Bona Dea

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Bona Dea — the “Good Goddess” — was a Roman deity worshipped above all by women, associated with fertility, healing, and the protection of the female body. The name is not a name. It is a title held in front of one, the way a hand is held in front of a face: Bona Dea, the Good Goddess, a courtesy that keeps the true name out of the air. Her worship turned on that withholding. Men were not merely barred from her central rite; in the strictest accounts they were not to learn her name at all. The euphemism that everyone could say stood guard over the word that no man might. Everything else about the cult — the veiled images, the wine called by another word, the rite conducted behind closed doors at night — is of a piece with that first concealment. The secrecy is not incidental to the goddess. It is the shape she is known by.

Who stood behind the title was already a matter of learned dispute in antiquity, and the disagreement was never resolved because the people best placed to resolve it were precisely those forbidden to speak. The antiquarians reached for equivalents. Most often they named her Fauna, the female counterpart of Faunus the woodland god — wife, sister, or daughter, depending on the teller — and gave her the attendant by-names Fatua, the speaker, the prophesying one, and Oma. The pairing with Faunus carried a whole stratum of meaning. He was one of the oldest gods of the Italian countryside, a power of the wild margin and a voice that spoke unbidden out of the woods, and the Romans had long since identified him with the Greek goat-god Pan; to call his female counterpart a goddess of the generative earth was to place Bona Dea among the indigenous numina of field and forest rather than among the imported Olympians. With the equation came a myth. A story made her Faunus’s chaste wife, beaten to death with myrtle rods after he found her drunk on a jar of wine, and then deified by him in his remorse — a tale told less as biography than to account for the cult’s own peculiarities: why myrtle was banished from her rites, and why the wine within them went masked under another word. Another version made her his daughter, who yielded to him only after he took the form of a serpent, which served in turn to explain the snakes kept in her temple. The myths, in other words, run backward from the ritual; they are explanations dressed as origins.

Others reached further afield than the Italian woods. The grammarian Festus identified her with a Greek goddess, Damia, whose priestesses were called damiatrix and whose sacrifice was a damium; on that reading the cult, or a layer of it, came to Rome from Tarentum after the city’s capture in 272 BCE, the Greek Damia grafted onto a goddess already at home in Latin soil. Still other writers folded her into the broad maternal powers of the pantheon — Ops the god of plenty’s consort, Terra the earth itself, Maia of the spring increase whose month opens with the goddess’s own temple-day, even the chthonic Hecate at the darker edge of the list. None of these equations is the goddess; each is a guess made from outside the wall, and several were made precisely to supply an etymology and a story for rites the writer could not enter. What the sources agree on is the secrecy, not the identity behind it, and the multiplicity of names they offer is itself a record of how little the men who wrote them were permitted to know.

The Aventine cult

Two observances are recorded, and they differ in almost every respect — one public and open to daylight, the other private and sealed in the dark. The first was a state cult housed in a sanctuary on the Aventine hill, below the rock the Romans called the Saxum, on the slope outside the old sacred boundary of the city. The temple was an ancient one, standing by the third century BCE; legend gave its consecration to a maiden named Claudia, and its foundation day fell on the Kalends of May, the first of the month, when the spring stood at its fullest. It was no marginal shrine left to decay. The empress Livia, wife of Augustus, restored it, and a later hand — perhaps Hadrian’s — restored it again, so that the cult kept imperial patronage across the centuries even as its inner rite stayed closed.

This was a place of women’s work and of healing. The temple was tended by women, many of them freedwomen, and it kept two things that fixed the goddess’s character in the ancient mind. The first was a garden, or store, of medicinal herbs — a pharmacopeia held within the precinct, drugs and simples dispensed under the goddess’s protection, so that her house was also a place one came to be made well. The second was serpents. Snakes were kept on the premises, harmless and at liberty, and an ancient eye read them at once: the serpent as the emblem of healing, coiled on the staff of the healing gods, and at the same time the serpent as the creature of the earth’s own generative power, the underground life that renews itself by shedding its skin. A goddess of the female body, of fertility and cure, kept the two together — the herb that mends and the snake that signs both medicine and the fertile ground.

There was a further note to her, inherited from the Fauna who lay behind the title: a prophetic one. The by-name Fatua, the one who speaks the future, attached to her, as a voice in the wild attached to Faunus, and it set her cult faintly within the broad Roman world of women’s mantic religion — neither oracle nor mystery in the developed Greek sense, but a power approached for what she might disclose as well as for what she might cure. The Aventine cult was the part of her worship the city could see, and even there it kept its character: women tending a healing house, dispensing the goddess’s medicine and keeping her snakes, under a name that stood in for one they would not say. It drew imperial money and public devotion without ever opening its inner word — proof that a Roman cult could be both a fixture of the state and a sealed thing, honored in the open and withheld at the center.

The December rite

The other observance, and the more famous, was held once a year in early December, and it was held nowhere a stranger could come. It took place not in the temple but in the private house of one of Rome’s senior magistrates — a consul or a praetor holding imperium, a man invested with the city’s command. He himself had to leave. The rite was hosted by his wife, who presided over it in his absence, joined by the matrons of Rome and by the Vestal Virgins, the women who tended the perpetual fire of the state under Vesta and whose presence lent the night the weight of the public religion even as it was conducted in private. Men were excluded without exception. The exclusion ran past the human: in the magistrate’s house, for the duration, even pictures and images of men and of male animals were covered or carried out, so that no male thing, not so much as a painted one, looked on the rite. For one night the household became, as nearly as a house could be made, a world without men.

