Weddings in Ancient Greece and Rome. 

www.theoi.com/Gallery/T8.3.html

Among the objects left by the Ancient Greeks were the paintings on vases and other ordinary objects.  Our home is filled with several modern copies bought in Athens 50 years ago when I went there on the USS Iowa as a sailor in the 6th Fleet. Then, as now, the Greek culture interests me greatly, but I would find it difficult to recover the elements in a wedding ceremony from a picture on a pot, even so well designed as the one above was.

malaspina.com/jpg/homer
           

Since much of our the awareness of the ancient Greek culture comes through Homer, who told his stories 3,000 years ago, it seemed useful to try find a wedding ceremony from the poems of the master.  But when the poems in the “Iliad” begin, Helen has already been gone on her own or been stolen by Paris;  and they are already in Troy.  Was theirs a “love” marriage, or might it have been one in which Helen was stolen?

I found no wedding ceremony in the Odyssey. Therefore, I found it to be quite difficult, even in  my “wedding crashers” time/space vehicle, to determine what an ancient ceremony in Greece was like.  Also,  I confess to have been frightened to see all the preparations for war going on all around me.  I was afraid, I would be an obvious recruit for the Greeks, who needed all the experience they knew I had experience in the skill of navigation learned in the navy.   They would have assumed that I wanted to fight for the Hellenic forces.
In fact, when I saw Paris and Helen, even from a distance, I wondered if Helen had been taken captive or went willingly, for the choice might determine the kind of wedding that was held as well as the form of marriage that would follow. 
Clearly Greeks took maidens from their home cities and islands by capture,  and sometimes they bought their wives.  I learned that love could bring couples together or gods and goddesses could do so, but was it rare that love bound the couple? I might have wanted to fight with the sons of Troy, if Helen had chosen to go with Paris.  

Homer does not tell much about with the wedding of Paris and Helen.  He started his poem by recounting the preparations for war, giving what can be called a roll call on the battlefield after the Greeks have landed near Troy.  Meanwhile,  he takes his readers/hearers to a council of the gods and goddesses who will play a huge role in the oncoming struggle by taking sides with the humans down below, some of the gods and goddess will side with the Greeks and some with the Trojans.

In the Iliad, chapter 3, we learn of a confrontation and a short duel between Paris,  who had already taken Helen to his home in Troy, and Menelaus, who had lost Helen, his wife.  Her disappearance caused the famous war.


The closest description that Homer gave was a scene of love making, even briefer than the battle, but in the chapter we find some longing of Helen for her former husband, but with the help of the goddess Aphrodite, Helen is led to Paris bed and “the two lay down together on the well made bed.”(Homer, 63)  So we have no wedding ceremony recorded, for this scene seems more like their “honeymoon.  Was there a wedding at all?  Was Helen ever married to Paris?  The single line suggests a nuptial consummation, but was this the first time?  Was it the last?  Therein abides one of the abiding attractions in Homer's writings in that he can say enough to trust his readers/hearers to let their own imaginations carry them across the “wine, dark seas.” 

In Troy, I wondered if I am more than a “wedding crasher”, hoping to see more into the hearts of Paris and Helen than I was granted, or wishing to see if their love was strong enough to have sustained them during of the War in Troy, or was it a fictitious reason for two armies  “with no weapons of mass destruction” in either camp for one to have attached the other.? I assume every reader of Homer is aware that this connection between Paris and Helen was not the result of a normal marriage, and it may be pointless to look for a wedding scene. But the story of the two does seem to confirm what his translator E. V. Rieu wrote that “Homer's main interest less in the study of human beings and human gods.”  He is disposed to “reject the grotesque and the supernormal.  The beautiful Helen did not emerge from an egg, and apart from one perfunctory reference to the Judgment of Paris, it was her human frailty and that of her seducer that led to the Trojan War.”  (Rieu in Homer, 18).  My readers will see that I believe that what Homer wrote was based on historical memories, and I do not follow the 19th skeptics who see Homer as merely fiction.    “Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are literary creations that nonetheless preserve accurate historical memories.” (Yamaguchi, 37).

www.nnb.com/aeschylus

In the tragedies and comedies of the Greek theaters, one can also look for a sense of Athens in the 5th and 4th Centuries before the Common Era.  Aeschylus wrote Agamemnon and showed the difficulty of a husband returning home after the Trojan War, especially bringing a captive slave as his mistress. Therefore we have no chance to see their wedding portrayed on stage, for soon both are slain by Clytemnestra, whose earlier wedding to Agamemnon was also not enacted.  But in that play, we feel a powerful sense of the earlier relationship between Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, which was destroyed by the absence in war and the return with a captive mistress.

gentleworld.org/Plutarch

Later in Greek culture when the Romans were all around the land, Plutarch wrote many biographies of memorable Greeks and Romans but not so much on their weddings. Plutarch wrote a letter to his wife, at the time their daughter died.  Plutarch had just received a report of the death and shared what has always seemed to me a very personal letter, which has survived the centuries.  We learn that his wife had born four sons, and the “longed for daughter” had been named for her mother (Plutarch, 583).  Had the daughter lived to experience a wedding, we might not have had this letter at all, but the letter attests to a high value by this educated and moral Greek author in family life itself.
Reading on, we find that Plutarch had never had “occasion for the one quarrel…(and ) your plainness of attire and sober style of living has without exception amazed every philosopher who has shared our society and intimacy….” (Plutarch, 589).  He continues in the tone of consolation to suggest they try to remember a time before the daughter had been born….but not to regret that she had lived with them binging “delight and enjoyment” for which he was grateful (597).

