him she says ‘The dream I dreamed has now put up its head out of the void’,
and she goes and adorns his head with her coronet.^78
We can find further parallels in northern Europe. I referred in Chapter 5 to
the German May Day or Easter custom of auctioning pretty girls, each of
whom became the ‘May-wife’ of the young man who offered most for her. It
is now pertinent to add that in some places she signified her approval of him
by attaching a bunch of flowers to his hat.^79 In one of the Latvian songs too a
young girl expresses her desire to bedeck the hat of a suitor, and here it is
perhaps a real marriage that is contemplated:
Saule [the Sun] se couche le soir,
parant les cimes de la forêt.
Donne-moi, Dieu, pendant que je suis jeune,
de parer le chapeau d’un prétendant. (LD 10482 = Jonval no. 985)An alternative way for the girl in a svayam
̇vara to make her choice appears
in two barbarian settings described by Greek authors. Chares of Mytilene, a
historian of Alexander, told the following romantic story (FGrHist 125 F 5).
The Scythian king Homartes wanted to marry off his daughter Odatis, the
most beautiful woman in Asia, and he invited his friends, kinsmen, and
princes from his realm. After they had drunk deep, Odatis was called in and
told that it was her wedding and that she should take a good look at all the
candidates, fill a golden goblet, and give it to whichever one she most fancied.
She cried and prolonged the process of mixing the wine, because she could
not see Zariadres, the king from beyond the Tanais whom she had beheld in
her dreams and fallen in love with but never met. But he turned up at the last
minute, dressed as a Scythian. She gave him the cup, and he carried her off on
his chariot, which was waiting near by. Chares said that the story was famous
in Asia and depicted in shrines, palaces, and private houses.
After transcribing this from Chares, Athenaeus is reminded of a similar
episode related by Aristotle (fr. 549). A local (presumably Celtic) king at
Massalia was celebrating his daughter’s wedding, ‘and the wedding was done
in this manner: after the dinner the girl had to come in with a cup of mixed
wine and give it to whoever she wished of the suitors present, and the man she
gave it to became the bridegroom’.
The giving of a drink, rather than the bestowal of a garland or bunch of
flowers, recalls the Celtic custom noted earlier, by which a bride would proffer
a drink to her groom. We saw that Irish kings might receive one from the
personified Sovereignty whom they symbolically married. But it is the floral
(^78) Levy (1967), 186 f. (^79) Mannhardt (1905), i. 450–2.
- King and Hero 435