Livy claims the earliest version of the Bacchanalia was open to women only, and held on three days of the year, in daylight while in nearby Etruria, north of Rome, a "Greek of humble origin, versed in sacrifices and soothsaying" had established a nocturnal version, added wine and feasting to the mix, and thus acquired an enthusiastic following of women and men. Most Roman sources describe him as Rome's equivalent to Dionysus and Bacchus, both of whom were sometimes titled Eleutherios (liberator). The wine and fertility god Liber Pater ("The Free Father"), divine patron of plebeian rights, freedoms and augury, had a long-established official cult in the nearby temple he shared with Ceres and Libera. ![]() The Aventine was an ethnically mixed district, strongly identified with Rome's plebeian class and the ingress of new and foreign cults. Livy, the principal Roman literary source on the early Bacchanalia, names Paculla Annia, a Campanian priestess of Bacchus, as the founder of a private, unofficial Bacchanalia cult in Rome, based at the grove of Stimula, where the western slope of the Aventine Hill descends to the Tiber. The Bacchanalia may have had mystery elements and public elements religious dramas which were performed in public, and private rites performed by acolytes and priests of the deity. One of the earliest sources is Greek playwright Euripides's The Bacchae, which won the Athenian Dionysia competition in 405 BC. ![]() Like all mystery cults, the Bacchanalia were held in strict privacy, and initiates were bound to secrecy what little is known of the cult and its rites derives from Greek and Roman literature, plays, statuary and paintings. Tenney Frank suggests that some form of Dionysian worship may have been introduced to Rome by captives from the formerly Greek city of Tarentum in southern Italy, captured from the Carthaginians in 209 BC. 200 BC via the Greek colonies in southern Italy, and from Etruria, Rome's northern neighbour. They were based on the Greek Dionysia and the Dionysian Mysteries, and probably arrived in Rome c. The Bacchanalia were Roman festivals of Bacchus, the Greco-Roman god of wine, freedom, intoxication and ecstasy. See also: Bacchus, Liber, Dionysia, and Dionysian Mysteries Bacchus, Liber and Dionysus became virtually interchangeable from the late Republican era (133 BC and onward), and their mystery cults persisted well into the Principate of Roman Imperial era. The reformed Bacchanalia rites may have been merged with the Liberalia festival. This may have been motivated less by the kind of lurid and dramatic rumours that Livy describes than by the Senate's determination to assert its civil, moral and religious authority over Rome and its allies, after the prolonged social, political and military crisis of the Second Punic War (218–201 BC). Senatorial legislation to reform the Bacchanalia in 186 BC attempted to control their size, organisation, and priesthoods, under threat of the death penalty. Modern scholars take a skeptical approach to Livy's allegations. Livy believed the Bacchanalia scandal to be one of several indications of Rome's inexorable moral decay. Livy claims that seven thousand cult leaders and followers were arrested, and that most were executed. Livy, writing some 200 years after the event, offers a scandalized and extremely colourful account of the Bacchanalia, with frenzied rites, sexually violent initiations of both sexes, all ages and all social classes he represents the cult as a murderous instrument of conspiracy against the state. ![]() They seem to have been popular and well-organised throughout the central and southern Italian peninsula. Like all mystery religions of the ancient world, very little is known of their rites. They were almost certainly associated with Rome's native cult of Liber, and probably arrived in Rome itself around 200 BC. ![]() The Bacchanalia were unofficial, privately funded popular Roman festivals of Bacchus, based on various ecstatic elements of the Greek Dionysia.
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