What happened inside is largely hidden, which is exactly as the cult intended, and the few details that escaped come wrapped in the same indirection that governed the name. Wine was present — it had to be, for a goddess whose myth turned on it — but it was not called wine. The sources report that within the rite the wine went under the name “milk,” and the jar that held it was called a “honey-pot,” a mellarium. Myrtle, the rod with which the goddess of the story had been beaten, was kept out altogether. There was music; one ancient observer, straining to find a category, likened the proceedings to Orphic mysteries, a night-rite of women with its own utterances and its own decorum, set apart from the open sacrifices of the civic calendar. To speak of the cult’s inner meaning is to speak past the evidence. The screen of euphemism — wine that is milk, a jar that is a honey-pot, a goddess who is only “the Good” — was built precisely so that an outsider who heard a word of it would still hold nothing. So little of the rite’s substance survives because so little was ever meant to. The general anatomy of Roman offering belongs to sacrifice; what the Bona Dea rite shows is something the open altar does not — a ritual whose content was sealed by design, kept among women and kept from the men on whom the written record depends.

The Clodius scandal

The cult owes most of its surviving fame to the one night the wall was breached. In 62 BCE the December rite was held in the house of Julius Caesar, then a praetor. His wife Pompeia presided; his mother Aurelia was in the house. Into that sealed assembly came Publius Clodius Pulcher, a young patrician — in love with Pompeia, the sources say, and bent on reaching her — dressed in the clothes of a woman, a music-girl, to pass among the matrons unseen. He did not pass. He was discovered, the rite broken off as polluted, and the city woke to a sacrilege at the heart of the state religion, committed in the house of a serving magistrate against a goddess whose secrets a man was forbidden even to overhear.

The affair became a set piece of late Republican politics, and it is the best-documented thing about the entire cult — which is precisely the difficulty, for it documents the rite from the outside, through the men whom the rite had shut out and who were now turned by their exclusion to outrage. The matter went first to the Senate and the priestly colleges, who pronounced the act sacrilege; then to a special court. A prosecution followed for incestum, the technical charge for a violation of sacred law. Cicero testified — breaking Clodius’s alibi, his claim to have been far from Rome that day, by swearing the man had visited him in the city only hours before — and earned in return a lifelong enemy who, made a plebeian and elected tribune, would one day carry the law that drove Cicero himself into exile. The jury, by the bitter account of the sources, was bought wholesale, and Clodius was acquitted. Caesar, for his part, had already divorced Pompeia. Summoned to the trial, he declined to charge Clodius with anything and professed to know nothing of the affair; asked then why, if he knew nothing, he had put his wife away, he answered — in the line that outlived the whole affair — that those of his household must be free even of suspicion. The episode fixed the cult in the historical record at the very moment of its profanation, and it fixed it from the only angle the record could take: that of the locked-out men, recording a women’s rite by the scandal of its breaking.

The cult and its sources

To study Bona Dea is to study an absence as much as a presence. Her worship was women’s worship, conducted by women, much of it deliberately closed to the men who wrote nearly everything that survives about Roman religion. The matrons and freedwomen who kept her herbs, the wives who presided over her December night, the Vestals who attended it — none of them left an account. What reaches us comes through the antiquarians who guessed at her name, the poets who told the myrtle story, and above all the orators and biographers who recorded a scandal. The result is a goddess seen always at a slant, her cult reconstructible in shape but not in substance: the secrecy, the healing, the matronly and Vestal participation, the May temple and the December house — and behind all of it a silence that the evidence cannot fill because it was made not to be filled.

The collection and analysis of that evidence is itself a modern achievement. The standard work is H. H. J. Brouwer’s Bona Dea: The Sources and a Description of the Cult (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1989; EPRO 110; ISBN 90-04-08606-4), a five-hundred-page revision of his Utrecht doctorate that gathers every literary inscription and notice of the goddess and reads the cult against them — the indispensable corpus. The cult’s place within the wider system of Roman religion, and the methodological problem of recovering women’s cult from male-authored sources, is set out in Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price’s Religions of Rome (Cambridge University Press, 1998), the standard survey of the field. For the texture of the ancient testimony, the nineteenth-century Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities assembles the by-names (Fauna, Fatua, Oma), the Aventine grotto, the serpents, and the myrtle and wine taboos with their classical citations, and the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica gives a compact synthesis of the same material. The scandal’s primary witnesses remain Cicero’s own letters of 62–61 BCE and the later biographers; for the rite itself, the most circumstantial ancient description is the one in Plutarch’s life of Caesar, which both narrates the Clodius affair and, in passing, lets slip more of the December ceremony than the cult would have wished. Recent scholarship has also pressed at the cult’s apparent exclusions — asking, against the famous prohibition, where and how men did stand at the margins of her worship — in studies such as the 2015 essay Male Worshippers and the Cult of Bona Dea, which reads the inscriptions for the dedicants the literary sources overlook.

A goddess of women, fertility, and healing, then, set within the religion of a city of the Roman Republic whose central festival no man might attend and whose name no man might say — a worship that appears in the record chiefly at the moments it was breached or explained from outside. The goddess kept her name. The record keeps the silence around it.

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