Bona Dea
In ancient Roman religion, Bona Dea was a goddess associated with chastity and fertility among married Roman women, healing, and the protection of the state and people of Rome. According to Roman literary sources, she was brought from Magna Graecia at some time during the early or middle Republic, and was given her own state cult on the Aventine Hill.
Her rites allowed women the use of strong wine and blood-sacrifice, things otherwise forbidden them by Roman tradition. Men were barred from some of her mysteries and only initiates were given the possession of her true name. Given that male authors had limited knowledge of her rites and attributes, ancient speculations about her identity abound, among them that she was an aspect of Terra, Ops, Cybele, or Ceres, or a Latin form of a Greek goddess "Damia". Most often, she was identified as the wife, sister, or daughter of the god Faunus, thus an equivalent or aspect of the fertility nature-goddess Fauna, who could prophesy the fates of women.
The goddess had two main annual festivals. One was held at her Aventine temple, for the benefit of the Roman people; the other was hosted by the wife of a Roman senior annual magistrate for an invited group of elite matrons and female attendants. The latter festival came to scandalous prominence in 62 BC, when the politician Publius Clodius Pulcher was tried for his sacrilegious intrusion on the rites, allegedly bent on the seduction of Julius Caesar's wife, Pompeia. Clodius was found not guilty, but Caesar divorced Pompeia because "Caesar's wife must be above suspicion". For his support of the prosecution, Cicero earned Clodius' undying hatred. The festival fertility rites remained a subject of male curiosity and speculation, both religious and prurient.
Bona Dea's cults in the city of Rome were led by the Vestal Virgins and the Sacerdos Bonae Deae, and her provincial cults by virgin or matron priestesses. Surviving statuary shows her as a sedate Roman matron with a cornucopia and a snake. Personal dedications to her are attested among all classes, especially plebeians, freedmen and women, and slaves. Approximately one third of her dedications are from men, some of whom can be identified as acolytes and priests of her cult.
Titles, names and origins
Bona Dea is a name, an honorific title and a respectful pseudonym; the goddess' true or cult name is unknown. Her other, less common names or pseudonyms include Feminea Dea, Laudanda... Dea, and Sancta. She is a goddess of "no definable type", with several origins and a range of different characteristics and functions.Based on what little they knew of her rites and attributes, Roman historians speculated about her true name and identity. Festus describes her as identical with a "women's goddess" named Damia, which Georges Dumézil sees as an ancient misreading of Greek "Demeter". In the late Imperial era, the neoplatonist author Macrobius identifies her as a universal earth-goddess, an epithet of Maia, Terra, or Cybele, worshiped under the names of Ops, Fauna, and Fatua. The Christian author Lactantius, claiming the late Republican polymath Varro as his source, describes her as Faunus' wife and sister, named "Fenta Fauna" or "Fenta Fatua".
Mythology
makes no reference to any myth pertaining to Bona Dea. Later Roman scholars connected her to the goddess Fauna, a central figure in Latium's aristocratic foundation myth, which was thus re-embroidered as a Roman moral fable. Several variants are known; Fauna is daughter, wife or sister of Faunus. Faunus was son of Picus, and was the first king of the Latins, empowered with the gift of prophecy. In Roman religion he was a pastoral god and protector of flocks, with a shrine and oracle on the Aventine, sometimes identified with Inuus and later, with the Greek god Pan.As his female counterpart, Fauna had similar gifts, domains, and powers the applied solely to women. In Plutarch's version of the myth, the mortal Fauna secretly gets drunk on wine, which is forbidden her. When Faunus finds out, he thrashes her with myrtle rods; in Lactantius's version, Faunus thrashes her to death, regrets the deed, and deifies her. Servius derives the names Faunus and Fauna, collectively known as the Fatui, from fari : they "are also called Fatui because they utter divine prophecy in a state of stupor". Macrobius writes that Bona Dea is "the same as Fauna, Ops or Fatua... It is said too that she was the daughter of Faunus, and that she resisted the amorous advances of her father who had fallen in love with her, so that he even beat her with myrtle twigs because she did not yield to his desires though she had been made drunk by him on wine. It is believed that the father changed himself into a serpent, however, and under this guise had intercourse with his daughter." This myth bears a marked similarity to the rape of Persephone by her father Zeus in the form of a chthonic snake in Orphic mythology. Macrobius refers the serpent's image at the goddess' rites to this mythical transformation, and to the live, harmless serpents who roamed the goddess' temple precincts.
Varro explains the exclusion of men from Bona Dea's cult as a consequence of her great modesty; no man but her husband had ever seen her, or heard her name. For Servius, this makes her the paragon of chaste womanhood. Most likely, once Fauna's mythology seemed to offer an explanation for Bona Dea's mysterious cult, the myth developed circumstantially to fit what little was known of the practice. In turn, the cult practice may have changed to support the virtuous ideological message required of the myths, particularly during the Augustan religious reforms that identified Bona Dea with the empress Livia. H. S. Versnel notes the elements common to the Bona Dea festival, Fauna's myths, and Greek Demeter's Thesmophoria, as "wine, myrtle, serpents and female modesty blemished".
