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Spirit Day Special: Senatus Consultum de Bacchanalibus · Lambda: the LGBT in Antiquity Podcast

• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Hello everybody and welcome to Lambda, the LGBT and Antiquity podcast, your home for all queer things in the ancient world.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Dominica Raven.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: Today is our Spirit Day special on the Senatus Consultium de Bacchanalibus in 186 BC.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: Spirit Day is the best chance to discuss anti-LGBT bullying and violence.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: So today we're going to discuss a time when Rome attacked and tried to persecute and drive queer people from their nation.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: As always occurs, they were not successful, and queer people continue to live in Italy.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: This was a very violent and disturbing time for queer people in Rome.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: Today is going to be a slightly different type of episode.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to work through a narrative of the Senatus Consultium de Bacchanalibus, the Senate's great decree on Bacchanalia, which was passed in 186 BC.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: The Roman Republic has reached its apex.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: Hannibal was defeated in 201 BC during the Second Punic War, and Rome's great rival for power in the Western Mediterranean had been reduced from the great Carthaginian Empire to Carthage, a little city-state in North Africa.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: It had not been wiped off the map yet, and Romans wouldn't sow salt in the fields until the end of the Third Punic War in 146 BC, but by this point Carthage had been humbled and given up its imperious aspirations.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: It became content to trade with Rome and the Greek-speaking East, rather than fight Rome for dominance.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: In the Eastern Mediterranean, Rome was exerting its growing power and ambitions as well.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: Rome fought with Macedon, the former kingdom of Alexander the Great during the Second Punic War.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: In 197 BC, Macedon was defeated and their sprawling colonies were stripped away by the Romans.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: Within a few decades, Macedon would be added to the Republic as well in 146.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: This period also marked the beginning of Rome's increasing ambitions in the Greek-speaking Hellenic East.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: They gained ever increasing influence in Greece itself, particularly after the defeat of Corinth in 146 BC.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: They would slowly exert more power over Greece as a series of additional conflicts and squabbles led to an increasingly aggressive imperial policy in the region.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: The Greek-speaking city-states of Asia Minor were also under increasing influence of the Romans.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: So this is the period when the Roman Republic is at its height.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: Their imperial aspirations are getting arguably too large, which would eventually manifest in Rome turning upon itself.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: This is an era when Rome starts to become drunk on its own power, and the entire political apparatus begins focusing on acquiring power for individuals and factions, rather than for the Republic itself.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: This is an era when Roman politicians, generals, senators, and consuls went off to the provinces and did truly unspeakable horrors upon their own provincials and foreigners alike.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: But it's also a period where Rome's aspirations are truly focusing on the East.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: For the first several centuries of the Roman Republic's existence, their entire political policy had been to extend their influence throughout Italy.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: Following the First Punic War, they gained provinces such as Sicily and started having increased awareness of the vulnerability from the north after Hannibal's famous invasion.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: The Second Punic War ended with Rome gaining incredible territories in the west.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, by this point, the Western Mediterranean was either direct Roman provinces like Spain, or Roman ally states like Numidia, which is modern Algeria.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: So at this point, Rome doesn't really have an adversary at all in the Western Mediterranean.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: But Rome has dozens of Hellenic kingdoms, and the Seleucid Empire from Persia as new rivals.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: It would be over two hundred years from this point before figures like Pompey the Great, Julius Caesar, Antony, Cleopatra, and Augustus would finally unify the eastern provinces under the Roman banner, but Rome was definitely gaining more influence in this region all throughout this era.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: At the same time, many conservative Romans started to become increasingly concerned about the corruption of Roman virtues, Roman heritage, Roman religion, and Roman politics by the inclusion of these ideas that came from the East.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: Practically every generation of Roman, whether senator or lower class, saw this increased influence.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: During the Second Punic War, the religion of Rea Caibalae, led by the transgender priestesses called the Gale, were first brought to Rome, according to tradition, to help them defeat Hannibal.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: The wealthy and elite Romans were taught to read by educated Greek men who were enslaved from one campaign or another.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody and no class of Roman society were immune to this rising influence from the East.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: With all of this change came a host of social challenges.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: Roman generals and politicians were able to make a fortune extorting money out of their provinces, then use that money to shape the political fortunes back at Rome.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: Victorious generals came home and celebrated triumphs, then exerted their influence in ways prior generations never could have.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's also a period when the Roman middle class equestrians were growing as well.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: They made incredible amounts of money in the same provinces and on the same campaigns and in many of the same ways the senators had.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: In time the equestrians started to assert their own political interests rather than simply being clients for the senatorial overlords.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: This period also saw the rise of the Roman poor as a much more substantial group in Roman society.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: Citizen farmers once made up the bedrock of the old republic's economy.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: In time they were driven out of the agricultural industry entirely by the rise of this industrializing agriculture with infinite amounts of free slave labor, led by the same Roman senators and equestrians, where Italy had once been a patchwork where lots of small farmers owned small plots of land and toiled away.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: Now only a handful of very wealthy men brought up ever-increasing amounts of the countryside.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: We are still quite a few decades from the Gracchus brothers who would try to alleviate this problem with agricultural reform in 133 BC, but the problem was accelerating at a truly exponential rate even in the 180s.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: Additionally, Rome's population is exploding, and most of that population is urban plebs, the Roman peasant class, as well as a ton of resident foreigners flocking to the capital city from all of the provinces.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: These ranged from Hellenic princes and emissaries to Hellenic kings in exile, peasants looking for a better life, and slaves, only some of which were those privileged tutors, and others were brought to work the farmland.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: In this chaotic world, the Bacchanalia gained extensive popularity.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: Bacchanals were brought to Italy by a Greek who immigrated to Etruria, more or less modern Tuscany, and Umbria, along the western coast of central Italy.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: This was a Greek immigrant who was a professional prophet and ritual specialist who taught mystery rituals which had to be performed at night in honor of Bacchus.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: The rituals appear to have been largely in keeping with the Bacchic traditions from around the Mediterranean.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: People engaged in ceremonial meals which included sanctified wine.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: There would be dancing and singing with drums and cymbals all the night through.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: From Etruria, the rites spread across Italy, eventually penetrating Rome like a deadly contagion, according to the conservative Romans of high society.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: For some time the religion remained like this, a nocturnal mystic festival, but in the year 188 BC things began to change.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: The sanctuary was overseen by a new priestess called Pecula Annia from Campania, in southwestern Italy.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: New rules were put into place based on advice she had received from the gods themselves.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: First, she opened initiations to people under the age of twenty, starting with her own two sons.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: She increased the festival days from three per year to five per month.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: Pakula Anya also began opening the sexually liberated rights to mixed male and female participation.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's important to remember that the Bacchic religion is always a haven for queer people.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: Bacchus is the liberator, and part of that liberation is from societally constructed concepts of sexuality and gender.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: Dionysus encourages their followers to explore the possibilities of gender and sexuality, even if only during the duration of the ritual.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: So it is only natural that the Dionysaic religion attracted queer men and queer women, and people just interested in exploring their own gender and sexualities.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: What could be more terrifying for conservative Roman society?
