The Instructor 3.8.41

If any of you shuns luxury to the end, nursed by frugality, he will more easily practice enduring involuntary labors, making voluntary hardships a constant training for persecutions, so that when he comes to necessary labors, fears, and griefs, he will not be untrained in endurance. That is why we have no fatherland on earth, so that we may despise earthly possessions. Frugality is the richest thing, being a disposition that lacks nothing in the expenses that ought to be made for what is needed and as far as is needed; for expenses are payments. How a wife should live with her husband, about working with her own hands, housekeeping, and the use of servants, and also about the time for marriage and what befits women, we discuss in the treatise on marriage; what suits instruction is all we must set down now, noting in outline the life of Christians. Most of it has already been said and taught; what is still left we will set out; for examples are no small weight toward salvation. “See,” says tragedy, “Telemachus did not kill the wife of Odysseus; for she did not take a husband over her husband, but the marriage bed remains sound in the house.” Someone, reproaching lewd adultery, showed love for her husband as a fine image of self-control. And the Spartans, compelling the Helots (Helots is a name for servants) to get drunk, showed themselves, being sober, the deeds of drunkenness by way of cure and correction.