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In ancient Roman religion and Roman mythology, Liber ( , ; "the free one"), also known as Liber Pater ("the free Father"), was a god of viticulture and wine, male fertility and freedom. He was a patron deity of Rome's plebeians and was part of their Aventine Triad. His festival of Liberalia (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 Greek Dionysus/Bacchus, whose mythology he came to share.Grimal, Pierre, The Dictionary of Classical Mythology, Wiley-Blackwell, 1996, .[2]
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 actual Secessio plebis from Rome's patrician authority. According to Livy, the Roman dictator A. Postumius vowed games (ludi) and a joint public Roman temple to a Aventine Triad on Rome's Aventine Hill, .The vow was made in hope of victory against the Latins, the relief of a famine in Rome and the co-operation of Rome's plebeian soldiery in the coming war despite the threat of their secession. In 493 the vow was fulfilled: the new Aventine temple was dedicated and Ludi (religious dramas) were held in honour of Liber, for the benefit of the SPQR. These early ludi 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 his Liberalia festival.T.P. Wiseman, Remus: a Roman myth, Cambridge University Press, 1995, p.133. The formal, official development of the Aventine Triad may have encouraged the assimilation of its individual deities to Greek equivalents: Ceres to Demeter, Liber to Dionysus and Libera to Persephone or Kore.T.P. Wiseman, Remus: a Roman myth, Cambridge University Press, 1995, p.133 and note 20.
Liber's patronage of Rome's largest, least powerful class of citizens (the plebs) associates him with particular forms of plebeian disobedience to the civil and religious authority claimed by Rome's Republican patrician elite. The Aventine Triad has been described as parallel to the Capitoline Triad of Jupiter, Mars and Quirinus on the Capitoline Hill, within the city's sacred boundary (pomerium): and as its "copy and antithesis".Barbette Stanley Spaeth, The Roman goddess Ceres, University of Texas Press, 1996, pp. 6-8, 92, [6]. Spaeth cites Henri Le Bonniec, Le culte de Cérès à Rome. Des origines à la fin de la République, Paris, Librairie C. Klincksieck, 1958, for the Aventine cult with its central female deity as "copy and antithesis" of the early, entirely male Capitoline Triad. When Mars and Quirinus were later replaced by two goddesses, Jupiter remained the primary focus of Capitoline cult. The Aventine Triad was apparently installed at the behest of the Sibylline Books but Liber's position within it seems equivocal from the outset. He was a god of the grape and of wine; his early ludi scaenici virtually defined their genre thereafter as satirical, subversive theatre in a lawful religious context. Some aspects of his cults remained potentially mos maiorum and offered a focus for civil disobedience. Liber asserted plebeian rights to ecstatic release, self-expression and free speech; he was Liber Pater, the Free Father – a divine personification of liberty, father of plebeian wisdoms and plebeian augury.Barbette Stanley Spaeth, The Roman goddess Ceres, University of Texas Press, 1996, pp. 6-8, 92, [7] While the Aventine temple and ludi may represent a patrician attempt to reconcile or at least molify the plebs, plebeian opposition to patrician domination continued throughout contemporary and later Republican history.
The Bacchanalia cults may have offered challenge to Rome's Mos maiorum 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 – the Senatus 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 recent Punic War and subsequent social and political instability.During the Punic crisis, some foreign cults and oracles had been repressed, on much smaller scale and not outside Rome itself. See Erich S. Gruen, Studies in Greek culture and Roman policy, BRILL, 1990, pp.34-78: on precedents see p.41 ff.[11] 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 Liberalia ludi 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. Illicit Bacchanals persisted covertly for many years, particularly in Southern Italy, their likely place of origin.See Sarolta A. Takács, Politics and Religion in the Bacchanalian Affair of 186 B.C.E., Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Vol. 100, (2000), p.301. [12]Beard, M., Price, S., North, J., Religions of Rome: Volume 1, a History, illustrated, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 93 - 96.
The wine produced under Liber's patronage was his gift to humankind, and therefore fit for Profanum (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 be vinum inferum, a strong wine of pure vintage, also known as temetum. It was made from the best of the crop, selected and pressed under the patronage of Rome's sovereign deity Jupiter and ritually purified by his Flamen Dialis (senior priest). Liber's role in viniculture and wine-making was thus both complementary and subservient to Jupiter's.Olivier de Cazanove, "Jupiter, Liber et le vin latin", Revue de l'histoire des religions, 1988, Vol. 205, Issue 205-3, pp. 245-265 [16]
Liber also personified male procreative power, which was ejaculated as the "soft seed" of human and animal semen. His temples held the Fascinus; 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 local crossroad 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.St Augustine, (trans. R. W. Dyson) The City of God against the pagans, 7.21., in Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, 1998, pp. 292-3. St Augustine (AD 354 – 430) uses Varro (116 – 27 BC) as source.[17]
Liber's festivals are timed to the springtime awakening and renewal of fertility in the agricultural cycle. In Rome, his annual Liberalia public festival was held on March 17. A portable shrine was carried through Rome's neighbourhoods ( Vicus); 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. Young men celebrated their coming of age; they cut off and dedicated their first beards to their household Lares and if citizens, wore their first toga virilis, the "manly" toga – which Ovid, perhaps by way of poetic etymology, calls a toga 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's domus (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.See John F. Miller, "Ovid's Liberalia", in Geraldine Herbert-Brown,(ed)., Ovid's Fasti: historical readings at its bimillennium, Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 199-224. Briefer scholarly treatment of the Festival is offered in William Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic, Gorgias Press, 2004 (reprint of Macmillan and Co., London, 1908), pp.54 - 56.[18]
A Bacchic community shrine dedicated to Liber Pater was established in Cosa (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.Jaquelyn Collins-Clinton, A late antique shrine of Liber Pater at Cosa, Etudes Preliminaires aux Religions Orientales dans l'Empire Romain, Volume 64, BRILL, 1977, pp.3, 5. [20] Around the end of the 5th century, in Orosius's Seven 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."Paulus Orosius: Seven Books of History Against the Pagans, trans. and ed. A T Fear, Liverpool University Press, 2010, p. 57, and editor's footnote 179, concerning Orosius' use of "Pater" to emphasise "the cruelty of this pagan father as opposed to the mercy of the Christian God the Father."
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