Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/64

 58 THE FAMILY. BOOK II. 1. The young girl quits llie paternal hearth. As she is not attached to this hearth by her own right, but through the father of the family, the authority of the father only can detach lier from it. The tradition is, therefore, an indispensable ceremony. 2. The young girl is conducted to the house of the husband. As in Greece, she is veiled. She wears a crown, and a nuptial torch precedes the cortege. Those about her sing an ancient religious hymn. The words of this hymn changed doubtless with time, accom- modating themselves to the variations of belief, or to those of the language ; but the sacramental refrain continued from age to age without change. It was the word Talassie, a word whose sense the Romans of Horace's time no more iinderstood than the Greeks understood the word iuivuK, and which was, probably, the sacred and inviolable remains of an ancient formula. The cortege stops before the house of the husband. There the bride is presented with fire and water. The fire is the emblem of the domestic divinity ; the water is the lusti'al water, that serves the family for all religious acts. To introduce the bride into the house, violence must be pretended, as in Greece. The hus- band must take her in his arms, and carry her over the sill, without allowing her feet to touch it. 3. The bride is then led before the hearth, where the Penates, and all the domestic gods, and the images of ancestors, are grouped around the sacred fire. As in Greece, the husband and wife offer a sacrifice, pouring out a libation, pronouncing prayers, and eating a cake of wheaten flour {panis farreus).^ ' We shall speak presently of other forms of marriage in use among the Konians, in which religion had no part. Let it suffice to say hero, that the sacred marriage appears to us fo be the