In ancient Athens, wedding ceremonies started after dark. The veiled bride traveled from her home to the home of the groom while standing in a chariot. Her family followed the chariot on foot, carrying the gifts. Friends of the bride and groom lit the way, carrying torches and playing music to scare away evil spirits.
During the wedding ceremony, the bride would eat an apple, or another piece of fruit, to show that food and other basic needs would now come from her husband. Gifts to the new couple might include baskets, furniture, jewelry, mirrors, perfume, vases filled with greenery.
In ancient Sparta, the ceremony
was very simple. After a tussle, to prove his superior strength, the groom
would toss his bride over his shoulder and carried her off.
Marriage in Egypt
The Wedded State was to ancient
Egyptian minds the ideal part of the divine order. Monogamy is documented
even from predynastic times. A
young man who had hitherto led a bachelor life and sometimes had a high
time of it, but had now attained a certain social standing, would go to
the house of his chosen's father to ask for her hand.
Entering into a marriage was
described as 'making a wife' or 'taking a wife', but in accordance with
the prevailing patriarchal system it seems that the girl's father had the
main say. Nor were the views of her mother to be ignored,
as an eager girl's words reveal
in a love-song: 'Little does he know how I long to embrace him, and for
him to send word to my mother.' If the girl had no father, an uncle would
step in.
The ratio of love-matches to arranged marriages is not clear from the evidence. We have a biographical inscription of the Ptolemaic Period where a woman says: 'My father gave me in marriage' to so-and-so.
In the absence of any preexisting agreement it seems that the girl's consent to a marriage was unimportant until the 26th dynasty, when brides also began to have a say. It is then that we find marriage contracts using not only the formula 'I have made you into a wife', but also, putting the woman's side, 'You have made me into a wife.' Whether there was a period of engagement before marriage we cannot tell.
At what age did young people marry in those days? Age is not usually mentioned in the contracts. References to child-marriage or early maturity among Egyptian girls repeated in some popular accounts have no basis in fact. We have already seen that the average age of puberty was 12 to 13 among girls and around I4 for boys.