Festival and cult
Republican era
The known features of Bona Dea's cults recall those of various earth and fertility goddesses of the Graeco-Roman world, especially the Thesmophoria festival to Demeter. They included nocturnal rites conducted by predominantly or exclusively female initiates and female priestesses, music, dance and wine, and sacrifice of a sow. During the Roman Republican era, two such cults to Bona Dea were held at different times and locations in the city of Rome.One was held on May 1 at Bona Dea's Aventine temple. Its date connects her to Maia; its location connects her to Rome's plebeian commoner class, whose tribunes and emergent aristocracy resisted patrician claims to rightful religious and political dominance. The festival and temple's foundation year is uncertain - Ovid credits it to Claudia Quinta. The rites are inferred as some form of mystery, concealed from the public gaze and, according to most later Roman literary sources, entirely forbidden to men. In the Republican era, Bona Dea's Aventine festivals were probably distinctly plebeian affairs, open to all classes of women and in some limited fashion, to men. Control of her Aventine cult seems to have been contested at various times during the Mid Republican era; a dedication or rededication of the temple in 123 BC by the Vestal Virgin Licinia, with the gift of an altar, shrine and couch, was immediately annulled as unlawful by the Roman Senate; Licinia herself was later charged with inchastity, and executed. By the Late Republic era, Bona Dea's May festival and Aventine temple could have fallen into official disuse, or official disrepute.
The goddess also had a winter festival, attested on only two occasions. It was held in December, at the home of a current senior annual Roman magistrate cum imperio, whether consul or praetor. It was hosted by the magistrate's wife and attended by respectable matrons of the Roman elite. This festival is not marked on any known religious calendar, but was dedicated to the public interest and supervised by the Vestals, and therefore must be considered official. Shortly after 62 BC, Cicero describes it as one of very few lawful nocturnal festivals allowed to women, privileged to those of aristocratic class, and coeval with Rome's earliest history.
Festival rites
The house was ritually cleansed of all unauthorized male persons. Then the magistrate's wife and her assistants made bowers of vine-leaves, and decorated the house's banqueting hall with "all manner of growing and blooming plants" except for myrtle, whose presence and naming were expressly forbidden. A banquet table was prepared, with a couch for the goddess and the image of a snake. The Vestals brought Bona Dea's cult image from her temple and laid it upon her couch, as an honoured guest. The goddess' meal was prepared: the entrails of a sow, sacrificed to her on behalf of the Roman people, and a libation of sacrificial wine. The festival continued through the night, a banquet with female musicians, fun and games, and wine; the last was euphemistically referred to as "milk", and its container as a "honey jar". The rites sanctified the temporary removal of customary constraints imposed on Roman women of all classes by Roman tradition, and underlined the pure and lawful sexual potency of virgins and matrons in a context that focused on female lust, instead of the lust of men. According to Cicero, any unauthorized man who caught even a glimpse of the rites could be punished by blinding, but he offers no example of this. Later Roman writers assume that apart from their different dates and locations, Bona Dea's December and May 1 festivals were essentially the same.Clodius and the Bona Dea scandal
The Winter festival rites of 62 BC were hosted by Pompeia, wife of Julius Caesar, senior magistrate in residence and pontifex maximus. Publius Clodius Pulcher, a popularist politician and ally of Caesar, was said to have intruded, dressed as a woman and intent on the hostess's seduction. According to Plutarch, Caesar's mother, Aurelia concealed the cult objects of the Goddess's mysteries from the intruder; but as the rites had been vitiated, the Vestals were obliged to repeat them, and after further inquiry by the senate and pontifices, Clodius was charged with desecration, which carried a death sentence. Cicero, whose wife Terentia had hosted the previous year's rites, testified for the prosecution.Caesar publicly distanced himself from the affair as much as possible – and certainly from Pompeia, whom he divorced because "Caesar's wife must be above suspicion". He had been correctly absent from the rites but as a paterfamilias he was responsible for their piety. As pontifex maximus, he was responsible for the ritual purity and piety of public and private religion. He had the responsibility to ensure that the Vestals had acted correctly, then chair the inquiry into what were essentially his own household affairs. Worse, the place of the alleged offense was the state property lent to every pontifex maximus for his tenure of office. It was a high-profile, much-commented case. The rites remained officially secret, but many details emerged during and after the trial, and remained permanently in the public domain. They fueled theological speculation, as in Plutarch and Macrobius: and they fed the prurient male imagination - given their innate moral weakness, what might women do when given wine and left to their own devices? Such anxieties were nothing new, and underpinned Rome's traditional strictures against female autonomy. In the political and social turmoil of the Late Republic, Rome's misfortunes were taken as signs of divine anger against the personal ambition, religious negligence and outright impiety of her leading politicians.
Clodius' prosecution was at least partly driven by politics. In an otherwise seemingly thorough account, Cicero makes no mention of Bona Dea's May festival, and claims the goddess' cult as an aristocratic privilege from the first; the impeccably patrician Clodius, Cicero's social superior by birth, is presented as an innately impious, low-class oaf, and his popularist policies as threats to Rome's moral and religious security. After two years of legal wrangling, Clodius was acquitted – which Cicero put down to jury-fixing and other backroom dealings – but his reputation was damaged. The scandalous revelations at the trial also undermined the sacred dignity and authority of the Vestals, the festival, the goddess, office of the pontifex maximus and, by association, Caesar and Rome itself. Some fifty years later, Caesar's heir Octavian, later the princeps Augustus, had to deal with its repercussions.