Different laws were in force depending on the place the wedding was held.  In Athens, in certain times a wedding which joined an Athenian with a “barbarian” (person from outside Greece) or even another city was forbidden. (Felton, 28).  Spartans liked to have mock “abductions” as part of the ceremony, which would have been a heritage of taking brides by conquest in earlier times, even if the bride was also from Sparta.

While the ancient Jews were celebrating weddings is the land of Israel, Greeks were celebrating ceremonies that lasted for three days.  On the first day, a formal betrothal (eugyesis) took place between the lord (kurios) of the bride, often her father, and the groom himself, who made a pledge to the bride’s family.

On the second day there were religious sacrifices to the gods of the city and offerings as ell.  Ritual baths were made followed by a feast at the home of the bride, where the groom brought gifts and saw the bride unveiled.  In Greece, the groom did not have to wait until after the vows were made to see his bride, and perhaps he could change his mind during the last night, even though he had brought gifts.  No mention is made of any priests during the ceremonies, just as in modern Greece, most weddings are performed by civil officials.

This image comes from the cover of a children’s book, which I bought in Greece in the summer of 2006 in order to study modern Greek.  I was using Shakespeare’s play written in England 400 years ago.  How strange thought some English and Greek tourists on our island upon who preferred other reading materials!
  In summary, I came to appreciate not only some Modern Greek, if for children, but also Shakespeare’s rich imagination as he created a play about an Athens in 500 BCE.  Shakespeare somehow knew that a father’s authority could be challenged by children for the sake of love. Was it because he knew English girls with just such spunk?   I also learned that  Shakespeare probably wrote the play for a friend who was making wedding plans, and he might even have produced it at the wedding itself.

In his play, Shakespeare wrote about  a wedding being planned for Hermia in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” by her father, who knew he was the lord of his family and could decide who was a fit groom in ancient Athens.  The image above comes from my children’s book in Modern Greek.  Like Shakespeare,  I imagined that I lived in an  ancient Greece, and I imagined the look of displeasure showing on a father’s face, when his daughter, Hermia, told him she preferred Lysander to her father’s choice.

But Oberon and his little friend Puck come to the rescue of Hermia, and with a magic drug taken from a local plant when dropped onto the bodies of sleeping human, they fall in love with the first person whom they see upon awakening.

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All turns out at the end, and Hermia gets to marry Lysander, and Helen gets to marry Alexander, and the two fathers seem to act as witnesses on the third and wedding night, if not pleased they are present. In the picture below Puck, seems playful and happy, not just because he made the cover of the Greek children’s book version of William Shakespeare’s “Oneiro Kalokairines Nuxtas” (“Dream of a Summer’s Night”) but also because it was his magic which allowed the two couples to sort out their lives, loving the choice that each of them made, and convincing the father’s that that love was more useful in the long haul than being forced by the fathers to wed the wrong mate.  All in a summer’s night, no less, but nights are longer in the summer, and midsummer nights are the longest of all.         

The Romans inherited a good deal from the Greeks, including art and poetry, and some ideas about family life.  The father in a family was the paterfamilias who had even more power than the Greeks described above.  As laws for which the Romans are famous evolved, the system provided for honor and respect for the family lineage.  Indeed, until he experienced his own wedding day, a young Roman man could not be a citizen, although in some cases there were emperors who were not yet wed.  In order to have children to keep the lineage going into the next generation, Romans made laws with allowed a man to have sex with prostitutes, concubines and slaves, even homosexual  encounters, if they could be seen as leading to children, which does seem unlikely. (Piar, 29)

"Married couples among the Roman elite lived in a social system in which the family, as modern societies think of it, did not exist. The Roman familia meant a household, not a family in the modern sense, and households came in a great variety of sizes and shapes. Among the wealthy and powerful, the household often numbered hundreds of persons and things: children, servants, slaves, livestock, and other property were all part of the familia, although his wife and children were members of it and, like the servants, and slaves, oxen and geese, and the rest of the familia, they belonged to the paterfamilia. Among the poor, however, households were apparently small, since they included no slaves or servants and little property. The familia of the humble often consisted simply of a woman and her children. Again, the male head of household was not part of his own familia."  Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe

Marriage was important in ancient Greece and Rome.  We think of city states as somewhat weak in Greece, with shifting alliances, and sometimes won battles, often followed by losses.  The success of the recent film “300” about ancient Greek struggles is a testimony to the lingering effect upon moderns.  Is the films success the result of our own failures in Iraq?  It was important then, as now, for the success in political, economic, and religious struggles for families to have children, especially boys for the battles, but women were the bearers of these children, so their lives were regulated as well by the state.  “The Athenian law, in the name of religion, forbade man to remain single.  (de Coulanges, 220 quoting Pollux VIII.40. Plutarch, Lysander, 30)

In Sparta, from whence came warriors of the recent film,  “300,” there were punishments rendered to those who remained single, or even for those who married late.  “Sparta regulated the head dress of women and those of Athens forbade them to take with them on a journey more than three dresses.” (de Coulanges, 220).  For those of us traveling among the Northern Europeans who flee the dismal summers north of the Alps and have made Greece their “Florida” with sunshine, we wonder why so many garments must be stuffed into bags, then must be checked and hauled through airports and onto busses.  I would suggest we make all tourists, men as well as women, go back to the “three dress rule of ancient Athens.

Perhaps my readers will have seen to the film “A Big Fat Greek Wedding;” I have; but I decided it was more about Greeks in America than the ancient ceremony, or problems in finding a mate.