Editing Liber (section)

===Liber and the Bacchanalia of 186 BC===
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.<ref>Sarolta Takacs, ''Vestal Virgins, Sibyls, and Matrons: Women in Roman Religion'',  University of Texas Press,  2008, p.95. [https://books.google.com/books?id=SnUCcOvhVKwC&dq=Takacs+Livy+%22men+most+like+women%22&pg=PA95] See also Beard, M.,  Price, S.,  North, J.,  ''Religions of Rome: Volume 1, a History'', illustrated, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 93 - 96, and Walsh, PG, ''Making a drama out of a Crisis: Livy on the Bacchanalia'', Greece & Rome, Vol XLIII,  No. 2, October 1996.</ref> Livy's ''[[dramatis personae]]'', stylistic flourishes and tropes probably draw on Roman satyr-plays rather than the Bacchanalia themselves.<ref>The plots of Satyr plays would have been familiar to Roman audiences from around the 3rd century BC onwards. See Robert Rouselle, Liber-Dionysus in Early Roman Drama, ''The Classical Journal'', 82, 3 (1987), p. 191.[https://www.jstor.org/pss/3297899]</ref>

The Bacchanalia cults may have offered challenge to Rome's [[Mos maiorum|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 &ndash; the ''[[Senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus]]'' of 186 BC &ndash; 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 [[Second Punic War|Punic War]] and subsequent social and political instability.<ref>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.[https://books.google.com/books?id=dnOPjX6GOrgC&dq=Gruen%201990%20Bacchus&pg=PA34]</ref> 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.<ref name="autogenerated133"/> Illicit Bacchanals persisted covertly for many years, particularly in Southern Italy, their likely place of origin.<ref>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. [https://www.jstor.org/pss/3185221]</ref><ref>Beard, M.,  Price, S.,  North, J.,  ''Religions of Rome: Volume 1, a History'', illustrated, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 93 - 96.</ref>