| Liber | |
|---|---|
God of wine-making, wine, male fertility, freedom | |
| Member of thedi selecti and theAventine Triad | |
| Festivals | Liberalia |
| Equivalents | |
| Etruscan | Fufluns |
| Greek | Dionysus |
| Religion in ancient Rome |
|---|
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| Practices and beliefs |
| Priesthoods |
| Deities |
| Related topics |
Inancient Roman religion andmythology,Liber (/ˈlaɪbər/LY-bər,Latin:[ˈliːbɛr]; "the free one"), also known asLiber Pater ("the free Father"), was a god ofviticulture and wine, male fertility and freedom. He was a patron deity of Rome'splebeians and was part of theirAventine Triad. His festival ofLiberalia (March 17) became associated with free speech and the rights attached to coming of age. His cult and functions were increasingly associated with Romanised forms of the GreekDionysus/Bacchus, whose mythology he came to share.[1]
The nameLīber ('free') stems fromProto-Italic*leuþero, and ultimately fromProto-Indo-European*h₁leudʰero ('belonging to the people', hence 'free').[2]
Before his official adoption as a Roman deity, Liber was companion to two different goddesses in two separate, archaic Italian fertility cults;Ceres, an agricultural and fertility goddess of Rome'sHellenized neighbours, andLibera, who was Liber's female equivalent. In ancientLavinium, he was a phallic deity. Latinliber means "free", or "free one"; when coupled with "pater", it means "The Free Father", who personifies freedom and champions its attendant rights, as opposed to dependent servitude. "Liber" is also understood in terms of "libation", the ritual offering of drink, related to Greek "spondé" and English "to spend". Roman writers of the late Republic and early Empire offer various etymological and poetic speculations based on this trope, to explain certain features of Liber's cult.[3][4][5]
Liber entered Rome's historical tradition soon after the overthrow of the Roman monarchy, the establishment of the Republic and the first of many threatened or actualplebeian secessions from Rome's patrician authority. According toLivy, thedictatorA. Postumius vowed games(ludi) and a joint publictemple to aTriad of Ceres, Liber and Libera on Rome'sAventine Hill,c. 496 BC.[6] In 493 the vow was fulfilled: the new Aventine temple was dedicated andludi scaenici (religious dramas) were held in honour of Liber, for the benefit of theRoman people. These earlyludi scaenici have been suggested as the earliest of their kind in Rome, and may represent the earliest official festival to Liber, or an early form of hisLiberalia festival.[7] The formal, official development of the Aventine Triad may have encouraged the assimilation of its individual deities to Greek equivalents: Ceres toDemeter, Liber toDionysus and Libera toPersephone or Kore.[3][8]
Liber's patronage of Rome's largest, least powerful class of citizens (theplebs, or plebeian commoners) associates him with particular forms of plebeian disobedience to the civil and religious authority claimed by Rome's Republicanpatrician elite. The Aventine Triad has been described as parallel to theCapitoline Triad ofJupiter,Mars andQuirinus on the Capitoline Hill, within the city's sacred boundary (pomerium): and as its "copy and antithesis".[9] The Aventine Triad was apparently installed at the behest of theSibylline Books but Liber's position within it seems equivocal from the outset. He was a god of the grape and of wine; his earlyludi scaenici virtually defined their genre thereafter as satirical, subversive theatre in a lawful religious context. Some aspects of his cults remained potentiallyun-Roman and offered a focus for civil disobedience. Liber asserted plebeian rights to ecstatic release, self-expression and free speech; he wasLiber Pater, the Free Father – a divine personification of liberty, father ofplebeian wisdoms and plebeian augury.[10]
Liber's associations with wine, inebriation, uninhibited freedom and the subversion of the powerful made him a close equivalent to the Greek godDionysus, who was Romanised asBacchus. In Graeco-Roman culture, Dionysus waseuhemerised as a historical figure, a heroic saviour, world-traveller and founder of cities; and conqueror of India, whence he had returned in the first evertriumph, drawn in a golden chariot by tigers, accompanied by a retinue of drunkensatyrs andmaenads. In some cults, and probably in the popular imagination, Liber was gradually assimilated to Bacchus and came to share his Romanised "Dionysian" iconography and myths. Pliny calls him "the first to establish the practice of buying and selling; he also invented the diadem, the emblem of royalty, and the triumphal procession."[11] Roman mosaics and sarcophagi attest to various representations of this exotic triumphal procession. In Roman and Greek literary sources from the late Republic and Imperial era, several notable triumphs feature similar, distinctively "Bacchic" processional elements, recalling the supposedly historic "Triumph of Liber".[12]
