Will scarce allow her features to be seen.
because married women only were allowed to wear the stola, a large robe which covered the person from head to foot. Matrons were distinguished as follows, matronas appellabant, quibus stolas habendi jus erat: those only were called matrons, whose rank entitled them to wear the stola, (Alex. ab. Alex. lib. 5. cap. 18.) as women of inferior rank wore the instita. The pronubæ were always chosen from those women who had been married only once; and it appears that a bride had several pronubæ to attend her, but only one matrona. Terence says nullam matronam, whereas the pronubæ were spoken of as being four or five in number. I think it not unlikely that the first in rank of the pronubæ was chosen to preside over the rest of the bridemaids, and to attend immediately on the person of the bride, whence she was called matrona pronubarum, the chief of the bridemaids. Servius thinks that matrona was used to designate a woman who had one child: and thus distinguished from the mater-familias who had several. But Aulus Gellius is of opinion that all married women were called matronæ, whether they had any children or not. Thus Ovid, speaking of Hersilia, the wife of Romulus, who had no offspring, calls her matrona.
“O et de Latiâ, O et de gente Sabinâ
Præcipuum matrona decus; dignissima tanti”—
And thou, O matron, ornament of Latium,
The chiefest glory of the Sabine race,
Most worthy consort of so great a hero——
Nonnius supports Gellius in this opinion.
[NOTE 119.]
All was silent.
Nil tumulti. Terence here compares guests, called together in a hurry, to soldiers raised on any sudden emergency of great importance. As no marriage had been thought of till that day, if Chremes had invited any guests, they could have had scarcely an hour’s notice; Davus, therefore, aptly calls such a hasty assemblage tumultus, which word was used to signify a very quick muster of soldiers on any pressing occasion, when all that took arms were called tumultuarii. (Vide Liv. I. 37, 35.) Numerous allusions of this kind, which abound in the writings of Terence, cannot be happily preserved in a translation.