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The history of the manners and customs of ancient Greece
The history of the manners and customs of ancient Greece Author:James Augustus St. John Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 128 CHAPTER II. BIRTH-FEAST—NAMING THE CHILD. NURSERY NURSERY TALES SPARTAN FESTIVAL. To quit, however, this melancholy topic : while the poor, as we... more » have seen, were driven by despair to imbrue their hands in the blood of their offspring, their more wealthy neighbours celebrated the birth of a child1 with a succession of banquets and rejoicings. Of these, the first was held on the fifth day from the birth, when took place the ceremony called Amphi- dromia, confounded by some ancient authors with the festival of the tenth day.2 On this occasion the accoucheuse or the nurse, to whose care the child was now definitively consigned,3 having purified her hands with water,4 ran naked5 with the infant in her arms, and accompanied by all the other females of the family, in the same state, round the hearth,6 which was regarded as the altar of Hestia, the Vesta of the Romans. By this ceremony the child was initiated in the rites of religion and placed under the protection of the fire goddess, probably with the same view that infants are baptized among us. Meanwhile the passer-by was informed that a fifth- day feast was celebrating within, by symbols suspended on the street-door, which, in case of a boy, consistedin an olive crown; and of a lock of wool, alluding to / her future occupations, when it was a girl.1 Athe- nseus, apropos of cabbage, which was eaten on this occasion, as well as by ladies " in the straw,"2 as conducing to create milk, quotes a comic description of the Amphidromia from a drama of Ephippos, which proves they were well acquainted with the arts of joviality. 1 More particularly that of a 5 Hesych. in. v. cpofiidp(o'. son.—Casaub. ad Theophr. Char. Meurs. Grsce. Fer. p. 20. Brunck, p. 307. in Aristoph. Av. 922. Sch. Aristoph. Lysist. 757. 6 Har...« less