“This means that your stepfather—I suppose it would be offensive to mention your mother—is in a hurry to destroy your virtue, your good name, your prospects and your life.”
Swearing her lover to the strictest secrecy, Hispala said that she had been initiated while still a slave, and the cult was a cover for the grossest immorality and even murder. As Livy describes them, the rites were
a workshop of corruptions of every kind; and it was common knowledge that for the past two years no one had been initiated who was over the age of twenty. As each one was introduced, he became a kind of sacrificial victim for the priests. They led the initiate to a place that resounded with shrieks, with the chanting of a choir, the clashing of cymbals and the beating of drums, so that the victim’s cries for help, when violence was offered to his chastity, might not be heard.
Aebutius went home and announced that he would have nothing to do with the Bacchic cult. This enraged his mother and his stepfather, and they drove him out of the house. He took refuge with an aunt, who advised him to go and tell all to the consul Spurius Postumius Albinus. After checking that Aebutius was a reliable witness, Postumius made some discreet inquiries. He arranged for his mother-in-law to ask Hispala to pay her a visit. Mystified by the fact that this well-known and eminently respectable lady should want to see her, Hispala obeyed.
Puzzlement turned to terror when she saw the consul’s lictors and entourage in the hall, and then the consul himself. Eventually, she calmed down and told her story. Apparently, the rites had originally been all-female and had taken place only three times a year, but then a Campanian priestess had introduced reforms. Now men were allowed to take part, the ceremonies were held at night, and their frequency had risen to five times a month. According to Livy:
There were more obscenities practiced between men than between men and women. Anyone refusing to submit to outrage or reluctant to commit crimes was slaughtered as a sacrificial victim. To regard nothing as forbidden was among these people the summit of religious achievement. Men, apparently out of their wits, would shout prophecies with frenzied bodily convulsions: married women, dressed as Bacchantes, with their hair disheveled and carrying blazing torches, would run down to the Tiber, plunge their torches into the water and bring them out still alight—because they contained a mixture of live sulfur and calcium.
Anyone unwilling to take part was whisked away by, or in, some sort of mechanical device and done away with in hidden caves.
Postumius made a full report to a shocked Senate. Although the immoral goings-on were to be deprecated in themselves, what really worried members was that a secret society could recruit adherents from across the classes and plan heaven knows what clandestine mischief, political as well as sexual. Dionysus was associated with breaches of social control and the dissolution of gender, age, and class distinctions. It may be no accident that the orgies took place in a grove on the Aventine, the traditional center of popular agitation, and that Aebutius and Hispala both lived on the hill, too.
An inscription has survived communicating the Senate’s decision on the cult to communities across the peninsula. It ordered:
No man is to be a priest; no one, either man or woman, is to be an officer (to manage the temporal affairs of the organization); nor is anyone of them to have charge of a common treasury; no one shall appoint either man or woman to be master or to act as master; henceforth they shall not form conspiracies among themselves, stir up any disorder, make mutual promises or agreements, or exchange pledges.
Care was taken not to offend the god needlessly. Bacchic rituals could still be performed, but only with official permission and in the presence of no more than five people.
As for the lovers, they were handsomely rewarded. Aebutius was forgiven his military service and Hispala was allowed to marry a freeborn Roman, and, it was decreed, “no slur or disgrace on account of the marriage should attach to the man who married her.” History does not relate what happened to them next.
With this permission granted, the couple were entitled to become husband and wife, in theory. But the boy was young and, like many who have their first sexual experience with a knowledgeable and kindly older woman, he probably moved on. After all, he and his girlfriend were from radically different social classes. Whatever the Senate said, prejudice against former slaves and prostitutes was fierce. The integrity of the family line had to be protected at all costs.
We may hope for, but doubt, a happy ending.
THE REAL IMPORTANCE of the scandal was the light it threw on Rome’s contradictory attitudes toward Greece. From the Republic’s earliest years, the Hellenic world had been a major influence, but now that they were emerging as the dominant Mediterranean state, Romans were coming into direct contact with this culture for the first time. They admired the deathless achievements of a glorious past—the works of the great tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; the philosophy of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; the sculpture of Pheidias; the architecture of Ictinus and so forth—and knew they could not compete with them.
The decadent descendants of these great men looked down their noses on the provincial newcomers from Italy. They “would jeer at their habits and customs, others at Roman achievements, others at the appearance of the city itself, which was not yet beautified in either its public places or private districts.” For his part, the average Roman harbored a healthy distrust of contemporary Greeks (they were the classical equivalent of cheese-eating surrender monkeys). Livy makes this clear when, with a sneer, he attributes the Bacchanalia as a “method of infecting people’s minds with error” to a “Greek of humble origin, a man possessed of none of those numerous accomplishments which the Greek people, the most highly educated and civilized of nations, has introduced among us for the cultivation of mind and body.”
While the Senate disliked and discouraged foreign cults from the Orient, it was by no means consistent in practice. In 293, an outbreak of plague led to a consultation of the Sibylline Books and the importation from Epidaurus, in Greece, of a snake sacred to the god of medicine, Asklepios (Latinized into Aesculapius), for whom a shrine and a healing center were built on Tiber Island. In 206, a prophecy was discovered which stated that if ever a foreign enemy were to invade Italy he would be driven out only if Cybele, or the Great Mother, was brought to Rome (in the shape of a holy black stone).
Desperate to see an end to Hannibal’s occupation of the peninsula, the goddess was welcomed into the city and a new temple was built for her on the Palatine. Cybele and her youthful consort, Attis, expressed the annual cycle of the fertility of the land in a manner that a Roman traditionalist would find distinctly unappealing. Her spring festivities, during which self-castrated eunuchs danced to cymbals and drums, were no less exotic than those dedicated to Dionysus. Attis had set the precedent. As the first-century poet Catullus writes, he,
This was all most un-Roman, and care was taken to limit the impact of the new cult. The goddess’s priests were and remained foreigners, and their numbers and activities were strictly limited.