Page:The evolution of marriage and of the family ... (IA evolutionofmarri00letorich).pdf/118

 some distance; her bridegroom awaits her there, but he has to force her to enter it; that done, the women retire.

With the Moors of Java, relates Schouten, the father of the bride carries her, all swathed up, to the bridegroom. The latter, aided by two of his paranymphs, lifts her on a horse and rides away with her. Once arrived at his house he hides his wife there and goes off, without thanking his assistants and friends.

Many European races have also practised the ceremonial of marriage by capture. The Bœotians, says Pausanias, conducted the wives to the house of the husband in a chariot, of which they afterwards solemnly burnt the pole, to indicate that the woman was henceforth the property of her master, and was never to think of quitting his abode. But in ancient Greece it was at Sparta especially that the nuptial ceremony of capture was practised. A frequently quoted passage from Plutarch's Life of Lycurgus gives us details on this point. "In their marriages the bridegroom carried off the bride by violence; and she was never chosen in a tender age, but when she had arrived at full maturity. Then the woman that had the direction of the wedding cut the bride's hair close to the skin, dressed her in a man's clothes, laid her upon a mattress, and left her in the dark. The bridegroom, neither oppressed with wine nor enervated with luxury, but perfectly sober, as having always supped at the common table, went in privately, untied her girdle, and carried her to another bed. Having stayed there a short time, he modestly retired to his usual apartment to sleep with the other young men, and observed the same conduct afterwards, spending the day with his companions and reposing himself with them in the night, nor even visiting his bride but with great caution and apprehensions of being discovered by the rest of the family; the bride at the same time exerted all her art to contrive convenient opportunities for their private meetings," etc.

At Rome the ceremonial of capture was kept up for a long time in the plebeian marriages, without confarrearation or coemption. As in so many other countries, they played