Free From Good Goddess to Vestal Virgins: Sex and Category in Roman Religion by Ariadne Staples Page B

myrtle was excluded from Bona Dea ’ s rites was because it was a plant sacred to Venus and Bona Dea was a chaste goddess. 132 Both myrtle and wine were used by Faunus in the story, in a vain attempt to force his daughter to yield to his incestuous advances. 133 As a result, myrtle was excluded from the rites altogether, and wine was brought in a honey pot (mellarium) and called milk. 134 The sig- nificance of the exclusion of myrtle will be more conveniently dis-
    cussed in chapter 3 , where I examine aspects of the cult of Venus. Here I shall examine the significance of wine in Bona Dea ’ s festival.
    Again the most useful approach to the problem is through an examination of another rite — the Parilia, which was celebrated on 21 April. Our main source for the Parilia is Ovid, who claims to have participated in the festival, and describes it in gratifying detail. 135 It appears to have been principally a rite for shepherds, designed to purify the sheep and ensure both their preservation from harm and their fertility during the coming year. Both ancient and modern commentators appear to agree on this point. 136 But that wasn ’ t all it was. The Parilia was also regarded as a celebration of the birthday of Rome, although the festival itself, like those of Her- cules at the Ara Maxima and Bona Dea, was perceived to have existed before Rome was actually founded. 137 The Parilia was a fes- tival admirably suited to accommodate the multivalent significa- tions that cults were endowed with, and which helped maintain their vibrancy and meaning as social, political and economic struc- tures evolved. 138 Already in the time of Ovid, the rite had acquired many layers of meaning, as Ovid ’ s eager attempt to interpret them shows. ‘ The multitude of explanations creates a doubt and thwarts me at the outset, ’ he complains, then devotes twenty-two lines to a dizzy succession of baffling interpretations. 139 The evidence we have for the ritual practices of the Parilia serves only to mystify if considered simply in the context of this single rite. However, when put into the wider context of Roman cult practice it is possible to formulate a plausible hypothesis as to their meaning and function. In terms of this analysis, the rites of Bona Dea and the Parilia will give each other meaning. It is important to bear in mind, however, that there is no discernible structural parallelism of the sort that was demonstrated between the rites of Hercules and Bona Dea. Here it is rather a case of two separate rites within a common polytheistic reli- gion, embedded in the same cultural matrix, using a ritual mecha- nism in a similar way. The ritual mechanism in this case is the use of wine and milk in the Parilia and the wine that is called milk in the rites of Bona Dea. Neither of these two features makes much sense when the cults are considered separately. But they do make quite a lot of sense when the two cults are compared. For this reason the following discussion will be a bit disjointed. I shall start with a dis- cussion of the Parilia, switch to the rites of the Bona Dea, then return to the Parilia before summing up the argument.
    This is not going to be a comprehensive analysis of the rites of the
    Parilia — only an examination of one particular aspect of them which will help shed some light on a feature of the cult of the Bona Dea. The most striking feature of Ovid ’ s description of the Parilia is fire. Indeed it is the fires of the Parilia that Ovid tries to explain in his exegetical exercise. The fire appears to have a twofold function: purificatory and generative, concepts which indeed appear closely interrelated in other areas of religious ideology. 140 First of all the sheep are purified with fire in which sulphur is burned together with special ritual fumigants supplied by the Vestal Virgins. 141 The purification is followed by a prayer. The structure of this prayer as set forth by Ovid reveals the close connection between