"Try to take for a mate a person of your own neighborhood"
About this Quote
Hesiod’s advice lands with the blunt practicality of a man trying to keep a fragile household from being wrecked by distance, gossip, and logistics. “Try to take for a mate a person of your own neighborhood” isn’t romance-killing so much as risk management, delivered from a world where marriage is less a private adventure than a public contract. In early archaic Greece, a spouse isn’t just a beloved; they’re labor, lineage, dowry, alliances, and reputation bundled into one choice. Proximity is a form of due diligence.
The intent is prophylactic: choose someone whose family you can observe, whose habits are already legible, whose past can’t be conveniently reinvented. “Neighborhood” functions like a social credit score. In a tight community, information travels faster than desire; your neighbors can vouch for (or warn about) a potential partner because they’ve watched them handle scarcity, conflict, and work. Hesiod is essentially saying: don’t outsource your future to a stranger’s story.
The subtext is also about control. Marrying nearby keeps kin networks close, disputes easier to arbitrate, and a wife’s movements more surveillable by both families. It shrinks the space where a partner can act independently, which reveals the patriarchal assumptions under the counsel: stability is purchased by limiting unpredictability, especially in women’s social mobility.
Context matters: Hesiod writes as a small farmer-poet suspicious of elites, travel, and flashy ambitions. The neighborhood match is a hedge against the chaos of debt, inheritance fights, and feuding households. It works as poetry because it compresses a whole sociology of survival into a single, almost offhand line.
The intent is prophylactic: choose someone whose family you can observe, whose habits are already legible, whose past can’t be conveniently reinvented. “Neighborhood” functions like a social credit score. In a tight community, information travels faster than desire; your neighbors can vouch for (or warn about) a potential partner because they’ve watched them handle scarcity, conflict, and work. Hesiod is essentially saying: don’t outsource your future to a stranger’s story.
The subtext is also about control. Marrying nearby keeps kin networks close, disputes easier to arbitrate, and a wife’s movements more surveillable by both families. It shrinks the space where a partner can act independently, which reveals the patriarchal assumptions under the counsel: stability is purchased by limiting unpredictability, especially in women’s social mobility.
Context matters: Hesiod writes as a small farmer-poet suspicious of elites, travel, and flashy ambitions. The neighborhood match is a hedge against the chaos of debt, inheritance fights, and feuding households. It works as poetry because it compresses a whole sociology of survival into a single, almost offhand line.
Quote Details
| Topic | Marriage |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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