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.[254] 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.[255] At Rome the ceremonial of capture was kept up for a long time in the plebeian marriages, without confarreation or coemption. As in so many other countries, they played the comedy of the carrying off of the bride by the bridegroom with the pretended resistance of the mother and the relations.[256] In the more respectable marriages the ceremonial of capture was simplified, but still very significant. The hair of the bride was separated with the point of a javelin (_hasta celibaris_),[257] and for this symbolic ceremony a javelin that had pierced the body of a gladiator was preferred. Then the bride, conducted to the house of her husband, was to enter it without touching the threshold; she was lifted over it.[258] It is curious to find this same custom in China now in our own day, and we can hardly help recognising in it the symbolic embodiment of capture. A similar ceremonial is always practised in Circassia. In the midst of a feast the bridegroom enters, escorted by his friends, and carries off his bride, who henceforth becomes his wife.[259] Moreover, as at Sparta, the newly-married Circassian must not visit the wife, except in secret, for a whole year--a term evidently fixed, as at Sparta, for the period of probable pregnancy.[260]