Potter observes, with great naïveté, that, before men married, it was customary to provide themselves with a house to live in. The custom was a good one, and the thrifty old poet of Ascra, undertaking to enlighten his countrymen in economics, is explicit on the point— “First build your house and let the wife succeed:”[36] which, no doubt, is better advice than if he had said “first marry a wife and next consider where you shall put her.” And we find that, even among pastoral, young ladies who, in modern poets, make their meat and drink of love, and hang up a rag or two of it to preserve them from the elements, in antiquity posed their lovers with interrogations about comforts. “You are very pressing, my dear Daphnis, and swear you love me; but that is not just now the question. Have you a house and harem to take me to?”[37] ----- Footnote 36: Opera et Dies, 405. Footnote 37: Theocrit. Eidyll. xxvii. 36. ----- But prudent as they may be considered, the Athenians were still more pious than thrifty. Before the virgin quitted her childhood’s home, and passed from the state she had tried, and in most cases, perhaps, found happy, to enter into one altogether unknown to her, custom demanded the performance, on the day before the marriage, of several religious ceremonies eminently significant and beautiful. Hitherto, in the poetical recesses of their thalamoi, they had been reckoned as so many nymphs attached to the train of the virgin goddess of the woods. About to become members of a noviciate more conformable to nature than that of the Catholic church, they deemed it incumbent on them to implore their Divinity’s permission to transfer their worship from her to Hymen; and, the more readily to obtain it, they approached her, in the simplicity of their hearts, with baskets full of offerings such as it became them to present and her to receive.[38] Nor was Artemis the only deity sought, on this occasion, to be rendered auspicious by sacrifice and prayer. Offerings were likewise made to the Nymphs, those lovely creations with which the fancy of the Greeks peopled the streams and fountains of their native land.[39] These rites performed, the future bride was conducted in pomp to the citadel, where solemn sacrifice was offered up to Athena, the tutelar goddess of the state, with prayers for happiness, peculiarly the gift of supreme wisdom.[40] To Hera, also, and the Fates,[41] as to the goddesses that watched over the connubial state and rigidly punished those who transgressed its sacred laws, were gifts presented, and vows preferred; and on one or all of their several altars did the maiden deposit a lock of her own hair, in remoter ages, perhaps, the whole of it, to intimate that, having obtained a husband, she must preserve him by other means than beauty, and the arts of the toilette.[42] At Megara the young women devoted their severed locks to Iphinoë. Those of Delos