Editing Liber (section)

===Liber, Bacchus and Dionysus===
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 [[euhemerism|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 [[Roman triumph|triumph]], drawn in a golden chariot by tigers, accompanied by a retinue of drunken [[satyrs]] and [[maenad]]s. 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."<ref>See Pliny, ''Historia Naturalis'', 7.57 (ed. Bostock) at Perseus: [https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137&layout=&loc=7.57 Tufts.edu]</ref> 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".<ref>[[Mary Beard (classicist)|Beard, Mary]]: ''The Roman Triumph'', The Belknap Press of [[Harvard University Press]], Cambridge, Mass., and London, England, 2007, pp. 315 - 7.</ref>