Marriage, if one will face the truth, is an evil, but a necessary evil.

The line expresses a characteristically comic, worldly skepticism about marriage: it is portrayed as burdensome, constraining, and productive of trouble (“an evil”), yet also as socially unavoidable and practically useful (“necessary”). In Menander’s New Comedy, domestic arrangements—courtship, household conflict, inheritance, legitimacy—drive plots and generate humor, so marriage often appears less as romantic fulfillment than as a social mechanism that stabilizes families and resolves complications. The aphorism captures that tension: private misgivings versus public necessity, and the idea that institutions can be simultaneously oppressive and indispensable.