IOANNES BOCCATIVS,

and already a companion to the watching husband, and named Eve by Him. What greater, what more splendid thing could have ever happened to one being born? Furthermore, we can believe her to have been wondrous in bodily beauty, for what was made by the finger of God that does not exceed the rest in beauty? And although this beauty was destined to perish with age, or to fall in the middle flower of life by the small impulse of sickness: yet because women count this among their principal gifts, and have already attained much glory from it (in the indiscreet judgment of mortals), it has not been superfluously placed among their famous traits as a principal radiance, and will come to be placed in what follows. Moreover, she was made a citizen of Paradise as much by right of origin as of dwelling, and clothed in a splendor unknown to us. While she, together with her husband, greedily enjoyed the delights of the place, the envious enemy of her happiness suggested to her mind through wicked persuasion that if she went against the one law imposed upon her by God, she could go into greater glory. When she believed him, out of feminine levity, more than she believed what would have profited us, and stupidly thought she would consent to higher things, before all else, by a certain bland suggestion, she drew her husband, who was flexible, to her own opinion. And as they acted against the law and tasted the fruits of the tree of good and evil by a rash daring, they brought themselves and their entire future race out of peace and eternity into anxious labors, misery, and death, and from a delightful fatherland into thorns, clods, and rocks. For when the shining light, with which they were clothed as they walked, had departed, and they were rebuked by their troubled Creator and girded with skins, they came out of the place of delights, driven as exiles into the fields of Hebron. There, the excellent woman, famous for these deeds, since she was the first (as some have believed) to have discovered for her husband how to turn the earth with mattocks, she often experienced the pains of childbirth, and suffered equally miserably in the anguish of mind by which she was angered over the death of her sons and grandsons, and the cold and heat, hunger, and other inconveniences; exhausted by labors, she arrived at old age to die.

But the wife of Ninus, most famous in war and arms,
More famous for incest, ruined by luxury,
She too commanded that the wife should dominate her own husband.