In ancient Roman religion, Bona Dea (; 'Good Goddess') 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 to 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" (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 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 ("The Good Goddess") 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 ("The Women's Goddess"),In Propertius, 4, 9, 25. Laudanda ... Dea ("The Goddess who must be Praised"),Lygdamus, Elegia, 5, 8. and Sancta ("The Holy One"). 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"., cites Dumézil's theory that "Damia" was probably an ancient misreading or mistranslation of "Demeter", later institutionalised. 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.Macrobius cites Cornelius Labeo as his source for Bona, Fauna, and Fatua as indigitamenta of Terra in the Libri PontificalesCornelius Labeo seems to have drawn this theology from the work of Varro. See 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" (Fenta "the prophetess" or Fenta "the foolish").
Mythology Cicero 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 (also named Faunus Fatuus, meaning Faunus "the foolish", or seer). 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 (to prophesy): 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."Macrobius, Saturnalia, 1.12.20–29. 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.See Brouwer, p. xxiii, 266ff. 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". Thesomphoria was a three-day festival; its participants, exclusively female, slept on "primitive" beds made of lugos, a willow species known to the Romans as agnos, or vitex agnus castis: supposedly an infertile tree, and a strong anaphrodisiac. Though wine is not attested at Thesmophoria, it may have been used. Like the Vestals, Demeter's priestesses were virgin.
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 (c. late 3rd century BC).Ovid, Fasti, 2, 35; he is the only source for this assertion. 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., citing Cicero, De Domo Sua, 53.136.
The goddess also had a winter festival, attested on only two occasions (63 and 62 BC). 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 assistantsPossibly, her own female servants. 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 (pulvinar) for the goddess and the image of a snake. The Vestals brought Bona Dea's cult image from her templePresumably her Aventine Temple. and laid it upon her couch, as an honoured guest. 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.The sacrifice could have been offered by the Vestals or, according to Plutarch, by the hostess; see Cult themes in this article. 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".Winter festival summary based on Brouwer (1989) as summarised in , and . For Roman sources, cf. Plutarch, Lives: Life of Caesar, ix (711E), Life of Cicero, xix (870B); Juvenal, vi.339 (a satirical treatment); and Plutarch, Roman Questions, (Loeb), 20–35, available via link to Bill Thayer's website 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.Cicero, De Haruspicum Responsis XVII.37 – XVIII.38; cited in Brouwer, pp. 165–166. Later Roman writers assume that apart from their different dates and locations, Bona Dea's December and May 1 festivals were essentially the same.See W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals of the period of the Republic, MacMillan (New York, 1899): pp. 102–106.
Clodius and the Bona Dea scandal