Bona Dea: The Good Goddess of Rome and Her Women-Only Rites

One night in early December of 62 BC, a young aristocrat put on a woman’s dress, took a lute, and slipped into the house of Julius Caesar. Inside, the most respected women in Rome were celebrating a rite so secret that every man in the household, every male animal, and even the male figures in the paintings had been removed or covered. The intruder got lost in the corridors. A maid asked who he was looking for, he answered, and his voice gave him away.

The scandal ran for months. It ended Caesar’s marriage, nearly wrecked Cicero’s career, and produced one of the most quoted lines in Latin history. It also preserved, almost by accident, most of what anyone knows about the goddess whose rite was broken. The Romans called her Bona Dea, the Good Goddess, a title that stood in for her real name. That name, several ancient writers say, was kept from men.

Overview of Bona Dea

Bona Dea (pronounced BO-nah DAY-ah) was a Roman goddess honored above all by women. She protected the health and fertility of women and the well-being of the Roman state, and she had two celebrations a year: the anniversary of her temple on May 1, and a secret night rite in early December, held in the home of a senior magistrate and run by women.

She had a temple on the lower slope of the Aventine Hill, below a rock outcrop the Romans called the Saxum. The poet Ovid says it was dedicated by a Vestal Virgin from the Claudian family and restored by Livia, the wife of Augustus, and that men were forbidden to look inside. According to the late Roman writer Macrobius, the temple kept a store of medicinal herbs that the priestesses dispensed to the sick, and harmless snakes moved freely through its rooms.

Her private name is still debated, and the ancient writers offer several answers. Some identified her with Fauna, the wife or daughter of the woodland god Faunus. Others called her Ops, Fatua, Maia, or simply the Earth, and Greek writers in Rome linked her to a goddess of their own. The question of her identity is part of her story and comes up again below.

Titles

Her names in literature and inscriptions show how many ways Romans approached her:

• Bona Dea, “the Good Goddess,” her public name
• Feminea Dea, “the Women’s Goddess,” in the poet Propertius
• Fauna and Fatua, names linked to her in Roman myth
• Damia, a name recorded by the grammarian Festus
• Bona Dea Oclata, “of the eyes,” in a dedication tied to healing sight
• Augusta, Domina, and Regina, “Imperial,” “Lady,” and “Queen,” in imperial-era inscriptions
• Terrae Marisque Dominatrix, “Mistress of Land and Sea,” in one inscription

Characteristics

How her worshippers and the ancient writers describe her:

• A healer, whose temple was also a dispensary of herbs
• A protector of women’s health, childbirth, and fertility
• A guardian of the state, whose December rite was made on behalf of the whole Roman people
• A goddess of secrets, whose true name and rites were hidden from men
• In statues, a seated matron holding a cornucopia, with a snake in some images

Symbols

• The snake: sacred serpents lived in her temple, and one sat beside her image at the December rite
• The cornucopia: the horn of plenty in her seated statues
• Vine leaves: the rite’s chamber was hung with vines
• The covered wine jar: brought in as a “honey pot,” its wine called “milk”
• Medicinal herbs: stored and dispensed at her Aventine temple
• The sow: the animal sacrificed to her in secret

Legends associated with Bona Dea

Bona Dea has few stories, and the stories she has all try to explain the strange rules of her worship: why myrtle was banned, why wine had to be called milk, why men were shut out. The tellings disagree with one another, and the disagreements say as much as the stories.

The daughter of Faunus

Macrobius, writing his Saturnalia in the early fifth century AD, records the version told in his day. Bona Dea was the daughter of Faunus, the old Latin god of the woods. Her father fell in love with her, and she refused him. He made her drunk on wine and, when she still refused, beat her with a rod of myrtle. Finally he turned himself into a snake and came to her in that form.

The story explains three customs at once. Myrtle was forbidden in her rites. Wine was allowed, but it had to be brought in a covered jar called a honey pot and called milk. And snakes were sacred to her and lived unharmed in her temple.

The wife who drank wine

Plutarch, writing around AD 100, tells it differently in his Roman Questions. In his account the goddess was the wife of Faunus, a prophet, and she secretly drank wine, which Roman custom forbade to women. When her husband found out, he beat her with myrtle rods. That is why, Plutarch says, women bring no myrtle when they decorate her shrine, and why the wine poured for her is called milk.

The Christian writer Lactantius, in the early fourth century, preserves the harshest version, which he attributes to a writer named Sextus Clodius. In it the wife of Faunus drank a whole jar of wine and was beaten to death with myrtle rods. Faunus, grief-stricken, made her a goddess afterward. Lactantius also quotes the scholar Varro on her chastity: she was so modest, Varro wrote, that no man but her husband ever saw her or heard her name. That is one ancient explanation for why her name was hidden.

Hercules at the door of her grove

The Augustan poet Propertius tells a story from the other side of the door. Hercules, having killed the monster Cacus and recovered his cattle, came to the site of Rome tired and dying of thirst. He heard women laughing in a grove and found a spring inside it, in the sanctuary of the Women’s Goddess. He begged at the threshold for water, listing his labors and even admitting he had once worn a dress himself, as a servant to the Lydian queen Omphale.

