The house of the bridegroom, diligently prepared for their reception, was decorated profusely with garlands, and brilliantly lighted up. When, among the Bœotians, the lady, accompanied by her husband, had descended from the carriage, its axletree was burnt, to intimate that having found a home she would have no further use for it.[69] The celebration of nuptial rites generally puts people in good temper, at least for the first day; and new-married women at Athens stood in full need of all they could muster to assist them through the crowd of ceremonies which beset the entrances to the houses of their husbands. Symbols of domestic labours, pestles, sieves,[70] and so on, met the young wife’s eye on all sides. She herself, in all her pomp of dress, bore in her hands an earthen barley-parcher.[71] But, to comfort her, very nice cakes of sesamum,[72] with wine and fruit and other dainties innumerable, accompanied by gleeful and welcoming faces, appeared in the background beyond the sieves and pestles. The hymeneal lay,[73] with sundry other songs, all redolent of “joy and youth,” resounded through halls now her own. Mirth and delight ushered her into the banqueting-room, where appeared a boy covered with thorn branches, and oaken boughs laden with acorns, who, when the epithalamium chaunters had ceased, recited an ancient hymn beginning with the words, “I have escaped the worse and found the better.”[74] This hymn, constituting a portion of the divine service performed by the Athenians during a festival instituted in commemoration of the discovery of corn, by which men were delivered from acorn-eating, they introduced among the nuptial ceremonies to intimate, that wedlock is as much superior to celibacy as wheat is to mast. At the close of the recitation, there entered a troop of dancing girls crowned with myrtle-wreaths, and habited in light tunics reaching very little below the knee, just as we still behold them on antique gems and vases, who, by their varied, free, and somewhat wanton, movements, vividly represented all the warmth and energy of passion. ----- Footnote 69: Plut. Quæst. Roman. xx. 19. Valckenaer ad Herodot. iv. 114. Footnote 70: Poll. iii. 37. Footnote 71: Poll. i. 246. Footnote 72: Schol. Aristoph. Pac. 834. Footnote 73: Athen. xiv. 10. Anac. Od. xviii. Schol. Hom. Il. σ. 493. Pind. Pyth. iii. 17. Dissen. Schol. ad v. 27. Footnote 74: Suid. v. ἔφυγον κακὸν. t. i. p. 1113, d. -----