Sexual life in ancient Greece : with thirty-two full-page plates

MARRIAGE AND THE LIFE OF WOMEN

girdle and lifted her on to the bed. After he had spent a short time with her, he went away again quietly, to sleep in the usual place in the company of the other young men. He did the same thing again and again ; he spent the day with his comrades, slept with them at night, and visited his bride only secretly and with circumspection, feeling ashamed and being afraid that someone in her house might see him.

“Yet the bride herself assisted in this, and always knew how to arrange that they might be able to come together at the right time and without being seen. ‘They did this not merely for a short time, but many of them had children born to them, before they had seen their wife by day. Such meetings served not only to make them practise restraint and moderation, but also promoted the birth of children and caused them to embrace with ever fresh and rejuvenated love, so that, instead of becoming sated or weakened by too frequent enjoyment, they left behind as it were a provocative and fuel of mutual love and inclination”.

If this custom as described by Plutarch must be regarded as a specifically Dorian phenomenon, the habit of the wedding-banquet was certainly customary throughout Greece. It was generally given in the house of the bride’s father. While at other times women kept away from men’s feasts, they were present at marriage banquets, but certainly had their place at separate tables (Evangelius, in Ath., xiv, 644d). The expenditure at this meal and the nature of the entertainment were, of course, quite different according to financial conditions and the taste of the time being. Sesame cakes, to which according to Menander (frag., 938, CAF) a fructifying influence was ascribed, were a common dainty. It had an equally symbolical meaning, when during the meal a beautiful naked boy (Zenobius, Proverbs, ii, 38), adorned with thorns and oak-leaves, carried round a plate with pastry

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