A Roman divorced from his wife, being highly blamed by his friends, who demanded, “Was she not chaste? Was she not fair? Was she not fruitful?” holding out his shoe, asked them whether it was not new and well made. “Yet,” added he, “none of you can tell where it pinches me.”

Plutarch uses this anecdote in his moral essays to illustrate the limits of outsiders’ judgments about private life. The story concerns a Roman man who divorces his wife and is criticized by friends who point to conventional public measures of a “good” wife—chastity, beauty, and fertility. In reply, he produces a shoe that appears new and well made, yet only the wearer knows where it hurts. The comparison reflects Greco-Roman social expectations around marriage and reputation, and Plutarch’s broader interest in ethical reasoning drawn from everyday examples and historical customs.

The shoe metaphor argues that external appearances and socially approved criteria cannot fully capture lived experience. A marriage may look exemplary by public standards, yet still contain private grievances, incompatibilities, or suffering invisible to observers. Plutarch’s point is not necessarily to praise divorce, but to caution against moralizing based on incomplete information and to emphasize the authority of personal experience in matters of intimate pain. More broadly, the passage critiques the tendency to reduce complex human relationships to checklists of virtues, reminding readers that what “pinches” is often known only to the person who bears it.