What the Cult Excluded, and What That Tells Us

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.