From Good Goddess to Vestal Virgins: Sex and Category in Roman Religion (18 page)

The most popular aetiology for the exclusion of myrtle from Bona Dea
’
s festival was the story that Bona Dea was beaten by Faunus with rods of myrtle. In the accounts of Plutarch, Arnobius and Lac- tantius, Bona Dea was Faunus
’
wife who was beaten by her husband with myrtle because she drank a large quantity of wine.
4
In Macro- bius
’
version she was Faunus
’
daughter. She refused his incestuous advances and he plied her with wine and beat her with rods of myr- tle in a vain attempt to force her to submit. Despite the slight varia- tions in narrative detail, the relationship between Bona Dea and

99

Faunus is the reason offered by all four writers as to why wine was disguised as milk at her festival, and myrtle excluded. Implicit in these accounts is the belief that myrtle, like wine, represented the male principle which was overtly rejected at Bona Dea
’
s festival. Myrtle and wine are thus given a symmetric symbolic value in these accounts. The pervasive force of the belief that myrtle was con- nected with Venus makes this interpretation superficially plausible. Indeed Plutarch explicitly makes the connection between myrtle and Venus in the context of the cult of the Bona Dea.

Is it because they remain pure from many things, particularly from venery, when they perform this holy service? For they not only exclude their husbands, but they also drive every- thing male out of the house whenever they conduct the cus- tomary ceremonies in honour of the goddess. So, because the myrtle is sacred to Venus, they rigorously exclude it.

(ibid.)

But though the literary accounts give symmetrical symbolic value to wine and myrtle, their ritual relationship is asymmetrical. Wine, though disguised, was an essential element of the rite of Bona Dea. It represented the male principle, which though overtly excluded from the rite, was covertly included.
5
But myrtle was entirely excluded. Its absence was underscored by the presence of all sorts of different plants. The house where the festival took place was decorated with
‘
all manner of growing and blooming plants
’
except for myrtle. If myrtle, like wine, was meant to represent the male principle, its absence would have been symbolic of a total rejection of the male, overt and covert. To read both wine and myrtle as symbolically rep- resentative of men results in the appearance of a fundamental incon- sistency within the cult.

But the pervasiveness of the belief that myrtle was associated with Venus makes it improbable that it had a different evocation in the cult of the Bona Dea. The association with Venus, however, does not always necessarily evoke ideas of sexual love, and in a cult of women, ideas of men. The contention of this chapter is that Venus
’
significance in Roman religion was not confined to the role she played as custodian of the domain of sexual relationships. The rep- resentation of Venus as patron deity of sexual relationships was merely the most widely acknowledged manifestation of a much more complex role. It was not only the categories of male and

female that Venus united. Her broader function was to draw together into a single system the various categories
—
whether defined sexually, politically or socially
—
that other cults and rituals separated. The cults of Venus provided an alternative model for the ritual treatment of categories: a model based on inclusiveness rather than exclusiveness.

Myrtle was also associated with Venus in contexts other than sex- ual love. For example, generals celebrating an
ovatio
wore a chaplet of myrtle rather than the laurel of the triumphator. Why? Gellius says that one of the reasons why a general was awarded an
ovatio
rather than a triumph was if he had won an easy victory owing to a quick surrender.
‘
For such an easy victory they believed that the leaves sacred to Venus were appropriate on the ground that it was a triumph not of Mars but of Venus.
’
6
But he also gives other reasons why an
ovatio
might be granted rather than a triumph: if war had not been declared in due form and therefore not waged with a legiti- mate enemy, or waged with adversaries of low status such as slaves or pirates. Such victories were not necessarily easy. Nevertheless they too could result in an
ovatio
.
7

Pliny also associates Venus and myrtle in a context that has noth- ing to do with sex. He tells a story of two myrtle trees called the patrician myrtle and the plebeian myrtle that once grew in the precinct of the shrine of Quirinus. As long as the patricians were the more powerful faction in the state the patrician myrtle flourished while the other withered, but when the plebeians grew strong their myrtle tree grew green while the patricians
’
turned yellow. Although the connection with Venus is not made explicit here, it is clear from the structure of the passage as a whole that in this instance too, an intuitive appeal was being made to the acknowledged association between myrtle and Venus, whom Pliny calls the
‘
guardian spirit of the tree who presid[ed] over unions
’
.

