Liber

In ancient Roman religion and mythology, Liber (/ˈlaɪbər/ LY-bər, Latin: [ˈliːbɛr]; "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.

The name Līber ('free') stems from Proto-Italic *leuþero, and ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *h₁leudʰero ('belonging to the people', hence 'free').

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's Hellenized neighbours, and Libera, who was Liber's female equivalent. In ancient Lavinium, he was a phallic deity. Latin liber 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.

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 plebeian secessions from Rome's patrician authority. According to Livy, the dictator A. Postumius vowed games (ludi) and a joint public temple to a Triad of Ceres, Liber and Libera on Rome's Aventine Hill, c. 496 BC. In 493 the vow was fulfilled: the new Aventine temple was dedicated and ludi scaenici (religious dramas) were held in honour of Liber, for the benefit of the Roman people. 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. 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.

Liber's patronage of Rome's largest, least powerful class of citizens (the plebs, or plebeian commoners) 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". 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 un-Roman 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.

Liber's associations with wine, inebriation, uninhibited freedom and the subversion of the powerful made him a close equivalent to the Greek god Dionysus, who was Romanised as Bacchus. In Graeco-Roman culture, Dionysus was euhemerised as a historical figure, a heroic saviour, world-traveller and founder of cities; and conqueror of India, whence he had returned in the first ever triumph, drawn in a golden chariot by tigers, accompanied by a retinue of drunken satyrs and maenads. 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." 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".

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 the Second Punic War. Livy, writing 200 years after the event, gives a highly theatrical account of the Bacchanalia'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 have leuitas 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. Livy's dramatis personae, stylistic flourishes and tropes probably draw on Roman satyr-plays rather than the Bacchanalia themselves.

The Bacchanalia cults may have offered challenge to Rome's traditional, 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 – 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. 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.