Epithalamium

This form continued in popularity through the history of the classical world; the Roman poet Catullus wrote a famous epithalamium, which was translated from or at least inspired by a now-lost work of Sappho.

[1] It was originally among the Greeks a song in praise of bride and bridegroom, sung by a number of boys and girls at the door of the nuptial chamber.

Among the Romans a similar custom was in vogue, but the song was sung by girls only, after the marriage guests had gone, and it contained much more of what modern attitudes would identify as obscene.

Sappho, Anacreon, Stesichorus and Pindar 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 of Menelaus and Helen.

Perhaps no poem of this class has been more universally admired than the pastoral Epithalamion of Edmund Spenser (1595), though he also has important rivals—Ben Jonson, Donne and Francis Quarles.

In his ballad, Suckling playfully demystifies the usual celebration of marriage by detailing comic rustic parallels and identifying sex as the great leveler.

The 20th-century French organist-composer (and successor in his post to Charles Tournemire and César Franck) Jean Langlais (1907–1991) includes it as a title in his collection Ten Pieces for organ (No.

Lorenzo Lotto's epithalamic painting notably portrayed Cupid as a puer mingens urinating on Venus, a gesture that symbolized fertility in Renaissance artwork.

[12] Although epithalamia existed only in poetic form during antiquity, during the Renaissance it was believed that presenting gifts of erotic paintings was an ancient Roman tradition.