Liber- Roman GodDeity"The Free One"

The Procession

Augustine, scandalized, preserved the detail. During Liber's festival in the Italian towns, an enormous phallus was mounted on a cart and wheeled through the streets. The procession stopped at the crossroads, and a respectable matron came forward to place a garland on it. This was how the fields were blessed and the evil eye turned away. Augustine wrote to condemn the rite. He kept the rite alive in doing so.

Liber was an Italic wine god rooted in the agriculture of central Italy, older than Rome's contact with Greece. His worship followed the vine: planting, tending, harvest. His name meant "the free one," and his festivals gave the word substance. Wine loosened what sobriety held in place.

The Aventine

In 496 BCE the dictator Aulus Postumius vowed a temple to Ceres, Liber, and Libera on the Aventine Hill. It was dedicated three years later, and it became the center of plebeian political life. The aediles of the plebs kept their headquarters there. The archives of plebeian legislation were stored inside. While the patricians worshipped on the Capitoline, the plebeians had the Aventine, and Liber's association with freedom was not abstract. He was the god of the free citizen.

When the Senate crushed the Bacchic rites in 186 BCE, Livy records that Liber's own worship was left untouched. The distinction mattered: Liber's festivals were civic and orderly. What the Senate suppressed was foreign ecstasy, not the Italic god of the vine.

The Liberalia

On March 17, Roman boys who had come of age put aside the bordered toga of childhood and donned the plain white toga of manhood for the first time. The day belonged to Liber. Old women called his priestesses sold honey cakes fried on portable stoves in the streets and offered portions to the god on behalf of each buyer. Ovid describes the scene in the Fasti: the smoke, the little cakes called liba, the crowds of families leading their sons to the Forum in new white wool. The boy who entered the Liberalia as a child left it as a citizen.