Very little is known of Liber's official and unofficial cults during the early to middle Republican era. Their Dionysiac or Bacchic elements seem to have been regarded as tolerably ancient, home-grown and manageable by Roman authorities until 186 BC, shortly after the end of theSecond Punic War. Livy, writing 200 years after the event, gives a highly theatrical account of theBacchanalia's introduction by a foreign soothsayer, a "Greek of mean condition... a low operator of sacrifices". The cult spreads in secret, "like a plague". The lower classes, plebeians, women, the young, morally weak and effeminate males ("men most like women") are particularly susceptible: all such persons haveleuitas animi (fickle or uneducated minds) but even Rome's elite are not immune. The Bacchanalia's priestesses urge their deluded flock to break all social and sexual boundaries, even to visit ritual murder on those who oppose them or betray their secrets: but a loyal servant reveals all to a shocked senate, whose quick thinking, wise actions and piety save Rome from the divine wrath and disaster it would otherwise have suffered.[13] Livy'sdramatis personae, stylistic flourishes and tropes probably draw on Roman satyr-plays rather than the Bacchanalia themselves.[14]
The Bacchanalia cults may have offered challenge to Rome'straditional, official values and morality but they were practiced in Roman Italy as Dionysiac cults for several decades before their alleged disclosure, and were probably no more secretive than any other mystery cult. Nevertheless, their presence at the Aventine provoked an investigation. The consequent legislation against them – theSenatus consultum de Bacchanalibus of 186 BC – was framed as if in response to a dire and unexpected national and religious emergency, and its execution was unprecedented in thoroughness, breadth and ferocity. Modern scholarship interprets this reaction as the senate's assertion of its own civil and religious authority throughout the Italian peninsula, following the recentPunic War and subsequent social and political instability.[15] The cult was officially represented as the workings of a secret, illicit state within the Roman state, a conspiracy of priestesses and misfits, capable of anything. Bacchus himself was not the problem; like any deity, he had a right to cult. Rather than risk his divine offense, the Bacchanalia were not banned outright. They were made to submit to official regulation, under threat of ferocious penalties: some 6,000 persons are thought to have been put to death. The reformed Bacchic cults bore little resemblance to the crowded, ecstatic and uninhibited Bacchanalia: every cult meeting was restricted to five initiates and each could be held only with a praetor's consent. Similar attrition may have been imposed on Liber's cults; attempts to sever him from perceived or actual associations with the Bacchanalia seems clear from the official transference of the Liberalialudi of 17 March to Ceres'Cerealia of 12–19 April. Once the ferocity of official clampdown eased off, the Liberalia games were officially restored, though probably in modified form.[7] Illicit Bacchanals persisted covertly for many years, particularly in Southern Italy, their likely place of origin.[16][17]
Liber was closely, often interchangeably identified with Bacchus, Dionysus and their mythology but was not entirely subsumed by them; in the late Republican era, Cicero could insist on the "non-identity of Liber and Dionysus" and describe Liber and Libera as children of Ceres.[18][19][20] Liber, like his Aventine companions, carried elements of his older cults into official Roman religion. He protected various aspects of agriculture and fertility, including the vine and the "soft seed" of its grapes, wine and wine vessels, and male fertility and virility.[21] As his divine power was incarnate in the vine, grape and wine, he was offered the first, sacredpressing of the grape-harvest, known assacrima.[22]
