Secondly, he must consider the time at which the children will succeed
to their parents; there ought not to be too great an interval of
age, for then the parents will be too old to derive any pleasure
from their affection, or to be of any use to them. Nor ought they to
be too nearly of an age; to youthful marriages there are many
objections- the children will be wanting in respect to the parents,
who will seem to be their contemporaries, and disputes will arise in
the management of the household. Thirdly, and this is the point from
which we digressed, the legislator must mold to his will the frames of
newly-born children. Almost all these objects may be secured by
attention to one point. Since the time of generation is commonly
limited within the age of seventy years in the case of a man, and of
fifty in the case of a woman, the commencement of the union should
conform to these periods. The union of male and female when too
young is bad for the procreation of children; in all other animals the
offspring of the young are small and in-developed, and with a tendency
to produce female children, and therefore also in man, as is proved by
the fact that in those cities in which men and women are accustomed to
marry young, the people are small and weak; in childbirth also younger
women suffer more, and more of them die; some persons say that this
was the meaning of the response once given to the Troezenians- the
oracle really meant that many died because they married too young;
it had nothing to do with the ingathering of the harvest.
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