Ancient women in religious spheres
A quick note before we begin: the term “cult” in relation to antiquity does not carry the same meaning that it does today. In ancient times, “cult” was just used to define a religious sect that had certain rituals/rites and usually was built around a specific deity. It wouldn’t have the same negative implications that it has now, and being in one was generally accepted. That being said, I am going to be using the term “cult” in the ancient sense.
Roman religion both offered opportunities for “release” (i.e. festivals, “lewd” behavior) to celebrate, and asked for behavioral limitations in order to keep deities appeased. In that vein, women’s religious expectations centered around upholding a feminine moral standard (Pomeroy 205-206). Still, religion also offered an escape from other gendered cultural expectations. Through the examples of the rites of Bona Dea and the Bacchic Conspiracy we can see how women’s participation in Roman religion both held them to and allowed for the bypassing of restrictions of gender and class, resulting in fear and further regulation from male authorities.
Please note that this section will contain sexually violent, period-typical misogynistic language.
The Festival of bona dea
Bona Dea, roughly translating from Latin to “Good Goddess”, was the goddess of fruitfulness/harvest both in women and in land. Her temple was attended to and cared for only by women (see the Oxford Classical Dictionary). In early December, a special festival was held to honor her. The upper-class wives of praetors, consuls, and generals (high-ranking government and military officials) would host other women in their homes and engage in secret ceremonies led by the vestal virgins, who were female religious figureheads (Plutarch, Life of Caesar, 9.4). These ceremonies would happen late at night and usually last into the morning. Notably, it was “unlawful for a man to approach or be in the house when the rites are celebrated” (Plutarch 9.3).
Pictured is a marble statue of Bona Dea
Plutarch records an episode in 62 BCE in which Pompeia, Julius Caesar’s wife before he assumed general control of Rome, hosted the rites at their home. Another noble Roman man, Publius Clodius, snuck into their house dressed as a lyre-player for the event. Ultimately, he was found out. Plutarch says that the “women were terrified” that a man had witnessed the sacred rites, and all of the sacred objects hidden and proceedings immediately halted. The general story was that “Clodius had been involved in sacrilege and had committed injustice against not only those he had insulted, but the city and the gods” (10.3). This was incredibly damaging to both Clodius’ and Pompeia’s reputation, with popular politician, writer, and public speaker Cicero writing that it was “a spectacular scandal” (Letters to Atticus, 1.12.4). Additionally, he says that an individual has sympathy to “subversion and subversive movements” due to continued friendship with Clodius after the fact (1.14.6).
Caesar divorced Pompeia “immediately” after this, and Clodius was sent to trial. However, during the trial Caesar attested that “he knew nothing about the accusations against Clodius” when making that decision, and that his “‘wife should be beyond suspicion’” of engaging in inappropriate behavior with Clodius (Plutarch 10.6).
Whether or not that is what Caesar truly believed has been questioned, and some scholars (and Romans) assumed that Caesar divorced Pompeia due to rumors that she encouraged Clodius’ behavior (Pomeroy 210). It is possible that he only testified to having no suspicions in order to reduce the penalty placed on Clodius (Plutarch 10.6). Additionally, it would have benefitted Caesar to attest to Pompeia’s faithfulness to preserve his own reputation and masculinity. Regardless of Caesar’s motivations for their divorce, Pompeia’s perceived failings in maintaining religious expectations were enough to jeopardize her position and open her up to attacks on her person. While Clodius certainly received blame for his actions, Pompeia’s integrity was also questioned, and the incident might have resulted in the loss of her marriage. It destabilized her role and reputation as the responsible matrona (Latin for “matron”, used to refer to an upper-class Roman wife). This event also opened up the rites themselves to scrutiny and ridicule.
The ancient satirist Juvenal writes:
“My god! The sacred mysteries of the special Goddess of Women are no longer secret! Women get all stirred up with wine and wild music; they drive themselves crazy; they shriek and writhe – worshippers of Phallus… The aristocratic matrons challenge the professional whores – and win… If only the ancient rituals of our public rites could be conducted free from such debaucheries; but the whole world knows how they were defiled when Clodius disguised himself as a woman and entered the sacred ceremony from which even male mice had fled, where even pictures of men used to be covered as part of the ritual. In the old days, who would dare defile sacred rites and ritual objects and scorn the gods? Now there’s a Clodius for every temple. We can’t even lock the women up to keep them in check. Who’d guard the guards?”
– Juvenal 6. 306-48.
