Marriage Quote by Hesiod

Hesiod isn’t offering relationship advice so much as issuing a grim civic warning: opt out of marriage and you’re opting out of the future. The line lands with the blunt force of a proverb, but its craft is in the double bind it sets. Women are framed as a source of “sorrows,” yet refusing them leads to something worse: “deadly old age.” The sting is deliberate. Hesiod taps a familiar misogynistic trope and then weaponizes it to steer men back toward the institution they’re tempted to avoid.

The subtext is economic before it’s romantic. In an agrarian world where lineage is labor, inheritance is stability, and household continuity is survival, marriage isn’t a personal milestone; it’s a technology for managing risk. “Fleeing” suggests the man isn’t merely single but evasive, trying to dodge obligations. Hesiod answers with the terror of ending up without heirs, without caretakers, without a place in the chain of reciprocity that makes old age bearable. “Deadly” reads less like melodrama than social diagnosis: isolation is physically dangerous when your welfare depends on kin.

Context matters: Hesiod writes in a world anxious about scarcity, disputes over property, and the fragility of order. Women, in his broader mythic imagination (think Pandora), often arrive as a costly necessity. This line distills that worldview into a hard-edged bargain: yes, marriage brings trouble; the alternative is extinction of your household and a lonely, precarious decline. The poem’s authority comes from sounding like common sense while enforcing a social script.