Perhaps the most festive moments of an ancient Athenian wedding celebration occurred in the evening as the bride and groom were escorted from the bride’s childhood home to the groom’s home in a mule cart—as shown on this mid-sixth century B.C. vase, by the so-called Amasis Painter.
The bride is shown holding a crown that she would have worn beneath her veil before it was removed in a ceremony known as anakalupteria (unveiling of the bride). Earlier in the day, our bride would have sacrificed her childhood toys to Artemis, the goddess of virginity, and cut off a lock of her hair as a sacrifice to Hera, Zeus’s consort and the protectress of women and marriage. Both bride and groom would have made separate offerings to Aphrodite to ensure a fruitful marriage.
In the hours before the wedding, the bride would have ritually bathed, dressed and donned her veil. Then the ceremony would have begun, with both families feasting together, the men sitting on one side of the room and the women on the other.
As shown on the rollout, made by rotating a camera around the vase, the bride’s mother—carrying two torches—leads the procession. (Torches were so strongly associated with wedding festivities that an illegitimate union was colloquially referred to as “a wedding without torches.”) At the threshold of the groom’s home, the young couple is greeted by the groom’s mother. They would then kneel at the family hearth, where relatives would shower them with nuts and sweetmeats, symbolically placing them under the protection of the household gods. The bride would then be escorted to the bridal chamber, emerging the next morning as a nymphe, or married woman.
Usually a bride and groom didn’t meet until their wedding day, following a betrothal arranged by their fathers. Brides were married off soon after they reached sexual maturity, around age 14. Grooms, however, were considerably older. The poet Hesiod (eighth century B.C.) suggests that men marry at 30, while Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) recommends 37.
Perhaps the most festive moments of an ancient Athenian wedding celebration occurred in the evening as the bride and groom were escorted from the bride’s childhood home to the groom’s home in a mule cart—as shown on this mid-sixth century B.C. vase, by the so-called Amasis Painter. The bride is shown holding a crown that she would have worn beneath her veil before it was removed in a ceremony known as anakalupteria (unveiling of the bride). Earlier in the day, our bride would have sacrificed her childhood toys to Artemis, the goddess of virginity, and cut off a lock […]
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