fuit ubi nunc Roma est iam cum conderetur, quippe ita tradi- tur, myrtea verbena Romanos Sabinosque, cum propter raptas virgines dimicare voluissent, depositis armis purgatos in eo loco qui nunc signa Veneris Cluacinae habet: cluere enim antiqui purgare dicebant. et in ea quoque arbore suffimenti genus habetur, ideo tum electa quoniam coniunctioni et huic arbori Venus praeest, haud scio an prima etiam omnium in locis publicis Romae sata, fatidico quidem et memorabili augurio. inter antiquissima namque delubra habetur Quirini,

hoc est ipsius Romuli. in eo sacrae fuere myrti duae ante aedem ipsam per longum tempus, altera patricia appellata, altera plebeia. patricia multis annis praevaluit exuberans ac laeta; quamdiu senatus quoque floruit, illa ingens, plebeia retorrida ac squalida. quae postquam evaluit flavescente patri- cia, a Marsico bello languida auctoritas patrum facta est, ac paulatim in sterilitatem emarcuit maiestas. quin et ara vetus fuit Veneri Myrteae, quam nunc Murciam vocant.

At the time of the foundation of Rome myrtles grew on the present site of the city, as tradition says that the Romans and Sabines, after having wanted to fight a battle because of the carrying off of the maidens, laid down their arms and purified themselves with sprigs of myrtle, at the place now occupied by the statues of Venus Cluacina,
cluere
being the old word mean- ing
‘
to cleanse
’
. And a kind of incense for fumigation is also contained in this tree, which was selected for the purpose on the occasion referred to because Venus the guardian spirit of the tree also presides over unions, and I rather think that it was actually the first of all trees to be planted in public places at Rome, fraught indeed with a prophetic and remarkable augury. For the shrine of Quirinus, that is of Romulus himself, is held to be one of the most ancient temples. In it there were two sacred myrtles, which for a long time grew in front of the actual temple, and one of them was called the patrician
’
s myr- tle and the other the plebeian
’
s. For many years the patrician
’
s tree was the more flourishing of the two, and was full of vigour and vitality; as long as the senate flourished this was a great tree, while the plebeians
’
myrtle was shrivelled and withered. But afterwards the plebeians
’
myrtle grew strong while the patricians
’
began to turn yellow, for from the Marsian war onward the authority of the fathers became weak, and by slow degrees its grandeur withered away into barrenness. More- over there was also an old altar belonging to Venus Myrtea, who is now called Murcia.
8

I shall start out with an a priori assumption that the exclusion of myrtle from the cult of Bona Dea was meant to evoke Venus. The thesis of this chapter will be that the cult of Bona Dea appealed not to Venus
’
widely attested connection with sexual love, but to her more fundamental religious function of which the connection with

sexual love was only one expression, that is the function of bringing together disparate ritual categories.

The cult of Venus Verticordia, which I shall look at first, is struc- tured according to sexually defined categories. Female sexuality was central both to the foundation legends and to the rites. The cult operated in terms of sexually defined categories. It categorized gen- der into male and female, and further categorized the female accord- ing to sexual status. But the ritual treatment of these categories in the cult of Venus was quite different from their treatment in the cults of Bona Dea, Ceres or Flora. Rather than excluding one category or another, the cult, while acknowledging the existence of the cate- gories, included them as equal participants in its rites. Venus Verti- cordia represented the ritual union not simply of male and female, but of ritually exclusive categories. It thus provided a competing model to cults such as Bona Dea
’
s which operated on a principle of ritual exclusion.