The old priestess turned him away. Men, she said, were forbidden to see the rites. Hercules broke in, drank the spring dry, and in revenge barred women forever from the great altar he was about to found, the Ara Maxima. In Propertius the two Roman cults, one closed to men and the other closed to women, explain each other.

Who was the Good Goddess?

The ancient writers who discuss her identity give answers that point in different directions. Laid side by side, they make a map of how Romans and Greeks understood her.

The Roman answers

Macrobius gathers the Roman identifications in one passage. He reports that the antiquarian Cornelius Labeo said her temple was dedicated on May 1 to Maia under the name Bona Dea, and that the books of the pontiffs addressed her as Bona, Fauna, Ops, and Fatua. Others, he says, identified her with the Earth. Those names tie her to the farm, the forest, and the harvest, and to Terra, the Roman earth mother who received prayers for crops and for the dead.

The Greek answers

Plutarch, in his Life of Caesar, records three rival answers in a single sentence. The Phrygians claimed her as the mother of their king Midas. The Romans said she was a dryad, a tree nymph, who married Faunus. The Greeks said she was one of the mothers of Dionysus, the one whose name it is forbidden to speak. The vine leaves that covered her ritual chamber and the wine called milk fit that last reading, and Plutarch adds that a sacred serpent sat enthroned beside her at the rite.

The grammarian Festus, whose dictionary survives in an abridged form, preserves a fourth line. He records that her secret sacrifice was called the damium, her priestess the damiatrix, and the goddess herself Damia. Damia was a Greek goddess worshipped in the Peloponnese and in the Greek city of Tarentum in southern Italy, where a festival called the Dameia was held. Many historians read this as evidence that a Greek women’s cult was joined to the Roman goddess, perhaps after Rome captured Tarentum in 272 BC. Others read it as a borrowed name laid over a much older Latin goddess. Both readings have serious defenders.

The December rite

Her best-known ceremony took place once a year at night, in early December, in the house of a consul or praetor in office. The magistrate’s wife or mother presided, the Vestal Virgins performed the sacrifice, and the leading women of Rome attended. Cicero calls it a sacrifice “for the Roman people,” which made it one of the state’s official rites, held in a private home.

What happened inside

The magistrate himself left the house, along with every man and boy, and male animals were taken away. Images of men in the rooms were covered. The women decorated the chamber with vines and every kind of flower except myrtle. A sacred snake sat beside the goddess’s image. A sow was sacrificed, wine was poured from a jar called the honey pot, and the women made music and danced late into the night. Beyond that, the sources go silent, which is what a secret rite is designed to produce.

The flame of 63 BC

A year before the scandal, the rite gave Rome an omen. In early December of 63 BC the consul was Cicero, and the rite was held in his house under his wife Terentia while he was deciding the fate of the men accused in the Catilinarian conspiracy. According to Plutarch, the altar fire had seemed to go out when a great bright flame leapt up from the ashes. The Vestals told Terentia to go to her husband at once: the goddess was giving him a great light on his path to safety and glory. Cicero went ahead with the executions.

The Clodius affair

The following December the rite was held at the house of Julius Caesar, who was both praetor and pontifex maximus, Rome’s chief priest. His mother Aurelia and his wife Pompeia hosted it. Publius Clodius Pulcher, a young patrician, came in disguised as a female lute player. Plutarch says a maid of Pompeia’s named Abra let him in and went to find her mistress. Clodius wandered off, and when one of Aurelia’s attendants asked him who he was, he said he was waiting for Abra, and his voice gave him away.

Aurelia stopped the rite and covered the sacred objects, and the women drove Clodius out. The Vestals performed the ceremony again later to repair the sacrilege. Clodius was tried in 61 BC for sacrilege. Cicero testified that Clodius had been in Rome that day, destroying his alibi, and Clodius became his lifelong enemy. The jury acquitted him anyway. Cicero, writing to his friend Atticus, said the verdict had been bought. Caesar divorced Pompeia, and when he was asked why, if he believed nothing had happened, he gave the answer Plutarch recorded: his wife ought to be above suspicion.

Two pictures of her worshippers

The December rite reached the history books because elite women hosted it and powerful men fought over it. The inscriptions tell a different story about who worshipped Bona Dea, and the poets tell a third.

The Dutch scholar H. H. J. Brouwer, who gathered every known source on her cult, found that roughly a third of the surviving dedications to Bona Dea were made by men, and that many of her worshippers were freedmen, freedwomen, and slaves. One seated marble statue from the Alban countryside, now preserved with its inscription, was dedicated by a slave named Callistus on behalf of his mistress. Her shrines stood in Rome and across Italy, and her cult reached the provinces. In this picture she is a goddess of healing and help, approached by ordinary people of both sexes in daylight, at shrines that kept herbs for the sick.

