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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1831 Excerpt: ...name. Very different from all this was the custom of the Lacedsemonians. They retained the ancient form of carrying off the bride by force. After the bridegroom had carried off the girl, a female paranymph cut the hair of the bride, put on her a male dress, seated her in a dark room, upon a carpet; the bridegroom then came clandestinely, unbound the zone, placed the bride upon the bed, and, soon after, stole away to the common sleeping room of the youths, and repeated these visits several times before the marriage was made known. After this, the solemn conducting home of the bride, accompanied by sacrifices, took place. The Romans had, in a legal sense, three different ways of concluding a marriage--coemtio, confarreatio, and mus--of which the confarreatio was the most solemn and most conclusive. At the betrothment (sponsalia), the day of marriage was settled, great care being taken not to fix upon one of the atri dies (unlucky days), viz. the month of May, the calends, nones and ides, and the days following them, the feast of the Salians, the purentalia, &c. On the other hand, a peculiar predilection was entertained for the second half of June. The day before the wedding, the bride sacrificed the virginlike toga prtetezta to the Fortuna virginalii; her Indta aurea, her strophia and toys to the Lar familiaris, or to Venus, after she had firet sacrificed to Juno jugo, the goddess of marriages, and after her hair had been divided with a lance (calibaria) into six locks (in allusion to the rape of the Sabines), and arranged according to the fashion of matrons. On the day of the wedding, the bride was ornamented. She covered her hair with the vitta recta, put on a wreath of flowers, the tunic of matrons, and encircled her waist with a woollen zone, tied in ...