The cults of Venus Obsequens and Venus Erycina were also con- cerned with ritual categories, but not only with those that were sexually defined. What little we know about the cult of Venus Obse- quens shows an easy assimilation of the quite unrelated ideas of military success and adulterous matrons. The cult of Venus Erycina encapsulated the essence of militaristic ideology, and at the same time was made to be a cult favoured by prostitutes. Venus Erycina contained both categories without apparent conflict or tension, and they both contributed in equal measure to the way in which the cult was perceived.

To conclude I shall address the question of how the cults of Venus and Bona Dea, as components of the same ritual system, were related meaningfully by their antithetical approach to a common ritual element.

Two foundation legends provided a frame of reference for the per- ception of the cult of Venus Verticordia in ancient times. Sometime in the late third or early second century BC
—
the exact date is uncer- tain
—
a statue was dedicated to Venus Verticordia by the chastest matron in Rome, in this case Sulpicia, daughter of Servius Sulpicius and wife of Fulvius Flaccus. The Sibylline books had prescribed the dedication as a cure for the prevailing licentiousness of women. The

hope was that matrons and unmarried girls would more readily turn from licentiousness to chastity.
9
The second legend was connected with the dedication of a temple to Venus Verticordia in 114 BC. A Roman knight and his virgin daughter were returning to Apulia from the Roman games when the girl was struck by lightning and killed. Her tunic was pulled up to her waist, her tongue protruded and the trappings of her horse were scattered around her. The mean- ing of this dreadful prodigy turned out to be that three Vestal Vir- gins had been guilty of unchaste conduct in which many members of the equestrian class were implicated. All the offenders, male and female, were duly punished and a temple was built to Venus Verti- cordia.
10
According to both Ovid and Valerius Maximus, the tem- ple and statue that respectively figured in each story were offered to the goddess in the hope that she would correct the wanton ways of women and make them chaste. This, said Ovid, was the explanation of the cult title itself: Verticordia, Changer of Hearts.
11

Each legend dealt with a separate aspect of the cult
—
the dedica- tion of the statue and the dedication of the temple; each also dealt with areas of female sexual morality which had different implica- tions for the collective welfare of the Roman state. There was much more at stake in the virginity of a Vestal Virgin than in the
pudicitia
of a
matrona
.
12
But the two stories are, none the less, complemen- tary rather than competing perceptions of the cult. They are both characterized by an extraordinary level of exaggeration: hyperbole is a common feature of both stories. Consider for example the con- cept of the chastest matron. How are the degrees of chastity to be identified? One is either chaste or unchaste. Indeed we are never told what Sulpicia did to deserve the honour of being deemed the chastest matron. Elsewhere in stories about women
’
s sexuality, chastity is defined in absolute terms. An example is the story of Claudia Quinta, who single-handedly drew to Rome along the Tiber the ship containing the statue of the Magna Mater.
13
Her dress and manner had given rise to rumours of unchastity but the goddess, by the miracle, proved her chaste. In other words, her behaviour, though it did not conform to prevailing norms of matronly conduct, did not make her less chaste than her fellows. The same dichotomy between chastity and unchastity operates in the story of Lucretia, as we saw. The question at issue was not to what degree her chastity had been compromised, but whether after she had submitted to Tarquinius
’
threats she could regard herself as chaste at all.
14

The second story is superficially very different from the first, but in fact it is thematically consistent. The temple, it was believed, was built to expiate the
crimen incesti,
the transgression of Vestal Vir- gins who had broken their vow of chastity. This story is extraordi- nary for a number of reasons. The virginity of the Vestals had very special implications for Rome. A Vestal did not merely have to be chaste, she had to be a virgin. A simple loss of virginity by a single Vestal would cause the collapse of the state if not properly expiated. A Vestal
’
s lapse from this strict ideal of virginity could never be con- cealed for any length of time, because the gods themselves by means of prodigies would reveal it. In the foundation legend of the temple of Venus Verticordia, not just one but three of the six Vestals were found to have been guilty of having had sexual relations with men. More startling in the context of the culture of the Vestals was that whereas one of the three was found to have had a single lover, the other two had had relations with large numbers of Roman knights. This is Dio Cassius
’
account: