Women’s Sacrifice to the Bona Dea.
This fell, in the year 63 B.C., on the night between Dec. 3 and 4, if we may trust Plutarch and Dio[[1113]]; but the date does not seem to have been a fixed one[[1114]]. The rite does not appear in the calendars, and, though attended by the Vestals, did not take place in the temple of the goddess, but in the house of a consul or praetor, ‘in ea domo quae est in imperio[[1115]].’ It seems to have been in some sense a State sacrifice, i. e. it was ‘pro populo Romano’ (according to Cicero); but it was not ‘publico sumptu’[[1116]], and it was never woven into the calendar by the pontifices, or it could hardly have occurred between the Kalends and the Nones. Its very nature would exclude the interference of the pontifical college, and there would be no need to give public notice of it.
The character of the goddess and her rites have already been discussed under May 1. All that need be said of the December sacrifice is that it was clearly a survival from the time when the wife of the chief of the community—himself its priest—together with her daughters (represented in later times by the Vestals), and the other matrons, made sacrifice of a young pig or pigs[[1117]] to the deity of fertility, from all share in which men were rigorously excluded. It must have been originally a perfectly decorous rite, and so have continued to the famous sacrilege of Clodius; it was only under the empire that it became the scene of such orgies as Juvenal describes in his second and sixth satires[[1118]].