For a Roman boy, laying the toga praetexta aside was itself a religious event, not merely a change of clothes. At the Liberalia, the festival of Liber Pater held on the seventeenth of March, boys judged ready for manhood, generally sometime in their mid teens though the exact age varied by family circumstance, exchanged the purple-bordered childhood toga for the plain white toga virilis in a household ceremony that then moved into a public procession to the Capitol or Forum, where the young man's name was entered on the citizen rolls. Traditionally he also dedicated his childhood protective amulet, the bulla, worn on a cord around the neck since infancy, to the household gods, closing out the ritual protections of childhood as he took on the responsibilities of adult citizenship.
Roman priests kept the border for life. Because the flamines and pontifices wore the praetexta throughout their tenure rather than only in childhood, the same visible marker that a Roman audience read on a boy as simply not yet grown, it read on a priest at the altar as still, in a sense, standing in the position that border had always signified, a person set apart, under a form of ritual protection ordinary adult dress did not carry.