Libera- Roman GodDeity

The Aventine Temple

In 496 BCE, with famine hollowing the city, the dictator Aulus Postumius vowed a temple to Ceres, Liber, and Libera. Three years later the temple rose on the Aventine Hill and became the center of plebeian religious life. The patricians had Jupiter on the Capitol; the common people had their own triad on their own hill. Plebeian aediles kept their headquarters there. The archives of plebeian legislation filled its rooms. Libera's name, from the same root as libertas, was no accident. She belonged to the people who had fought for their political freedom, and they kept her close.

The Liberalia

On March 17, the Liberalia brought Libera and Liber into the streets. Varro records that old women, crowned with ivy, sold honey cakes from portable hearths at every crossroads. Ovid describes the day as one of rest and celebration, when the vine stirred after winter. For Roman boys, the Liberalia marked the day they put on the toga virilis and entered public life. The honey cakes were sacred to Libera. The old women who sold them were her priestesses for the day, tending their small fires at the crossroads while the city celebrated around them.

Libera and Proserpina

Cicero, in the De Natura Deorum, called Libera and Proserpina one and the same. Augustine wrote that Libera governed women's fertility as Liber governed men's. Both identifications could coexist: a goddess of fruitful fields and a goddess seized by Dis Pater, carried underground, and returned each spring. The Aventine triad, once a purely Roman grouping, took on the shape of the Greek Demeter, Dionysus, and Persephone. What had been a temple of grain and freedom became a temple that also held the dead.