The wine produced under Liber's patronage was his gift to humankind, and therefore fit forprofane (non-religious) use: it could be mixed with old wine for the purposes of fermentation, and otherwise adulterated and diluted according to taste and circumstance. For religious purposes, it was ritually "impure" (vinum spurcum). Roman religious law required that the libations offered to the gods in their official cults should bevinum inferum, a strong wine of pure vintage, also known astemetum. It was made from the best of the crop, selected and pressed under the patronage of Rome's sovereign deityJupiter and ritually purified by hisflamen (senior priest). Liber's role in viniculture and wine-making was thus both complementary and subservient to Jupiter's.[23]
Liber also personified male procreative power, which was ejaculated as the "soft seed" of human and animal semen. His temples held theimage of a phallus; in Lavinium, this was the principal focus for his month-long festival, when according to St. Augustine, the "dishonourable member" was placed "on a little trolley" and taken in procession around the localcrossroad shrines, then to the local forum for its crowning by an honourable matron. The rites ensured the growth of seeds and repelled any malicious enchantment (fascinatus) from fields.[24]
Liber's festivals are timed to the springtime awakening and renewal of fertility in the agricultural cycle. In Rome, his annualLiberalia public festival was held on March 17. A portable shrine was carried through Rome's neighbourhoods (vici); Liber's aged, ivy-crowned priestesses (Sacerdos Liberi) offered honey cakes for sale, and offered sacrifice on behalf of those who bought them – the discovery of honey was credited to Liber-Bacchus. Embedded within Liberalia, more or less at a ritualistic level, were the various freedoms and rights attached to Roman ideas of virility as a divine and natural force.[3] Young men celebrated their coming of age; they cut off and dedicated their first beards to their householdLares and if citizens, wore their firsttoga virilis, the "manly" toga – whichOvid, perhaps by way of poetic etymology, calls atoga libera (Liber's toga or "toga of freedom"). These new citizens registered their citizenship at the forum and were then free to vote, to leave their father'sdomus (household), choose a marriage partner and, thanks to Liber's endowment of virility, father their own children. Ovid also emphasises the less formal freedoms and rights of Liberalia. From his later place of exile, where he was sent for an unnamed offense against Augustus having to do with free speech, Ovid lamented the lost companionship of his fellow poets, who apparently saw the Liberalia as an opportunity for uninhibited talking.[25]
Augustus successfully courted the plebs, supported their patron deities and began the restoration of the Aventine Triad's temple; it was re-dedicated by his successor,Tiberius.[26] Liber is found in some of the threefold, complementary deity-groupings ofImperial cult; a saviour figure, likeHercules and the Emperor himself.[27] The reign and dynasty of the emperorSeptimius Severus were inaugurated with games to honour Liber/Shadrafa and Hercules/Melqart, the Romanised founding hero-deities of his native town,Leptis Magna (North Africa). He built them a massive temple and arch in Rome.[28] Later still, Liber Pater is of one of many deities served by the erudite, deeply religious senatorVettius Agorius Praetextatus (c. AD 315 – 384).[29]
A Bacchic community shrine dedicated to Liber Pater was established inCosa (in modern Tuscany), probably during the 4th century AD. It remained in use "apparently for decades after the edicts of Theodosius in 391 and 392 AD outlawing paganism". Its abandonment, or perhaps its destruction "by zealous Christians", was so abrupt that much of its cult paraphernalia survived virtually intact beneath the building's later collapse.[30] Around the end of the 5th century, inOrosius'sSeven Books of History Against the Pagans, Liber Pater's mythic conquest of India is taken as an historical event, which left a harmless, naturally peaceful nation "dripping with blood, full of corpses, and polluted with [Liber's] lusts."[31]
Pliny the Elder describes the Aventine Triad's temple as designed by Greek architects, and typically Greek in style; no trace remains of it, and the historical and epigraphical record offers only sparse details to suggest its exact location, but Pliny's description may be further evidence of time-honoured and persistent plebeian cultural connections with Magna Graecia, well into the Imperial era.Vitruvius recommends that Liber'stemples follow anIonic Greek model, as a "just measure between the severe manner of theDoric and the tenderness of the Corinthian," respectful of the deity's part-feminine characteristics.[32]
Gods named Liber and Libera play a major role in the 1999science fiction/time-travel novelHousehold Gods byHarry Turtledove andJudith Tarr.
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