Bacchus

Somewhere in Etruria in the early second century BC, a Greek nobody has bothered to name is running initiations. He is not a public teacher, not one of the men who set up in the forum and sell prophecies openly. He works at night, with few people, and what he offers is a rite.

It spreads. Wine and dinner are part of it, and the numbers grow, and men are admitted alongside the women. Livy, writing about it a century and a half later, says that the drums and the cymbals were loud enough to cover any noise a person might make. His account is hostile, and modern historians read it carefully rather than literally, but the event it describes is real and there is a bronze plate to prove it.

Bacchus is the god at the centre. The name is Greek in origin, a cult title of Dionysus, and Rome took it along with the wine, the vine and the mysteries. What Rome did with it afterwards is a separate story from anything in the Greek record, and it is the story that matters here.

The god had a respectable Roman address already. Since 493 BC there had been a temple on the Aventine to Ceres, Liber and Libera, a plebeian foundation set up on the instruction of the Sibylline Books during a famine, and Liber was an old Italian god of wine and male fertility who slid easily into the Greek identification. That cult was open, agricultural, and supervised. The Bacchic mysteries were none of those things. They were private, they were nocturnal, they required an initiation, and they were spreading through Italy without asking anyone’s permission.

In 186 BC the consuls dropped everything else to deal with it. The trigger, in Livy’s telling, is small and domestic: a young man named Aebutius is about to be enrolled in the rites by his own mother and stepfather, who want him compromised, and a freedwoman named Hispala Faecenia, who loves him and who was taken into the cult as a slave, tells him what actually happens in there and then repeats it to the consul under guarantee of protection.

Her account is the most valuable thing in the whole episode, because it describes a change rather than a scandal. The rites, she says, used to belong to women. No man was admitted. Initiations happened three set days a year, in daylight, and matrons served as priestesses. Then a Campanian woman named Paculla Annia became priestess and altered everything, claiming divine instruction: she admitted men for the first time, starting with her own two sons, moved the ceremonies into the night, and increased them to five days in every month.

The details Livy keeps are strange enough to sound like something remembered rather than invented. Matrons dressed as Bacchae, hair loose, running down to the Tiber carrying burning torches, plunging them under the water and pulling them out still alight, because the torches were made of sulphur mixed with lime. Nobody over the age of twenty was to be initiated. The membership, he claims, was enormous, and included men and women of noble families.

The Senate’s response was not a ban on the god. It was a police operation. Something in the order of seven thousand people were implicated, and the number executed was greater than the number imprisoned. Guards were set at the gates so nobody could leave Rome. Informers were paid. The decree that followed was cut into bronze and sent out through Italy, and one of those bronze plates was dug up at Tiriolo in Calabria in 1640 and survives, in Latin old enough to be difficult, ordering that no Bacchanal be kept, that no man be a priest, that no more than five persons gather for the rites, and that anyone wanting an exemption apply to the praetor and the Senate in Rome.

They did not abolish him. They licensed him.

Two centuries later the god is painted across the wall of a large private house outside Pompeii, in a room whose frieze runs continuously around three walls and shows, in the reading most scholars accept, a woman being taken through an initiation. She uncovers a basket. She is shown something, and flinches. A winged figure swings a whip at her back. At the centre of it all Bacchus sprawls in the lap of Ariadne, entirely at his ease. Whatever the Senate had done in 186 BC, someone in Campania was still commissioning that in fresco and putting it where guests would see it.

The later evidence is stranger still and it is carved on coffins. Roman sarcophagi of the imperial period are covered with Bacchic processions more often than with almost any other subject: satyrs, panthers, the god riding, the whole noisy company put on the outside of a stone box holding a body. Some of those buried in them were initiates. Others may simply have wanted the association. Either way, the joke about the wine god turns out to be a burial cult, and the drinking is a promise about what happens afterwards.

His powers are release and reversal. Wine is the smallest of them. He dissolves the ordinary distinctions a Roman lived inside, between citizen and freedman, matron and slave, day and night, and he does it by admission rather than by birth, which is precisely why a Senate that could tolerate any amount of drunkenness could not tolerate him. He promises his initiates a better share of the afterlife than the state cult promised anybody.

His limits are political rather than divine. He can be regulated. The decree of 186 BC did not kill the cult but it did put it under licence, cap the congregations at five, bar men from the priesthood and require the Senate’s permission for every meeting, and the cult that emerged afterwards was quieter and more private and much easier to live with. A god whose whole power lies in secrecy is unusually vulnerable to a state that decides to find out what he is doing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Bacchus?

Bacchus is the Roman god of wine, intoxication and ritual release, worshipped both in the open cult of the Aventine temple and in a secret initiatory mystery cult that spread through Italy in the second century BC. His name comes from a Greek cult title of Dionysus, and at Rome he was identified with the older Italic god Liber Pater.

What was the Bacchanalia?

The Bacchanalia were the secret nocturnal rites of Bacchus in Italy. According to Livy they had once been women-only, held three days a year in daylight, until a Campanian priestess named Paculla Annia admitted men, moved them to the night and increased them to five days a month. In 186 BC the Roman Senate suppressed them.

What is the difference between Bacchus and Dionysus?

Dionysus is the Greek god; Bacchus is the name under which Rome received him, taken from one of his Greek cult titles. The Roman god had his own history, including a state temple shared with Ceres and Libera, an identification with the native Italian god Liber, and the mystery cult that led to the suppression of 186 BC.

Why did Rome suppress the cult of Bacchus?

The Senate treated the Bacchanalia as a conspiracy rather than a religion, because the rites were secret, sworn, held at night, and open to men and women, slave and free, without regard to rank. Roughly seven thousand people were implicated, and more were executed than imprisoned. The resulting decree survives on a bronze plate found at Tiriolo in 1640.

What is the Villa of the Mysteries?

It is a Roman house outside Pompeii containing a room painted with a continuous frieze usually read as the initiation of a woman into the Bacchic mysteries, with Bacchus himself at the centre in Ariadne’s lap. It shows that the cult was still alive and openly celebrated in private houses long after the suppression of 186 BC.

Related Entries

Dionysus, Liber, Ceres, Ariadne, Semele, Maenad, Satyr, Silenus, Faun, Priapus, Jupiter, Persephone, Orpheus, Cybele, Isis, Midas