EPITHALAMIUM (Gr. hirl, at or upon, and BhXayos, a nuptial chamber)

This article appears in Volume V09, Page 705 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

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EPITHALAMIUM (Gr. hirl, at or upon, and BhXayos, a nuptial chamber) , originally among the Greeks a song in praise of

bride

BRIDE (a common Teutonic word, e.g..Goth. bruths, O. Eng. bryd, O. H. Ger. prs2t, Mod. Ger. Bract, Dut. bruid, possibly derived from the root bru-, cook, brew; from the med. latinized form bruta, in the sense of daughter-in-law, is derived the Fr. bru)

and bridegroom, which was sung by a number of boys and girls at the

door

DOOR (corresponding to the Gr. Bbpa,. Lat. fores or valvae; the English word, with other forms common in allied languages, comes from the same Indo-European stem as the Gr. Obpa and Lat. fares)

of the nuptial chamber. According to the scholiast on Theocritus, one form, the KaraioL,LLr7Tuc6v, was employed at night, and another, the SLeyeprnKbv, to arouse the

bride

BRIDE (a common Teutonic word, e.g..Goth. bruths, O. Eng. bryd, O. H. Ger. prs2t, Mod. Ger. Bract, Dut. bruid, possibly derived from the root bru-, cook, brew; from the med. latinized form bruta, in the sense of daughter-in-law, is derived the Fr. bru)

and bridegroom on the following morning. In either case, as was natural, the main burden of the song consisted of invocations of blessing and predictions of happiness, interrupted from time to time by the ancient chorus of Hymen hymenaee. Among the Romans a similar custom was in vogue, but the song was sung by girls only, after the

marriage

MARRIAGE

guests had gone, and it contained much more of what modern morality would condemn as obscene. In the hands of the poets the epithalamium was developed into a

special

SPECIAL

literary form, and received considerable' cultivation., Sappho, Anacreon, Stesichorus and

Pindar

PINDAR (Gr. HivSapos, c. 522–443 B.c.)

are all regarded as masters of the species, but the finest example preserved in Greek literature is the 18th Idyll of Theocritus, which celebrates the

marriage

MARRIAGE

of Menelaus and Helen. In Latin, the epithalamium, imitated from Fescennine Greek models, was a base' form of literature, when Catullus redeemed it and gave it dignity by modelling his Marriage of

Thetis

THETIS

and Peleus on a lost ode of Sappho. In later times Statius, Ausonius, Sidonius Apollinaris; and Claudian are the authors of the best-known epithalamia in classical Latin; and they have been imitated by Buchanan, ScaIiger, '

Sannazaro

SANNAZARO, JACOPO (1458-1530)

, and a whole host of modern Latin poets, with whom, indeed, the form was at one time in

great

GREAT

favour. The names of Ronsard,

Malherbe

MALHERBE, FRANCOIS DE (1555-1628)

and

Scarron

SCARRON, PAUL (1610-166o)

are especially associated with the species in French literature, and Marini and Metastasio in Italian. Perhaps no poem of this class has been more universally admired than the Epithalamium of Spenser (1595), though he has found no unworthy rivals in Ben Jonson, Donne and Quarles. At the close of In Memoriam Tennyson has appended a poem, on the nuptials of his sister, which is strictly an epithalamium.

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