Bona Dea
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" (perhaps Demeter).
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 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.
Festus describes her as identical with a "women's goddess" named Damia, which Georges Dumézil sees as an ancient misreading of Greek "Demeter".
[6][7] 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.
[10] 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.
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.
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.
Then the magistrate's wife and her assistants[16] 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.
The goddess' meal was prepared: the entrails (exta) of a sow, sacrificed to her on behalf of the Roman people (pro populo Romano), and a libation of sacrificial wine.
[18] The festival continued through the night, a banquet with female musicians, fun and games (ludere), and wine; the last was euphemistically referred to as "milk", and its container as a "honey jar".
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.
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?
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.
[26] 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.
Livia's name did not and could not appear in the official religious calendars, but Ovid's Fasti associates her with May 1, and presents her as the ideal wife and "paragon of female Roman virtue".
[36] Livia's best efforts to restore Bona Dea's reputation had only moderate success in some circles, where scurrilous and titillating stories of the goddess' rites continued to circulate.
[39] The Temple of Bona Dea in Rome was situated on a lower slope of the northeastern Aventine Hill, beneath the height known as Saxum,[40] southeast of the Circus Maximus.
Dumezil claims that Festus' identification of Bona Dea with Damia infers a foundation date in or shortly after 272 BC, after Rome's capture of Tarentum.
While almost all Roman literary sources present the exclusion of men as an official and absolute rule of her cult, this is more likely a ritualised element of her annual festival, at least in Cicero's account of the same, than an everyday prohibition or an aspect of mystes vitiated by Clodius' unlawful presence.
[47][48] Inscriptions of the Imperial era show her appeal as a personal or saviour-goddess, extolled as Augusta and Domina; or as an all-goddess, titled as Regina Triumphalis (Triumphal Queen), or Terrae marisque Dominatrici (Mistress of sea and land).
The literary record offers at least one variation on this type; Macrobius describes her cult statue as overhung by a "spreading vine", and bearing a sceptre in her left hand.
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.
[58] 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.
[59] 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.
[60] Versnel (1992) 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".
At other times, they might drink weak, sweetened, or diluted wine in moderation but Roman traditionalists believed that in the more distant and virtuous past, this was forbidden,[63] "for fear that they might lapse into some disgraceful act.
[67] The euphemistic naming of strong wine at this festival has been variously described as an actual substitution for milk and honey, relatively late in the cult's development; as a theological absurdity;[68] and as an ingenious justification for behaviours that would be considered unacceptable outside this specific religious sphere.
[20] The vine-leaf bowers and the profusion of plants – any and all but the forbidden myrtle – transform the sophisticated, urban banqueting hall into a "primitive" dwelling, evoking the innocence of an ancestral golden age in which women rule themselves, without reference to men or Venus, drinking "milk and honey", which are "markers par excellence of utopian golden times"[72] – under the divine authority of Bona Dea.
