as proto-feminist skepticism about reducing women to ornament; it can also be read as a tightening of the cage: be more than beautiful, yes, but still in service of being kept and keeping. That tension is why it still bites.