Bacchus

«Bacchus» is the Latin form of the Greek Bakchos, one of the many names of Dionysus. «Liber Pater», by contrast, is a native Italic god, agrarian and plebeian, whom Rome worshipped long before it knew the Greek mysteries. That the two ended up as one is the work of the Roman interpretatio, and Cicero still carefully distinguishes between «this Liber born of Semele» and «the one our forefathers consecrated together with Ceres and Libera». The birth myth belongs wholly to the Greek side: Jupiter lies with the mortal Semele, she asks to see him in his divine form and the lightning consumes her; the god rescues the unborn child and sews him into his own thigh until the birth. Ovid therefore calls him ignigena, «fire-born», and bimater, «of two mothers», and closes his long list of epithets by noting that these are the names the god bears among the Greeks.

Bacchus is shown crowned with ivy and vine leaves, bearing the pine-tipped thyrsus, attended by maenads and satyrs; the panther and the drinking jar are his too. The wine he grants is at once gift and danger: it eases care and undoes judgement. But the Roman Liber also held a domain the Greek Dionysus does not. Varro makes him lord of every liquid seed, that of fruits and that of living creatures, with Libera as his female counterpart, and from this come the phallic rites Augustine describes with scandal: a phallus carried on a cart through the crossroads of the countryside and, at Lavinium, a whole month of festival at the end of which the most respected matron of the town publicly set a crown upon it. None of that comes from Greece: it is Latin. From the same root springs the proverb already current in Terence's day: without Ceres and without Liber, that is, without bread and wine, Venus goes cold.

Liber's official cult at Rome is very ancient and had nothing clandestine about it. His temple, on the slope of the Aventine beside the Circus Maximus, was not his alone: he shared it with Ceres and Libera, the triad vowed by the dictator Aulus Postumius in 496 BC after consulting the Sibylline Books during a famine, and dedicated by the consul Spurius Cassius in 493. It was the religious and institutional centre of the plebs: there the decrees of the senate were deposited in the keeping of the plebeian aediles, so that the consuls could neither suppress nor falsify them, and there went the estate of anyone who dared harm a tribune. His festival was the Liberalia, on 17 March, and what it celebrated was no manumission of slaves but the boy's passage into adulthood: on that day he first put on the man's toga, called precisely the toga libera, and thence the name. Ovid describes besides the aged priestesses crowned with ivy, seated along the streets with their portable stove, selling cakes of honey and oil and sacrificing them on the buyer's behalf.

In 186 BC the senate did to the Bacchanalia what it never did to Liber. Livy relates that the Bacchic rites had entered Rome from Etruria, brought by a Greek of low birth, and were held by night, initiating men and women alike. The consul Spurius Postumius Albinus conducted the enquiry on the denunciation of the freedwoman Hispala Faecenia, and the senate banned the cult throughout Italy save by express permission, with no more than five participants, no male priest and no common fund. The decree survives: a bronze tablet found at Tiriolo in Calabria, the oldest senatorial decree we possess in Latin. Livy speaks of more than seven thousand implicated and says there were more executed than imprisoned, and that condemned women were handed over to their families to be put to death in private; the figure comes from a hostile source and should be treated with caution. To call this a «regulation» would be a euphemism: it was the greatest religious repression of the Republic. And one detail explains everything: neither Livy nor the bronze ever names the god. What Rome prosecuted were nocturnal gatherings with no magistrate presiding, not its own Liber, whose temple and games went on as before.