The Tale of Bona Dea

At a Glance

Central figures: Bona Dea, also called Fauna, a goddess of healing, fertility, and women’s mysteries; Faunus, her father (in some accounts, her husband), a god of fields and woodland; and Publius Clodius Pulcher, the Roman nobleman who violated her rites in 62 BCE.
Setting: Rome, particularly the house of the sitting consul or praetor where the annual December rites were held, and the Aventine hill where Bona Dea’s temple stood; sources include Macrobius’s Saturnalia, Plutarch’s Life of Caesar and Life of Cicero, and scattered references in Ovid, Varro, and Lactantius.
The turn: Faunus struck Fauna with myrtle branches when she refused to yield to him, and in the rites that followed her death or transformation, all myrtle was forever banned from her sanctuary; centuries later, Clodius disguised himself as a woman to infiltrate her December ceremony in Julius Caesar’s house.
The outcome: Clodius was discovered and expelled, Caesar divorced his wife Pompeia on the grounds that Caesar’s household must be above suspicion, and the resulting trial fractured Roman political alliances in ways that helped precipitate the Republic’s collapse.
The legacy: The annual rites of Bona Dea - held each December in the house of a senior magistrate, attended only by women, with all male images veiled and wine referred to by the euphemism “milk” - persisted as one of Rome’s most closely guarded ceremonies until the Christian period.

No man could say what happened inside. That was the point. Once a year, in early December, the wife of a consul or praetor opened her house to the Vestal Virgins and the matrons of Rome, and every male creature was removed - the husband, the sons, the male slaves, even the dogs. Statues and paintings of men were covered with cloth. Wine was brought in, but no one called it wine. They called it lac - milk - and the vessel that held it was called a honey pot. The goddess whose worship demanded all this was Bona Dea, the Good Goddess, and even her true name was a kind of secret.

The Romans knew her also as Fauna. What they could not agree on was her story.

Fauna and the Myrtle

Macrobius, writing in the fifth century, preserved the oldest version. Fauna was the daughter of Faunus, the old god of the Italian countryside, a deity who predated the city itself. Faunus desired her. She refused. He beat her with branches of myrtle - the plant sacred to Venus, the plant of sexual love - but she would not submit. He got her drunk on wine. Still she refused, or could not be made willing enough for the story to call it anything but violence. In some tellings he changed himself into a serpent and came to her in that form, and what followed was not a seduction.

She died, or she was transformed, or she became divine - the sources slide between these possibilities without settling. What is certain is that Faunus, stricken with something the Romans would have called pudor - shame that touches on public standing - deified her. He made her Bona Dea and established her worship. And because myrtle was the instrument of her suffering, myrtle was banned from her temple and her rites forever. No branch of it could cross the threshold. No wreath of it could be worn in her presence.

Wine, too, was renamed in her sanctuary, because wine had been part of what Faunus did to her. The women who celebrated her mysteries drank freely - Juvenal would later mock the quantity - but the word itself was forbidden. Language bent around the injury. The thing was present; its name was not.

The Temple on the Aventine

Bona Dea’s temple stood on the Aventine hill, below the slope, in a precinct thick with medicinal herbs. She was a goddess of healing as well as of women’s secrets. Her priestesses kept a garden of simples - plants used for remedies - and a sacred serpent lived in the temple grounds. Serpents were associated with her worship broadly; they appeared in her iconography, coiled at her feet or around her arm, and offerings were made to them as to the goddess herself.

The temple was open to women of all classes, including freedwomen. This was unusual. Roman religion, like Roman society, was stratified with rigid precision, and for a public temple to welcome women regardless of status set Bona Dea’s cult apart. Varro listed her among the indigetes, the native gods whose functions were specific and whose origins predated Greek influence. She was not Venus, not Juno, not any of the great Hellenized figures of the state religion. She was older, stranger, more local.

Men were not merely excluded from her rites. They were excluded from knowledge of them. What the women did in that December ceremony - the prayers, the dances, the music that Plutarch mentions obliquely - remained behind a wall of silence that no ancient source fully breaches.

Clodius in a Dress

In December of 62 BCE, the rites were held in the house of Julius Caesar, who was then serving as praetor. Caesar’s wife Pompeia presided. Caesar himself left the house as custom required. Every male did.

Publius Clodius Pulcher did not.

Clodius was a patrician of the Claudian house, ambitious, reckless, and tangled in a rumored affair with Pompeia. He dressed as a female musician - some sources say a lute player - and entered the house among the women. A servant of Caesar’s mother Aurelia recognized him by his voice. He had been speaking to one of Pompeia’s maids, and his voice was wrong. Aurelia stopped the rites immediately, veiled the sacred objects, and had the doors shut. Clodius was found hiding in the quarters of the girl he had come to see.

The scandal was enormous. The violation of Bona Dea’s rites was not merely a social embarrassment but a crime against the pax deorum - the contractual peace between Rome and its gods. The Vestal Virgins had to perform the rites again from the beginning. The senate convened. The pontifex maximus - who happened to be Caesar himself - was consulted.

Caesar’s Wife

Caesar divorced Pompeia. When asked at the trial whether he believed Clodius had actually committed adultery with her, Caesar said he did not know. Then why the divorce?

Because Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.

The phrase entered Roman political language and never left it. Caesar had no evidence against Pompeia and said as much. But the contamination of Bona Dea’s rites in his house made the marriage untenable. The pietas owed to the goddess, to the state, and to his own public standing required a clean severance. Suspicion alone was enough. It had to be.

Clodius stood trial for the sacrilege but was acquitted, probably through bribery. Cicero, who had testified against him and destroyed his alibi, made a permanent enemy. That enmity would help drive Cicero into exile three years later and rearrange the alliances of the late Republic in ways that bent toward civil war.

Milk and Serpents

The rites of Bona Dea continued. They continued after Clodius, after Caesar’s assassination, after Augustus refounded the state religion and his wife Livia restored the goddess’s temple on the Aventine. The serpent was still fed. The herbs still grew in the precinct garden. Wine was still called milk, and myrtle still could not be brought inside.

What the women said and did in the December dark, behind shuttered doors with the men’s faces covered, remained what it had always been. A thing known only to those present, carried out in the name of a goddess whose oldest story was one of violence done to her - and whose worship, year after year, was a room from which the ones who resembled her father were made to leave.