The Game of Chess

They should live in dignity conferred by grace. Let there be a model for all of living chastely and honorably. Whence Jerome relates in his work Against Jovinian original: "contra Jovinianum"; a 4th-century polemic by St. Jerome defending the superiority of virginity over marriage that Duellius Gaius Duilius, a Roman politician and admiral known for his victory at the Battle of Mylae in 260 BCE, a noble Roman and the first to triumph in a naval battle after defeating his enemies, married a virgin named Julia original: "Yliam"; St. Jerome refers to her as Bilia. She was famed for her extreme devotion to her husband. She was of such great modesty that in those times—when self-restraint was almost a marvel because vice was so common—she became a shining example of chaste living.

A manicule (pointing hand) is drawn in the left margin, pointing towards the middle of the text block to highlight the story of Julia's modesty.

This Duellius, when he was already an old man with a trembling body, heard a rival in a certain place insult him by claiming that he had foul-smelling breath. When he had returned home in sadness and complained to his wife that she had never told him of this so he might have treated the defect, she replied: "I would have known you had this, had I not assumed that all men’s breath smelled that way." Therefore, noble and modest women are worthy of praise; she was ignorant of her husband's flaw and bore him patiently. Thus, the husband felt the sting of the insult not through his wife's disdain, but through his own physical failing.

¶ There was also a certain widow named Anna. When her relatives urged her to marry another, arguing that she was still of a suitable age and possessed her full beauty, she replied: "I shall by no means do so. If I were to find a husband as good as the one I had before, I would live in fear of losing him again; and if he were bad, it would be a misery to endure a bad husband after a good one." Thus she decided it was better to preserve her state of chastity chastity: here meaning "widow's continence," the medieval virtue of a widow refusing to remarry to remain faithful to her deceased husband.

¶ Augustine relates in The City of God original: "De Civitate Dei"; Augustine’s foundational work of Christian philosophy that there was a woman in Rome named Lucretia, most noble in both her character and her lineage. Her husband, named Collatinus, invited Sextus—the son of the tyrant King Tarquin the Proud original: "Tarquinii Superbi"; the legendary last king of Rome—to visit his estate at Collatia original: "castrũ suũ colatinũ"; refers to the town of Collatia near Rome. When Sextus was present at the banquet to see Lucretia, he observed many noble matrons there. And when the king's...