From Good Goddess to Vestal Virgins: Sex and Category in Roman Religion (21 page)

There are many literary versions of the story of how the black stone, the image of the Magna Mater, was brought to Rome from Pergamum. The stories vary with respect to the peripheral details.
38
But the core of ritual circumstance that marked the extraordinary nature of the transition is consistent across the different versions. First, there was an actual physical object that had to be transferred

—
the black stone, the symbol of the goddess. Next, although the move had been prescribed by the Sibylline books, the goddess her- self had to signify formally her willingness to make the change. And so we find Attalus, King of Pergamum, at first unwilling to accede to the Romans
’
request until the goddess herself conveys to him her desire to move to Rome.
39
So far the story is not very different from that of Juno. But from this point on it becomes much more elabo- rate. I shall use Ovid
’
s version for the discussion here not only because it is the most vivid description we have but also because it appears to have been the version that was enacted on the stage. It is a

reasonable supposition that the version seen constantly on stage would have been the most familiar.
40

The ship bearing the black stone from Pergamum was greeted at Ostia by a vast throng of people, which Ovid describes in terms of ritual and political categories: the men are categorized into
equites,
senators and plebeians; the women into matrons
(matres
…
nurusque),
virgins
(natae),
and finally the special category of Vestal Virgins. But at Ostia the ship stuck fast in the mud and could not be moved to Rome. The collective efforts of the male population failed to budge it. Then Claudia Quinta, a nobly born matron with an undeserved reputation for being unchaste, stepped forward and prayed to the goddess to vindicate her:
‘
They say I am not chaste
…
if I am free of crime give by thine act a proof of my innocence, and chaste as thou art do thou yield to my chaste hands.
’
41
The goddess heard her and with barely an effort, Claudia Quinta drew the ship to Rome.

Bremmer has suggested that this incident was an example of a rite of passage marking the transition of the goddess from one location to another. By putting this story in a general context of rites of pas- sage, he suggests that the ship sticking in the mud, for example, should be seen as an instance of the ritual reluctance that marks the passage of an individual from one domain to another; Claudia Quinta he sees as the marginal figure that commonly, in these cases, is made to overcome the ritual difficulty.
42
Bremmer is surely cor- rect in interpreting the incident as a rite of passage, a ritual acknowl- edgement of the danger inherent in passing from one domain to another, and the mechanisms by which the danger may be neutral- ized. But the introduction of this cult to Rome does not fit easily into Bremmer
’
s general cross-cultural theoretical framework. It is more helpful to analyse the incident in terms of the particular empirical framework of Roman ritual and ideology.

The non-Roman nature of the rites of the Magna Mater have long been recognized. However, the stress has most commonly been placed on the noisy, freakish nature of the rites: the clashing of cym- bals, the beating of drums, the howls of the
Galli,
her eunuch priests. All this is seen as being out of step with the
gravitas
of the Roman, and this is the standard explanation offered for the rule that no Roman citizen was allowed to join the priesthood of the
Galli
.
43
I suggest that the notion that these rites were intrinsically offensive to the Roman ideal of
gravitas
has been exaggerated by modern schol- arship.
44
Noisy, clamorous processions formed the stuff of the

state
’
s ritual apparatus. We only have to imagine the atmosphere at a triumph, for example, the procession headed by a garishly dressed general, his face daubed with rouge, followed by extravagantly dis- played spoils of war and his raucous, ribald army.
45
Not much
gravitas
there, or at any rate not the sort that would make squeamishness about the Magna Mater
’
s rites a plausible proposi- tion. Or consider the
Salii,
a college of priests consisting of well- born men, who processed through the streets at various times dur- ing the year, leaping, singing and clashing their sacred shields; or the
Luperci,
again men of the elite, who ran naked in the street lashing onlookers with strips of hide, their foreheads smeared with blood and milk. Lurid rituals were clearly not foreign to Romans and we must look elsewhere for an explanation of the obvious Roman per- ception of the
‘
otherness
’
of the Magna Mater.
46

