rites of anointing and arraying whether for marriage or for burial. As regards the cosmetics, we might feel well assured, even without the direct testimony of Aristophanes[1], that they were freely used in ancient weddings; and I myself have experienced a sense of suffocation from the same cause at weddings in modern Greece. Similarly at ancient funerals the original purpose of the lecythi was without doubt to contain the choice perfumes for the anointing of the dead[2]; and the custom of anointing is still well known. Then again in the matter of dress, the colour usually considered correct[3] both for marriage and for burial was white, and, even if this cannot be said to have been universally the case, at any rate there was, and there still continues to be, no less pomp and ornament in the dress of the dead body[4] than in the array of bride and bridegroom.
In this connexion too we may notice the use of the actual bridal-dress in the funerals of betrothed girls and of young wives. That this practice Was known in antiquity is proved by a passage of Chariton[5], in which the heroine of his story, Callirrhoë, whose first adventure, soon after her wedding, consists in being carried out to burial while unconscious but not dead, is described as 'dressed in bridal array'; and exactly the same custom may be witnessed in Greece to-day[6]. In fact not only may the person of the dead be seen dressed as for a wedding, but in the folk-songs we hear of the tomb itself being adorned like the home to which the bride should have been led.
'Came her lover to her bedside, stooped him down, and met her kiss;
Low and faint to his ear only, whispered she, her message this:
"When I pass away, my lover, deck thou out my tomb for me,
As thou would'st have decked the home where wedded I should dwell with thee[7]."'
Yet another point of coincidence between the ceremonial of marriage and of funeral is the wearing of a crown. In ancient times 'chaplets,' says Becker[8], 'were certainly worn both by bride and bridegroom,' and in modern usage they are as essential to
- ↑ Plut. 529.
- ↑ Cf. Lucian, de Luctu 11.
- ↑ For a discussion of the point in relation to funerals see Becker, Charicles pp. 385 f. and in relation to marriage pp. 486 f.
- ↑ Lucian, de Luctu 11.
- ↑ I. 6.
- ↑ Cf. Passow, Popul. Carm. Graec. Recent. no. 415, and Tournefort, Voyage du Levant, I. p. 153, who describes a dead woman, whose funeral he witnessed, as 'parée à la Gréque de ses habits de nôces.'
- ↑ Passow, Popul. Carm. 378.
- ↑ Charicles p. 487.
