want. When strangers passed through a village they were offered flowers as a sign of friendliness.⁴³ When poets and minstrels went to kings and chiefs to sing their praises and obtain relief in want, they were not only given elephants and lands and silks, but lotuses made of gold. It was the custom for the patron to present the head of the band of minstrels or dancers with lotuses of gold. Sometimes the gift consisted of flowers made of gold fastened together by bands of silver.⁴⁴ These musicians adorned even their musical instruments with garlands of flowers.⁴⁵

During periods of mourning, flowers and garlands were not used as personal ornament or to adorn the other objects which they were wont to decorate with flowers. Poverty and suffering too were causes for abstaining from the use of flowers.⁴⁶ Among the many poems rich in pathos is an elegy on the death of a chief, in which the poet addresses the jasmine, “Wherefore bloomest thou when none will wear thee”? The poem mentions the many occasions on which flowers were worn:

Upper class society, at the time of the composition of these poems, was hard on widows. They had to sleep on a bed of stones, and eat the rice of the white water-lily and fast and mourn their lot, or burn themselves on the funeral pyres of their husbands. A royal poetess says that it were better to die on the same pyre as her lord than live to lead a life so different from the one she led with her lord. To her, she says, after her lord’s death, the cool waters of the lake where lotuses bloom and the raging fires of the pyre are the same. She

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   ⁴³Malaipatu; 429 ff.

   ⁴⁴Porun; 159-160; Perumpaan; 481-482; Malaipatu; 568-569; Puram; 12. 1; 29; 1; 69; 4-21; 126, 1-3; Kali; 55, 2; 85, 2; Puram; 11, 18, 153, 7-8.