I suggest that the explanation is the castration of the
Galli
—
not so much the act itself, but the fact of it. The reason that no Roman was permitted to join the priesthood was that a castrated male was an aberration in terms of the system of ritual categories. A
Gallus
was considered to be neither man nor woman.
Semimares
is the word Ovid used.
47
This perception was encouraged by the custom- ary appearance of these priests:

[H]e wore a long garment, mostly yellow or many-coloured with long sleeves and a belt. On their heads these priests wore a mitra, a sort of turban, or a tiara, the cap with long ear flaps that could be tied under the chin. The chest was adorned with ornaments and sometimes they wore ornamented reliefs, pen- dants, ear-rings and finger rings. They also wore their hair long which earned them the epithet of
‘
long haired
’
;
…
on the day of mourning for Attis they ran around wildly with dishev- elled hair, but otherwise they had their hair dressed and waved like women. Sometimes they were heavily made up, their faces resembling white-washed walls.

(Vermaseren 1977:97)

From a ritual perspective it was not the fact that they looked strange, but that they looked pseudo-feminine that set the
Galli
apart. As we have seen, dress was used on many different occasions to mark a man out both politically and ritually.
48
This demarcation of roles occurred in so extreme a fashion that a consul could in the appropriate context even appear naked
—
as a
Lupercus
. But for a

man to dress in feminine garb was in the most profound sense un- Roman. Castration and the feminisation that went with it would have made a
Gallus
a ritual anomaly. There was no place for him in the ritual scheme. He could not be both a
Gallus
and a
Roman
.

This fact is made strikingly clear by an anecdote related by Valerius Maximus (7.7.6). A priest of Cybele, a
Gallus
named Genucius, was instituted heir under a will. The praetor granted him
bonorum possessio,
thus allowing him to take his inheritance. The testator was the freedman of one Surdinus, who appealed to the con- sul to set aside the praetor
’
s decision. The consul did so on the grounds that since Genucius was castrated he could be regarded as neither man nor woman
(Genucium amputatis sui ipsius sponte gen- italibus corporis partibus neque virorum neque mulierum numero haberi debere).
A non-Roman citizen could not inherit under the will of a Roman. If Genucius had not been a citizen, the praetor would not have granted him
bonorum possessio
in the first place. Therefore Genucius was a citizen who had disobeyed the senatorial decree forbidding Roman citizens to become
Galli
. But castration had deprived him of the status of citizen, not in a legal sense, but in a ritual sense. This explains both the decision of the praetor to grant
bonorum possessio
and the decision of the consul to abrogate the grant.

I suggest that it was this that made the entry of the Magna Mater to Rome, desirable as it was, ritually dangerous. The device of the ship sticking in the mud of the Tiber was not meant to suggest the goddess
’
reluctance to cross Rome
’
s ritual boundary. Rather it signi- fied the reluctance of the Roman religious system to accept a cult with elements so fundamentally at variance with its own ritual scheme.

The mechanism by which the danger posed by Cybele
’
s arrival was neutralized was the vindicated chastity of Claudia Quinta. An unchaste
matrona,
like a castrated man, was a ritual anomaly: there was no place for her in the religious scheme of things. She was nei- ther
matrona
nor prostitute. Claudia Quinta
’
s vindication was a signifier of the health or the wholesomeness of the Roman system of ritual categories and declared it robust enough to receive the foreign element without being contaminated by it. It established the ritual integrity of the collectivity that Magna Mater was entering. The chaste matron, embodied by Claudia Quinta, was not the marginal figure of Bremmer
’
s theory but indeed represented a central and vital element of the religious system.
49

