THE CULT OF BONA DEA

14 FROM GOOD GODDESS TO VESTAL VIRGINS

Brouwer observes, it was only when he himself had fallen foul of Clodius that he took the moral high ground over Clodius’ infiltration of the rites. Before that, soon after the incident itself, he displays a marked reluctance to support a senatorial motion for a trial of Clodius for incestum.3 After he had become a target of Clodius’ enmity, however, his moral indignation knew no bounds. His brilliantly vituperative rhetoric captured the imagination of later writers and we have an exceptionally large volume of material on the incident. None of it, however, tells us much more than we already know from Cicero’s own works. This has led some modern scholars to conclude that Bona Dea was a minor, relatively unimportant deity. Dumézil, for example, writes:

Did this group of savage divinities [i.e. Faunus, Silvanus, the Lares] include in ancient times, a feminine element? Fauna is hardly more than a name, which takes on substance only in legends where, as wife, daughter, or sister of Faunus, she passed into fiction, and into the Hellenized novel. Under the name of Bona Dea, she was the object of an annual ceremonial in December which was official but secret—strictly limited to women—highly coloured, but Greek. She was no more than a ‘Damia’, probably imported from Tarentum, and perhaps through a mistranslation when that city was conquered in 272.

(Dumézil 1970:350. My parentheses)

Brouwer’s is to date the most comprehensive study of the Bona Dea (Brouwer 1989). He argues that the literary evidence as derived from Cicero has given us an exaggerated view of the importance, not of the cult as a whole, but of the festival in December and its particular rites (ibid.: 260 et seq.). The epigraphical material reveals a somewhat different type of cult with some elements apparently contradicting the evidence of the December ritual. The most significant of these differences is that while the December ritual explicitly and very rigorously excluded men, the epigraphical evidence shows that men did, in fact, worship this goddess.4

Bona Dea was a goddess of many parts, as are most deities in polytheistic systems. The fact that her cult took different forms on different occasions is not in itself surprising or unusual in any way. Nor does evidence that men dedicated votive offerings to her diminish the significance of the December festival which was celebrated by women alone. That is, not unless we believe that women’s rituals

THE CULT OF BONA DEA 15

were ipso facto of little importance. The December festival was undoubtedly a part of the civic religion. Whatever the political motives behind the fracas occasioned by Clodius’ escapade, the fact is that Clodius did stand trial for incestum.

Nevertheless the all-female festival does raise interesting questions. Particularly since, as we shall see, the mythology of Bona Dea seems designed to explain the goddess’ avoidance of men. Also, the rhetoric of male avoidance in descriptions of the festival is exceptionally strident. Even if allowance be made for the fact that most of it harks back to Cicero and the Clodius affair, the cult of Bona Dea does seem to protest its abhorrence of males a little too much. Sexual segregation in cult and ritual is not unusual in Roman religion and most of the time it is presented as just another ritual feature. There is generally no attempt made to explain or defend the exclusion of one sex or the other from a particular rite. The striking exceptions are the cult of Bona Dea and the cult of Hercules Invictus at the Ara Maxima, which excluded all women from its rites. Significantly, as we shall see, at least one account of the founding of the Ara Maxima explains the exclusion of women by means of a story featuring Bona Dea.

As far as the rites at the Ara Maxima were concerned the exclusion of women was merely a ritual detail. Women simply did not participate in the rites.5 And though I have nowhere found it explicitly stated, it is, I think, safe to assume that women were also excluded from the public banquets that followed sacrifices at the Ara Maxima, even when the sheer numbers of people involved would have meant that the participants in the feast spilled out of the precincts of the shrine onto the public streets.6 Gellius cannot explain why men were not allowed to swear by Castor, but finds nothing strange in the fact that women could not swear by Hercules. After all, he says, they abstained from all sacrifice to that god.7 But there do not seem to have been any elaborate ritual mechanisms for keeping women out such as the cult of Bona Dea had for keeping out men.8 The myths that are connected with the rites at the Ara Maxima are however another matter altogether. Here, the exclusion of women is given a degree of prominence that makes it appear one of the most important, if not the most important feature of the cult. Moreover, except for one variant which links the exclusion of women to the goddess Carmenta,9 it is Bona Dea, who is made to occupy the opposite end of the male/female axis which the myths create.

16 FROM GOOD GODDESS TO VESTAL VIRGINS

The ritual separation of male and female is frequently expressed in terms of the opposition of fire and water. Fire and water together symbolize life itself: hae duae res (sc. aqua et ignis) humanam vitam continent—‘These two elements constitute human life’.10

Aqua et igni tam interdici solet damnatus, quam accipiunt nuptae, videlicet quia hae duae res humanam vitam maxime continent. Itaque funus prosecuti redeuntes ignem super gradiebantur aqua aspersi; quod purgationis genus vocabant suffitionem.

Water and fire are both denied to condemned men and accepted by brides. The reason is probably because these two substances contain the very stuff of human life. Therefore, those returning from a funeral sprinkle themselves with water and step over fire. They call this suffitio, a kind of purification.11

Death is equivalent to the denial of fire and water. Hence the reason why mourners after a funeral seek symbolic contact with the two elements. The Digest states that there were just two modes of capital punishment: exile and death. Exile—exilium—was not simple banishment; it signified the loss of Roman citizenship and was expressed in terms of the denial of fire and water. Simple banishment

—relegatio—was not accompanied by the denial of fire and water, did not entail the loss of citizenship and was therefore not a form of capital punishment.

Individually, fire and water represented the male and female principles respectively. In the Roman Questions Plutarch asked ‘why did the bride touch fire and water?’12 And he answered, ‘fire without moisture is without nourishment and dry, while water without heat is barren and inactive: and so male and female apart from each other are ineffectual but their coming together in marriage produces the perfect communal life’. Varro defines the ritual separation of male and female in terms of fire and water explicitly in terms of sexuality and procreation:

The conditions for procreation are two: fire and water. Thus these are used at the threshold in weddings, because there is union here. And fire is male, which the semen is in the other case, and water is the female because the embryo develops