The satirist Juvenal, writing about a century and a half after Clodius, paints the opposite picture. In his sixth satire the women at the rite get drunk, the music turns wild, and the ceremony becomes an excuse for lust. He asks which altar these days does not have its Clodius. Juvenal wrote satire, and his target was the Roman women of his own day. Readers have long debated how much of his scene reflects anything real. His version is still one of the ancient tellings, and it shows how a rite closed to men could look to a man outside it.

Between the two stands the official rite of Cicero and Plutarch: solemn, aristocratic, and performed for the safety of the state.

Bona Dea and her neighbors

Rome had several goddesses who cared for women, and Bona Dea’s place among them was unusual. Juno, as Juno Lucina, watched over childbirth and received the matrons’ prayers at the Matronalia on March 1. Vesta kept the hearth of the city, and her priestesses, the Vestals, were the ones who performed Bona Dea’s December sacrifice. Bona Dea overlapped with both. She was a healer like Juno Lucina and a protector of the state like Vesta, and she kept a secret all her own.

Further afield, the Greek festival of the Thesmophoria, held for Demeter and her daughter Persephone, was also closed to men, and ancient writers sometimes compared the two. The Roman Ceres had Greek-style women’s rites of her own. And Cybele, the Great Mother brought to Rome from Phrygia in 204 BC, had a temple on the Palatine across the valley from Bona Dea’s Aventine shrine. Plutarch’s note that the Phrygians claimed Bona Dea as the mother of Midas places her, in one telling at least, in Cybele’s homeland.

Final thoughts

The night Clodius walked into Caesar’s house, the women inside were doing what Roman women had done every December for generations: hanging vines, pouring “milk” from a honey pot, sacrificing for the safety of a city whose men waited outside. One man’s prank turned their secret into a public record, and two thousand years later the record is most of what remains.

What survives shows a goddess with many faces. She was a daughter who refused her father, a wife beaten for drinking wine, a dryad, a mother of Dionysus, a Greek Damia, a healer with a storeroom of herbs, and a power to whom slaves and consuls both made offerings. Her real name stayed hidden, which may have been the point. Given one question for the women in that room, what would you ask them about her?

Bibliography

• Macrobius. Saturnalia 1.12.20-29. Trans. Robert A. Kaster. Loeb Classical Library, 2011. The May 1 dedication and Cornelius Labeo; the identifications with Fauna, Ops, Fatua, Maia, and the Earth; the myth of Faunus’s daughter, the myrtle, the wine, and the snake; the herbs and snakes of the temple; the honey pot and “milk.”
• Plutarch. Roman Questions 20. Trans. Frank Cole Babbitt. Loeb Classical Library, 1936. The wife of Faunus, the secret wine, the myrtle rods, and the wine called milk.
• Plutarch. Life of Caesar 9-10. Trans. Bernadotte Perrin. Loeb Classical Library, 1919. The Phrygian, Roman, and Greek identifications; vines and the sacred serpent; Clodius, Abra, Aurelia, the trial, and “above suspicion.”
• Plutarch. Life of Cicero 19-20, 28-29. Trans. Bernadotte Perrin. Loeb Classical Library, 1919. The flame on the altar in 63 BC; Cicero’s testimony against Clodius.
• Cicero. Letters to Atticus 1.12.3, 1.13.3, 1.16.1-6. The intrusion at Caesar’s house, the sacrifice “for the Roman people,” the trial, and the bribed jury.
• Cicero. On the Responses of the Haruspices 37-39. The December rite as a state sacrifice and its pollution by Clodius.
• Cassius Dio. Roman History 37.35.4, 37.45. The omen of 63 BC; the Clodius affair.
• Lactantius. Divine Institutes 1.22.9-11. The wife of Faunus beaten to death with myrtle rods (after Sextus Clodius); Varro on her chastity and hidden name.
• Propertius. Elegies 4.9. Hercules at the grove of the Women’s Goddess and the exclusion of women from the Ara Maxima.
• Ovid. Fasti 5.148-158. The temple under the Saxum, its dedication by a Claudian Vestal, and Livia’s restoration.
• Juvenal. Satires 6.314-345; 2.82-90. The satirist’s lurid portrait of the rite.
• Festus, De verborum significatu, s.v. “Damium” (ed. W. M. Lindsay, Teubner, 1913). Damia, the damium, and the damiatrix.
• Brouwer, H. H. J. Bona Dea: The Sources and a Description of the Cult. Leiden: Brill, 1989. The full collection of literary and inscriptional sources; the share of male and lower-status dedicants.
• Versnel, H. S. “The Festival for Bona Dea and the Thesmophoria.” Greece & Rome 39, no. 1 (1992): 31-55. The comparison of the two women’s festivals and the meaning of the wine called milk.
• Tatum, W. Jeffrey. The Patrician Tribune: Publius Clodius Pulcher. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. The Bona Dea scandal and trial in political context.
• “Bona Dea”. Wikipedia. Overview of the temple, festivals, myths, epithets, and the statue dedicated by Callistus (CIL XIV 2251).
• “Bona Dea”. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Overview and the Damia identification.