A Roman boy spent his childhood in the toga praetexta, a garment bordered in purple and shared, in a different context, by priests and magistrates conducting religious business. On a day his family judged appropriate, most conventionally though not exclusively on the seventeenth of March, the festival of Liber Pater, he set that childhood toga aside for the plain white toga virilis worn by adult male citizens. The household ceremony that marked the change began at home, where the boy typically dedicated his bulla, a protective amulet worn on a cord since infancy, to the family's household gods, the Lares, closing out the specific ritual protections that had covered him as a child now that he was assumed to no longer need them in the same way.
From the household the young man, often accompanied by family and friends, processed into public space, to the Forum or up to the Capitol, where his name was entered onto the official citizen rolls, converting a private family occasion into a recognized civic one. The date's attachment to Liber Pater, a god associated with wine, fertility and a certain loosening of ordinary social constraint, was not treated by Roman writers as coincidental; a festival honoring liberation in the god's name provided an apt calendar peg for a rite about a young man's own passage toward the liberty of full citizenship.