The cult of Venus Erycina, by contrast with both the cult of Magna Mater and Juno of Veii, is striking because of the dearth of ritual circumstance attending its introduction into Rome. We have the barest minimum of detail: a temple was vowed to Venus Erycina by Q.Fabius Maximus, as prescribed by the Sibylline books; two years later, he dedicated it, having been appointed
duumvir
for the purpose of so doing. The only other prescription of the Sibylline books was that the dictator himself, as the most important individ- ual in the state, should dedicate the temple.
50
That was all that was apparently necessary for Venus Erycina to be brought to Rome. No statue or other physical object made to symbolize the goddess was deemed necessary to root the cult in Rome. Even after the establish- ment of Venus Erycina in Rome, her cult in Sicily continued to flourish, with the Roman state itself contributing to its great renown. Diodorus Siculus writes,

The consuls and praetors, for instance, who visit the island, and all Romans who sojourn there clothed with any authority, whenever they come to Eryx, embellish the sanctuary with magnificent sacrifices and honour, and laying aside the auster- ity of their authority, they enter into sports and have conversa- tion with women in a spirit of great gaiety, believing that only in this way will they make their presence there pleasing to the goddess. Indeed the Roman senate has so zealously concerned itself with the honour of the goddess that it has decreed that seventeen cities of Sicily which are most faithful to Rome shall pay a tax in gold to Aphrodite and that two hundred soldiers shall serve as a guard of her shrine.

(Diod. Sic., 4.83)

Tacitus says that Tiberius undertook to restore the ancient temple at Eryx though the actual work seems to have been carried out under Claudius.
51

The ancient writers saw the adoption of the cult by Rome as unproblematic since Aeneas was believed to have been connected with it, or as Diodorus Siculus puts it, since the Romans traced back their ancestry to Venus. But despite the special relationship that was believed to exist between Rome and Venus, Erycina was a foreign cult in much the same way as Juno of Veii was. I suggest that it was the general ritual function of Venus that obviated the necessity for any rite of introduction. We have already seen that internally,

within the Roman ritual framework, Venus was seen to unite ritu- ally disparate categories. But it was not merely the boundaries that demarcated ritual categories within the Roman system that Venus could straddle. The cult of Venus Erycina demonstrates that she could just as easily straddle the boundary that marked a Roman from a non-Roman cult.

We do not know what sorts of rites were carried out in the temple of Venus Erycina in Sicily. Nor do we have a clear account of the rites of Venus Erycina in Rome. There were two temples of Erycina in Rome: the temple vowed by Q.Fabius Maximus was built on the Capitoline.
52
We know very little about it and nothing at all about the sort of rites that were deemed appropriate to it. The temple of Venus Erycina which is better known to us is the one dedicated thirty-four years later by L.Porcius Licinius, who had vowed to con- struct it during the Ligurian war.
53
This temple, situated near the
porta Collina,
is the only one mentioned by Strabo when he says that the cult of Eryx was re-created in Rome.
54
Despite the separate temples the fact that the anniversary of the dedication of both tem- ples fell on the same date
—
23 April
—
suggests that the cult of Venus Erycina was seen as a single ritual entity. Nevertheless, it appears that nobody was quite clear as to the ritual nature of the day because it was also the day of the festival of the Vinalia Priora. The name Vinalia, says Varro, had nothing to do with Venus:
‘
The Vinalia from wine
—
Vinalia a vino
—
; this day is sacred to Jupiter, not to Venus.
’
55
But the very emphasis on the fact that Venus had no role in the festival is in itself suggestive. Varro could only have been trying to refute a perception of his time that the Vinalia was a festival of Venus. Support for this interpretation comes from Ovid. He writes about 23 April,

I will now tell of the festival of the Vinalia;
…
Ye common girls,
(vulgares puellae)
celebrate the divinity of Venus: Venus favours the earnings of ladies of a liberal profession. Offer incense and pray for beauty and popular favour; pray to be charming and witty; give to the Queen her own myrtle and the mint she loves, and bands of rushes hid in clustered roses. Now is the time to throng her temple next the Colline gate; the temple takes its name from the Sicilian hill.