1So they live with their chastity fenced about, corrupted by no allurements of public shows, by no provocations of banquets. 2Secret letters are unknown to men and women alike. 2In so numerous a people adulteries are very few, and their punishment is immediate and left to the husbands: having cut off her hair, the husband drives her, stripped, from the house in the presence of her relatives and drives her with blows through the whole village; 2for there is no pardon for chastity once prostituted: not by beauty, not by youth, not by wealth will she find a husband. 3For no one there laughs at vices, nor is corrupting and being corrupted called the fashion of the age.
3Better still, indeed, are those states in which only virgins marry, and the hopes and prayers of a wife are settled once and for all. 4So they receive one husband, just as they receive one body and one life, so that there may be no thought beyond him, no lingering desire, so that they may love not the husband so much as the married state. 5To limit the number of children or to kill any child born after the heir is held a crime, and good customs have more force there than good laws elsewhere.