which, no doubt, is better advice than if he had said “first marry a wife and next consider where you shall put her.” And we find that, even among pastoral, young ladies who, in modern poets, make their meat and drink of love, and hang up a rag or two of it to preserve them from the elements, in antiquity posed their lovers with interrogations about comforts. “You are very pressing, my dear Daphnis, and swear you love me; but that is not just now the question. Have you a house and harem to take me to?”[[37]]
But prudent as they may be considered, the Athenians were still more pious than thrifty. Before the virgin quitted her childhood’s home, and passed from the state she had tried, and in most cases, perhaps, found happy, to enter into one altogether unknown to her, custom demanded the performance, on the day before the marriage, of several religious ceremonies eminently significant and beautiful. Hitherto, in the poetical recesses of their thalamoi, they had been reckoned as so many nymphs attached to the train of the virgin goddess of the woods. About to become members of a noviciate more conformable to nature than that of the Catholic church, they deemed it incumbent on them to implore their Divinity’s permission to transfer their worship from her to Hymen; and, the more readily to obtain it, they approached her, in the simplicity of their hearts, with baskets full of offerings such as it became them to present and her to receive.[[38]] Nor was Artemis the only deity sought, on this occasion, to be rendered auspicious by sacrifice and prayer. Offerings were likewise made to the Nymphs, those lovely creations with which the fancy of the Greeks peopled the streams and fountains of their native land.[[39]] These rites performed, the future bride was conducted in pomp to the citadel, where solemn sacrifice was offered up to Athena, the tutelar goddess of the state, with prayers for happiness, peculiarly the gift of supreme wisdom.[[40]] To Hera, also, and the Fates,[[41]] as to the goddesses that watched over the connubial state and rigidly punished those who transgressed its sacred laws, were gifts presented, and vows preferred; and on one or all of their several altars did the maiden deposit a lock of her own hair, in remoter ages, perhaps, the whole of it, to intimate that, having obtained a husband, she must preserve him by other means than beauty, and the arts of the toilette.[[42]] At Megara the young women devoted their severed locks to Iphinoë. Those of Delos to Hecaerga and Ops,[[43]] while, like the Athenians, the maidens of Argos performed this rite in honour of Athena.[[44]]
Having, by the performance of the above rites and others of similar significance, discharged their instant duties to the gods, and impressed on their own minds a deep sense of the sacred engagements they were about to contract, they proceeded to perform the nuptial ceremonies themselves, still intermingling the offices of religion with every portion of the transaction. An auspicious day having been fixed upon, the relations and friends of both parties assembled in magnificent apparel, at the house of the bride’s father, where all the ladies of the family were busily engaged in the recitation of prayers and presentation of offerings. These domestic ceremonies concluded, the bride, accompanied by her paranymph or bridesmaid, was led forth into the street by the bridegroom and one of his most intimate friends,[[45]] who placed her between them in an open carriage.[[46]] Their dresses, as was fitting, were of the richest and most splendid kind. Those of the bridegroom full, flowing, and of the gayest and brightest colours,[[47]] glittered with golden ornaments, and diffused around, as he moved, a cloud of perfume. The bride herself, gifted with that unerring taste which distinguished her nation, appeared in a costume at once simple and magnificent—simple in its contour, its masses, its folds, magnificent from the brilliance of its hues and the superb and costly style of its ornaments. She was not, like some modern court dame, a blaze of precious stones tastelessly heaped upon each other; but through the snowy gauze of her veil flashed the jewelled fillet and coronet-like sphendone which, with a chaplet of flowers,[[48]] adorned her dark tresses; and between the folds of her robe of gold-embroidered purple, appeared her gloveless fingers, with many rings glittering with gems. Strings of Red Sea pearls encircled her neck and arms; pendants, variously wrought and dropped with Indian jewels, twinkled in her ears; and her feet, partly concealed by the falling robe, displayed a portion of the golden thonged sandal, crusted with emeralds, rubies, or pearls. But all these ornaments often failed to distract the eye from those which she owed to nature. Her luxuriant hair, which in Eastern women often reaches the ground:
Her hair in hyacinthine flow,
When left to roll its folds below,
As ’midst her maidens in the ball
She stood superior to them all,
Hath swept the marble, where her feet
Gleamed whiter than the mountain sleet,
Ere from the cloud that gave it birth