On Sobriety 5

¹Indeed there is one commandment of the law in which those who have ears to hear will perceive that he sets before us still more clearly the two truths of which I have spoken. For we read “if a man has two wives, one loved and the other hated, and the beloved and the hated each bear a son to him, and the son of her that is hated is the firstborn, it shall be that on the day on which he allots his goods to his sons, he shall not be able to give the right of the firstborn to the son of her whom he loves, and set aside the firstborn, the son of her whom he hates, but he shall acknowledge the firstborn, the son of her whom he hates, to give him a double portion of all that he has gotten; for he is the beginning of his children and to him belong the rights of the firstborn” (Deut. 21:15–17). ²You observe at once that the son of the beloved wife is never called by him “firstborn” or “elder,” but the son of the hated wife is so called often. And yet at the very beginning of the commandment he has shewn us that the birth of the former comes first and the birth of the latter afterwards. For he writes, “if the beloved and the hated bear children.” But all the same the issue of the wife mentioned first, though his years be more, is counted as younger in the judgement of right reason, while the child of the wife mentioned afterwards, though he be later in the date of his birth, ³is held worthy of the greater and senior portion. Why? Because we declare that in the beloved wife we have a figure of pleasure and in the hated wife a figure of prudence. For pleasure’s company is beloved beyond measure by the great mass of men, because from the hour of their birth to the utmost limits of old age she produces and sets before them such enticing lures and love-charms; while for prudence, severe and august as she is, they have a strange and profound hatred, as foolish children hate the most wholesome but most distasteful directions of their parents and those who have the charge of them. ⁴Both are mothers; pleasure of the pleasure-loving, prudence of the virtue-loving tendency in the soul. But the former is never full grown but always in reality a child, however long and never-ending the tale of years to which he attains. But the other—the virtue-lover—is exempt from old age, yet “from the cradle,” as the phrase goes, ⁵he ranks as an elder in the senate of prudence. And therefore he says—and very forcible are his words—of the son of the hated wife—virtue who is hated by the multitude—that he is “the beginning of his children,” and truly so, because he is first in rank and precedence—and again, “to him belong the rights of the firstborn,” by the law of nature, not by the no-law which prevails among men.