Some villas were surrounded with large parks, in which deer and various foreign wild animals were kept, and in order to render the sheep that pastured on the lawn ornamental, we are told that they often dyed their fleeces with various colours.
Large fish ponds were also a common appendage to the villas of persons of fortune, and great expense was often incurred in stocking them. In general, however, country houses were merely surrounded with gardens, of which the Romans were extravagantly fond.
CHAPTER XXII.
Marriages and Funerals.
A marriage ceremony was never solemnized without consulting the auspices, and offering sacrifices to the gods, particularly to Juno; and the animals offered up on the occasion were deprived of their gall, in allusion to the absence of every thing bitter and malignant in the proposed union.
A legal marriage was made in three different ways, called confarreatio, usus and coemptio.
The first of these was the most ancient. A priest, in the presence of ten witnesses, made an offering to the gods, of a cake composed of salt water, and that kind of flour called “far,” from which the name of the ceremony was derived. The bride and bridegroom mutually partook of this, to denote the union that was to subsist between them, and the sacrifice of a sheep ratified the interchange of their vows.
When a woman, with the consent of her parents or guardian, lived an entire year with a man, with the intention of becoming his wife, it was called usus.
Coemptio was an imaginary purchase which the husband and wife made of each other, by the exchange of some pieces of money.