The Complete Aristotle (eng.)

is
relative to a further end. Now, in men rational principle and mind
are the end towards which nature strives, so that the birth and
moral discipline of the citizens ought to be ordered with a view to
them. In the second place, as the soul and body are two, we see
also that there are two parts of the soul, the rational and the
irrational, and two corresponding states—reason and appetite. And
as the body is prior in order of generation to the soul, so the
irrational is prior to the rational. The proof is that anger and
wishing and desire are implanted in children from their very birth,
but reason and understanding are developed as they grow older.
Wherefore, the care of the body ought to precede that of the soul,
and the training of the appetitive part should follow: none the
less our care of it must be for the sake of the reason, and our
care of the body for the sake of the soul.
XVI
    Since the legislator should begin by considering how the frames
of the children whom he is rearing may be as good as possible, his
first care will be about marriage—at what age should his citizens
marry, and who are fit to marry? In legislating on this subject he
ought to consider the persons and the length of their life, that
their procreative life may terminate at the same period, and that
they may not differ in their bodily powers, as will be the case if
the man is still able to beget children while the woman is unable
to bear them, or the woman able to bear while the man is unable to
beget, for from these causes arise quarrels and differences between
married persons. 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. It also conduces to temperance not to marry too soon; for
women who marry early are apt to be wanton; and in men too the
bodily frame is stunted if they marry while the seed is growing
(for there is a time when the growth of the seed, also, ceases, or
continues to but a slight extent). Women should marry when they are
about eighteen years of age, and men at seven and thirty; then they
are in the prime of life, and the decline in the powers of both
will coincide. Further, the children, if their birth takes place
soon, as may reasonably be expected, will succeed in the beginning
of their prime, when the fathers are already in the decline of
life, and have nearly reached their term of three-score years and
ten.
    Thus much of the age proper for marriage: the season of the year
should also be considered; according to our present custom, people
generally limit marriage to the season of winter, and they are
right. The precepts of physicians and natural philosophers about
generation should also be studied by the parents themselves; the
physicians give good advice about the favorable conditions of the
body, and the natural philosophers about the winds; of which they
prefer the north to the south.
    What constitution in the parent is most advantageous to the
offspring is a subject which we will consider more carefully when
we speak of the education of