‘Came her lover to her bedside, stooped him down, and met her kiss;
Low and faint to his ear only, whispered she, her message this:
“When I pass away, my lover, deck thou out my tomb for me,
As thou would’st have decked the home where wedded I should dwell with thee[1407].”’
Yet another point of coincidence between the ceremonial of marriage and of funeral is the wearing of a crown. In ancient times ‘chaplets,’ says Becker[1408], ‘were certainly worn both by bride and bridegroom,’ and in modern usage they are as essential to the marriage ceremony as the wedding-rings. At a certain point in the service, it is the duty of the best man, assisted by the chief bridesmaid, to keep exchanging the rings from the hands of the bride and bridegroom, and in like manner to exchange the crowns which they wear from the head of one to the head of the other; and as the rings are always worn afterwards, so the two crowns are carefully preserved and hung up together in the new home. Equally well-established is the use of garlands in ancient funerals[1409], and, if not quite universal at the present day[1410], they are at any rate commonly employed in the funerals of women and children. In Macedonia it is actually the bridal crown which is worn for burial by anyone who was betrothed or newly married[1411].
Worthy of notice too is the not uncommon spectacle of an apple, quince[1412], or pomegranate laid among the flowers with which the bier is adorned; for all these three fruits have their special significance in relation to marriage. The classical custom of throwing an apple into a girl’s lap as a sign of love is a method of wooing still known to the rustic swain. It is not indeed regarded as a highly respectable method, but perhaps neither in old times was it so; for then, as now, the more well-conducted youths seem to have had their wooing, if such it may be called, carried on through the agency of an elderly lady (in ancient Greek προμνήστρια, in modern προξενήτρια) whose negotiations were chiefly addressed to the parents on either side, and whose conversation smacked more of dowry than of love. The quince and the pomegranate however are employed without any offence to propriety. The former is in some districts the food of which the newly-married pair are required to partake together at their first entry into their new home; and it is hoped that the sweetness of the fruit will so temper their lips that nothing but sweet words will ever be addressed by the one to the other. To the open-minded observer it might appear that acidity rather than sweetness was the chief characteristic of the quince, and that, if the qualities of the fruit are found to affect the tones of those who eat it, they would be better advised, as is the custom in some villages, to substitute for the quince a well-sugared cake or a dish of honey. But the pomegranate is far more commonly used than the quince, and in a variety of ways. Sometimes the bride and bridegroom eat together of it; elsewhere the bridegroom proffers it to the bride as his first gift on her entrance to their home, and she alone eats of it; or again she may be required to hurl it down and scatter its seeds over the floor. The second of these methods of using the pomegranate at marriage is, it will be remembered, of venerable antiquity; it was a seed of this fruit which Hades gave to Persephone to eat, that when she visited again the upper world she might not remain there all her days with reverend, dark-robed Demeter, but return to her home in the nether world[1413]; and similarly at the Argive Heraeum, the bride of Zeus was represented by Polyclitus holding in one of her hands the fruit of the pomegranate, concerning which, says Pausanias, there is a mystic story not to be divulged[1414]. Here again then is found the same close association of death and marriage. The three fruits, apple, quince, and pomegranate, each of which possesses a special use and purport in the preliminaries or the actual ceremony of marriage, are also the fruits most commonly laid upon the bier, in token, as it must appear, that death is but a marriage into the unseen world. In the light of such customs we can read with fuller understanding that simple and yet mystic dirge, ‘The Wedding in Hades’:
‘My mother maketh glad to-day, she maketh my son’s wedding,
She goeth for water to the springs, for snow unto the mountains,
To fruit-wives in their garden-plots for apples and for quinces...[1415].’
Thus in point after point the rites of marriage and the rites of death among Greeks both past and present have been found to coincide; and the number of these points of coincidence is too large to admit of their being referred to accident; design is evident. We are bound to suppose either that marriage-ceremonies were deliberately transferred to the funeral-rite, or that funeral-ceremonies were deliberately transferred to the marriage-rite. Which supposition shall we prefer? There can be no real question. It is impossible to conceive of a people so cynical or so distempered as to darken the wedding-day with grim reminders of death. But to transfer some of the usages of marriage to the funeral-scene was to infuse one ray of hope where all else was sorrow and darkness, to teach that, though the dead and the mourners might grieve for their parting, yet by that parting from the old home the dead was to enter upon a new life, a life of wedded happiness, in the unseen world. For indeed if there were no such intention as this, what was the meaning of the λουτροφόρος set up over the grave of the unmarried, what the purpose of adorning the dead with wedding-garment and wedding-crown? These two acts at least are no accidents; they reveal a studied purpose of assimilating the usages of death to the usages of marriage; and if that purpose underlay two of the customs enumerated, there is good warrant for the belief that in all the coincidences between marriage-rites and funeral-rites the same thought was operating—that very thought which has been found to be the common property of the Greek race, from one of the masters of ancient tragedy down to the humblest peasant of our day. Custom past and present, ancient literature, modern folk-song, all agree in their presentment of death as a marriage into the house of Hades.