Juvenal wrote extremely hyperbolic and distorted versions of practices he wished to condemn (Pomeroy). It is likely that Juvenal chose to satirize the festival of Bona Dea because women-only gatherings made men uncomfortable, as we will see later in the Bacchic Conspiracy. He proposes that the secret rites of Bona Dea are a scene of chaos where women violently eschew their expected role of modest matrona and step into a role of drunken, sexual deviancy that was usually only suited for upper class Roman men. These behaviors would be condemned for men too, but typically as long as a man knew when and when not to engage in them, adultery and extreme intoxication were “looked over”. In this episode, we see how women's-only religious spaces created suspicion, thus resulting in heavy criticism and social consequences when their "failings" were made public.
the Bacchic conspiracy
More than 100 years prior to the Bona Dea scandal, in 186 BCE, Rome was filled with internal tension and unease after the Second Punic War. Roman officials were challenged with rooting out threats to “good order”, leading them to the cult of the god Bacchus. The cult was characterized by dancing, drumming, and drinking, and was associated with sexual deviancy. Unlike the rites of Bona Dea, their rituals combined both men and women (Boatwright et. al).
Women filled leadership roles in the cult, and membership was originally limited to women. This was not necessarily "scandalous", as this was also the case in other cults, though it was unique to religious spaces. Outside of religion, women were unable to occupy any explicit roles of power, and instead needed to work "behind the scenes" in social spaces. Still, the configuration of power within the cult was worrying to Roman officials for other reasons.
Modern scholars propose that what most unsettled Roman authorities was the reversal of roles in the cult. A freedwoman, Hispala Faenicia, would eventually give a report that only men under the age of 20 were initiated, and were usually initiated by their mothers or a female authority figure of some kind. This would be most scandalous if initiation took place before they were presented to the state as citizens (Takacs). This would mean that women in the cult were “taking the place of both the father and the city” (Schied 398), insinuating that their allegiance was first to the Bacchic cult and to the Roman state second.
There has been some pushback on this, as men usually became full adult citizens sometime between the ages of 14-16, meaning that the age cap of 20 would not necessarily prevent the men from fulfilling their role in front of the state first. Still, it is possible that initiations did happen prior to a boy being presented as a citizen, as there was no “minimum” age presented for initiation into the cult. This is where their initiation would be a problem.
In addition to a theoretically problematic construction of power, the cult's behavior provoked a widespread moral panic. 150 years after these events, Livy describes the cult as “eliminating all moral judgement” and therefore allowing “depravity of every kind” to emerge, resulting in a range of immoral sins spanning “promiscuous sex between freeborn men and women” to “cases of poisoning and murders” (Livy, History of Rome 39.6-8). While Livy is certainly writing a much more dramatic version of events than what actually happened, the fear that the cult of Bacchus evoked in Roman government officials was very real. Hispala testified that after the gendered integration of the rites, deviancy within the cult grew to the point that “no crime and no shameful act [was] omitted from them”. Additionally, she testified that the cult had come to include noble men and women (Livy 39.242-45).
Eventually, the worshipping of Bacchus was extremely limited, but not completely outlawed. Among other things, the Senatus Consultum decreed:
“No one in a company of more than five persons all together, men and women, shall perform such rites;
nor in that company shall more than two men or three women be present”
—Senatus consultum de bacchanalibus, 186 BCE
This effectively made it impossible for women to participate in the cult in its original formation.
Livy records a speech given prior to the announcement of the Senatus Consultum in which the audience is told that of the worshippers, “a great number are women, and they are the sources of this evil; next there are men most like women”. He goes on to say that “nothing is more treacherous in appearance than perverse religion” (39.16). While a speech was certainly given, this exact speech is one of Livy’s creation (it was traditional to record a “rendition” rather than an exact copy of a speech in a historic account). In Livy’s account, he emphasizes that the evil of the cult was a result of the role of women within it.
However, while Livy (and modern scholars) focus largely on women's involvement in the Bacchic cult, the Senatus Consultum itself is more worried about policing the involvement of men. Men were expected to declare their continued worship before the senate, as seen in this excerpt:
"No one shall observe the sacred rites either in public or private or outside the city, unless he comes to the praetor urbanus, and he, in accordance with the opinion of the senate, expressed when no less that 100 senators are present at the discussion, shall have given leave".
—Senatus consultum de bacchanalibus, 186 BCE
So not only is the Senatus Consultum effectively de-centralizing women's involvement in the cult, but it is additionally policing how men are able to interact with it. By requiring the men involved to report themselves, the senate would be able to "keep tabs" on the political and social aspirations of those individuals. Still, Livy's account chooses to focus more on the involvement of women in the cult, attributing the "evil" to the women placed in charge of it.
The Bacchic Conspiracy and the Bona Dea scandal were both preserved by centralizing the role that women had in their creation and eventual perceived "failure". However, in both instances, men were prosecuted and restrained through political and religious frameworks. In these examples, we see how the scandal of the Bacchic cult and the construction of the Festival of Bona Dea were not necessarily used to restrict women, but rather to police how men were able to interact with women. This then contributes to the prevailing notion that women are a "corruptive force" from which men need to restrict their exposure to, which is exemplified so neatly in Juvenal's satire. This is then reinforced by how these episodes were preserved by ancient historians.
This is not to say that men are the only victim in this. It is alleged that thousands of men and women were sentenced to death for their involvement in the Bacchic rites. Women were executed by their blood relatives, or whoever was considered to have "authority" over them at that time (Pomeroy).
Sources
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