Bona Dea

The best documented episode in Bona Dea's cult is also the reason so much is known about a rite from which men were rigorously excluded: in December of 62 BCE, Publius Clodius Pulcher entered the house of Julius Caesar, where Caesar's wife Pompeia was hosting that year's nocturnal rite as the wife of a magistrate holding imperium, disguised as a woman musician. He was discovered, and the resulting scandal produced a public trial for sacrilege in which Cicero testified against him and which Clodius was widely believed to have escaped only through bribery of the jury. Caesar himself, despite testifying that he had seen nothing improper, divorced Pompeia over the affair, giving rise to the frequently quoted remark that Caesar's wife must be above suspicion regardless of what could actually be proven against her.

Nearly everything modern readers know about the private December rite comes from exactly this kind of hostile or scandalized male testimony describing the one night the exclusion of men was broken, since no participant's own account of an intact, undisturbed rite survives. Cicero returned to the episode repeatedly in his letters and speeches over the following years, using it as a standing example of Clodius's moral character in wholly unrelated political disputes, which is a further reason the scandal is so thoroughly documented relative to almost any other detail of Bona Dea's cult: it survived because it became useful ammunition in Roman political life long after the night itself.

Roman sources record specific exclusions from Bona Dea's December rite beyond the exclusion of men themselves: myrtle was reportedly banned from the ceremony, explained in one tradition by a story that her father Faunus once beat her with myrtle rods, and wine, ordinarily associated with women's exclusion from unmixed drinking in Roman custom generally, was present at the rite but referred to euphemistically as milk and kept in a container called a honey jar rather than named directly as wine, a circumlocution ancient writers including Plutarch and Macrobius found worth recording precisely because it was strange.

The cult in fact kept two quite different festivals under one goddess's name: a public temple rite on the Aventine every first of May, open in a more ordinary civic sense, and the far more famous December rite, private, nocturnal, held in a magistrate's own home and conducted by his wife together with the Vestal Virgins, which is the ritual almost all surviving anecdote and scandal concerns. The contrast between an ordinary public festival and an unusually restricted private one under the same goddess is itself informative about how differently Roman religious practice could be organized depending on where and by whom a rite was held.