VENUS

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Faunus is the reason offered by all four writers as to why wine was disguised as milk at her festival, and myrtle excluded. Implicit in these accounts is the belief that myrtle, like wine, represented the male principle which was overtly rejected at Bona Dea’s festival. Myrtle and wine are thus given a symmetric symbolic value in these accounts. The pervasive force of the belief that myrtle was connected with Venus makes this interpretation superficially plausible. Indeed Plutarch explicitly makes the connection between myrtle and Venus in the context of the cult of the Bona Dea.

Is it because they remain pure from many things, particularly from venery, when they perform this holy service? For they not only exclude their husbands, but they also drive everything male out of the house whenever they conduct the customary ceremonies in honour of the goddess. So, because the myrtle is sacred to Venus, they rigorously exclude it.

(ibid.)

But though the literary accounts give symmetrical symbolic value to wine and myrtle, their ritual relationship is asymmetrical. Wine, though disguised, was an essential element of the rite of Bona Dea. It represented the male principle, which though overtly excluded from the rite, was covertly included.5 But myrtle was entirely excluded. Its absence was underscored by the presence of all sorts of different plants. The house where the festival took place was decorated with ‘all manner of growing and blooming plants’ except for myrtle. If myrtle, like wine, was meant to represent the male principle, its absence would have been symbolic of a total rejection of the male, overt and covert. To read both wine and myrtle as symbolically representative of men results in the appearance of a fundamental inconsistency within the cult.

But the pervasiveness of the belief that myrtle was associated with Venus makes it improbable that it had a different evocation in the cult of the Bona Dea. The association with Venus, however, does not always necessarily evoke ideas of sexual love, and in a cult of women, ideas of men. The contention of this chapter is that Venus’ significance in Roman religion was not confined to the role she played as custodian of the domain of sexual relationships. The representation of Venus as patron deity of sexual relationships was merely the most widely acknowledged manifestation of a much more complex role. It was not only the categories of male and

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female that Venus united. Her broader function was to draw together into a single system the various categories—whether defined sexually, politically or socially—that other cults and rituals separated. The cults of Venus provided an alternative model for the ritual treatment of categories: a model based on inclusiveness rather than exclusiveness.

Myrtle was also associated with Venus in contexts other than sexual love. For example, generals celebrating an ovatio wore a chaplet of myrtle rather than the laurel of the triumphator. Why? Gellius says that one of the reasons why a general was awarded an ovatio rather than a triumph was if he had won an easy victory owing to a quick surrender. ‘For such an easy victory they believed that the leaves sacred to Venus were appropriate on the ground that it was a triumph not of Mars but of Venus.’6 But he also gives other reasons why an ovatio might be granted rather than a triumph: if war had not been declared in due form and therefore not waged with a legitimate enemy, or waged with adversaries of low status such as slaves or pirates. Such victories were not necessarily easy. Nevertheless they too could result in an ovatio.7

Pliny also associates Venus and myrtle in a context that has nothing to do with sex. He tells a story of two myrtle trees called the patrician myrtle and the plebeian myrtle that once grew in the precinct of the shrine of Quirinus. As long as the patricians were the more powerful faction in the state the patrician myrtle flourished while the other withered, but when the plebeians grew strong their myrtle tree grew green while the patricians’ turned yellow. Although the connection with Venus is not made explicit here, it is clear from the structure of the passage as a whole that in this instance too, an intuitive appeal was being made to the acknowledged association between myrtle and Venus, whom Pliny calls the ‘guardian spirit of the tree who presid[ed] over unions’.

fuit ubi nunc Roma est iam cum conderetur, quippe ita traditur, myrtea verbena Romanos Sabinosque, cum propter raptas virgines dimicare voluissent, depositis armis purgatos in eo loco qui nunc signa Veneris Cluacinae habet: cluere enim antiqui purgare dicebant. et in ea quoque arbore suffimenti genus habetur, ideo tum electa quoniam coniunctioni et huic arbori Venus praeest, haud scio an prima etiam omnium in locis publicis Romae sata, fatidico quidem et memorabili augurio. inter antiquissima namque delubra habetur Quirini,

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hoc est ipsius Romuli. in eo sacrae fuere myrti duae ante aedem ipsam per longum tempus, altera patricia appellata, altera plebeia. patricia multis annis praevaluit exuberans ac laeta; quamdiu senatus quoque floruit, illa ingens, plebeia retorrida ac squalida. quae postquam evaluit flavescente patricia, a Marsico bello languida auctoritas patrum facta est, ac paulatim in sterilitatem emarcuit maiestas. quin et ara vetus fuit Veneri Myrteae, quam nunc Murciam vocant.

At the time of the foundation of Rome myrtles grew on the present site of the city, as tradition says that the Romans and Sabines, after having wanted to fight a battle because of the carrying off of the maidens, laid down their arms and purified themselves with sprigs of myrtle, at the place now occupied by the statues of Venus Cluacina, cluere being the old word meaning ‘to cleanse’. And a kind of incense for fumigation is also contained in this tree, which was selected for the purpose on the occasion referred to because Venus the guardian spirit of the tree also presides over unions, and I rather think that it was actually the first of all trees to be planted in public places at Rome, fraught indeed with a prophetic and remarkable augury. For the shrine of Quirinus, that is of Romulus himself, is held to be one of the most ancient temples. In it there were two sacred myrtles, which for a long time grew in front of the actual temple, and one of them was called the patrician’s myrtle and the other the plebeian’s. For many years the patrician’s tree was the more flourishing of the two, and was full of vigour and vitality; as long as the senate flourished this was a great tree, while the plebeians’ myrtle was shrivelled and withered. But afterwards the plebeians’ myrtle grew strong while the patricians’ began to turn yellow, for from the Marsian war onward the authority of the fathers became weak, and by slow degrees its grandeur withered away into barrenness. Moreover there was also an old altar belonging to Venus Myrtea, who is now called Murcia.8

I shall start out with an a priori assumption that the exclusion of myrtle from the cult of Bona Dea was meant to evoke Venus. The thesis of this chapter will be that the cult of Bona Dea appealed not to Venus’ widely attested connection with sexual love, but to her more fundamental religious function of which the connection with