Bacchus- Roman GodDeity"Twice-Born"

Twice-Born

In the Metamorphoses, Juno disguised herself as an old woman and convinced Semele to ask Jupiter to appear in his true divine form. Jupiter came to her in thunder and lightning. Semele burned. He snatched the unborn child from her body and sewed it into his own thigh, and when the months were full, Bacchus was born a second time.

Mercury carried the infant to the nymphs of Nysa, who raised him in a cave wreathed with grapevines. The child grew into the god who discovered wine. He wandered the world and taught mortals to cultivate the vine.

Pentheus

Bacchus came to Thebes, the city of his mother's birth, and the young king Pentheus refused to acknowledge him. Pentheus mocked the god's effeminate appearance and dismissed his rites as drunken fraud. Bacchus drove Pentheus's mother Agave and her sisters into frenzy on Mount Cithaeron.

Pentheus climbed a tree to spy on the maenads. They spotted him. Agave hurled her thyrsus first. The women tore him apart. Agave wrenched off his head and carried it down the mountain on her staff, believing she held a lion's trophy. She set it before her father Cadmus and asked him to admire her kill.

Ariadne on Naxos

In Catullus's poem 64, Ariadne stood on the shore of Naxos watching Theseus's ship disappear. She had helped him escape the Labyrinth. He left her on the beach. She cursed him, hair tangled, garments slipping from her shoulders, the waves taking her footprints.

Bacchus arrived from the opposite direction with his train of satyrs and maenads. He saw Ariadne and took her as his bride. In the Metamorphoses, he set her wedding crown among the stars as the constellation Corona Borealis.

The Liberalia

On March 17 each year, Roman boys put on the toga virilis for the first time: the white toga of adult citizenship. This was the Liberalia, the festival of Liber Pater, the Italian god of fertility and wine whom the Romans identified with Bacchus. Old women crowned with ivy sat at portable altars along the streets, selling honey cakes called liba, which they burned as offerings on behalf of anyone who purchased them.

The older rites of Liber were rougher. Augustine described a festival in which a large phallus was carried through the countryside to bless the crops. A matron from a distinguished family placed a garland on it in public ceremony. The custom was ancient and rural.

The Bacchanalia

In 186 BCE, a freedwoman named Hispala Faecenia went to the consul Postumius with a warning. Her young lover Aebutius was about to be initiated into Bacchic rites by his mother and stepfather, who wanted him removed. Hispala had attended the ceremonies herself and told the consul what happened at the nighttime gatherings in the grove of Stimula near the Aventine: wine, darkness, and rites that had grown dangerous since a Campanian priestess opened them to men and moved them from day to night.

The Senate investigated and issued the Senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus, preserved on a bronze tablet found at Tiriolo in Calabria. The decree did not ban Bacchic worship outright but strangled it. No shrine without senatorial permission. No gathering larger than five. Violators faced death.

Livy claims more than 7,000 people were investigated. Many were executed. The suppression drove the cult underground, but it did not kill it. By the imperial period, Bacchic mysteries flourished again. They promised initiates a blessed afterlife. The frescoes in the Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii, painted around 60 BCE, show an initiation into the rites: a young woman kneels under a lash, then rises to dance. The walls survived because Vesuvius buried them in ash.