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: In the year 186 BC, the Senate tasked the two consuls named Spirius Postumus Albinus and Quintus Marcius Philippus with investigating the strange clandestine Vacanals, after word of these outrageous queer acts were brought to the attention of the consuls.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: Publis Abutius was a man of equestrian rank who was brought up by his mother and stepfather.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: He fell in love with a woman named Hispalia Faentia, who had been a prostitute slave in her younger days, but was now a free woman.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: The two fell in love and made plans to marry.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: The young Publis Albutius fell ill after a snake bite, and his mother vowed to initiate him into the mysteries so he could gain salvation.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: Bacchus was always a key deity when aiding mortals in protection from snake bites across antiquity, so it made sense to initiate the young man.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: After Publis recovered, he waited the required ten days for the pollution to leave his body and prepared to go to the shrine for his own initiation.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: On the day the initiation was to take place, Ispalia Faentia was mortified.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: She exclaimed she would die if he was initiated into the rites.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: Ispalia claimed that he would lose his chastity, his reputation, his hope, and his life if he joined the mystery religion.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: She claimed that Abuteus would be led to the altar and dishonored by force.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: Critically, Ispalia admits that she knew what was going to happen, but never actually been to one of these rites herself.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: Nevertheless, those things all sounded scary, so Abuteus refused to take part in the rites, and was cast out from his stepfather's home for disrespecting the gods.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: At this point the consul Postumus Albinus gets involved.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: He believes the story and calls upon Hispala to speak.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: When she arrives at the court, he asks her to tell him about the Bacchanals.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: She was seized with terror and unable to speak, trembling for several minutes.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: And when she did speak, her story had changed.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: Suddenly Hispala claimed to have been initiated when she was a slave, though she said she had never taken part in the rituals since becoming a free woman.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: She described the rites and posthumous albinus declared them to be valid, as evidence in the case.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: Let's go over the forensic evidence the Romans used to justify the violence that's about to start.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: The way the Romans historian tell of the episode, the whole ritual was one massive display of drunken debauchery and hedonism.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: Once everyone was thoroughly intoxicated, men and women engaged in grotesque acts of sexual pleasure.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: What was most monstrous was that any combination of gendered expression and sexuality was allowable during these rites.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: Now, because engaging in rituals is not necessarily against the law, the Romans invented all sorts of accusations that, had they actually been occurring, would have been.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: The Romans imagined a host of perjuries, falsifying evidence in courts, conspiracies, poisoning of political officials, and even murder.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: Now there were some who could have come forward with this evidence for all these crimes, but before they could, they too were conveniently killed by the Bacchants.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, that's really what all the foreign music was all about, hiding the sounds of murder.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: Now how did so many Romans from across various socioeconomic strata get murdered without anybody noticing?
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: Well, those queer Bacchans were like super good at hiding bodies.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: They had a cave somewhere where the bodies were dismembered, probably.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: This ironclad logic carried the day in the notoriously reasonable Senate.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: So the way the Senate is telling the story, any crime that has occurred in Rome over the last two years was because of those queer people.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: When Posthumus Albinus brought the matter before the Senate, we understand what's really going on here.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: Roman senators did believe that these accusations, if true, could be a gathering place for treachery and conspiracy against the state, but they also sheltered hidden fears that their friends, and definitely not the senators themselves, might be initiated and thus implicated in the treason, if any of this were true.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now that the case had been proven before the Senate, the Senate decreed that no more Bacchic initiation should occur in Rome or throughout Italy.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: They ordered that no meetings of the Bacchans should take place, they ordered that the Bacchans could not own property, and any priests or priestesses were to be executed.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: They dispatched Idiles, low level civic administrators in the Roman Republic, to attack the Bacchants in their rituals.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: They decreed that anybody who would not comply would stand trial and be executed.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: Any Bacchant who fled, or anyone who aided a Bakant in fleeing, would also be executed.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well naturally this show of violence led to public panic.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: At least seven thousand Bacchants committed suicide in the coming days.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: The leaders were rounded up and immediately blamed for all the wrongdoings this monstrous queer cult was definitely partaking in.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: During the ensuing chaos, the consuls made lists of names and hunted down anyone whose name had been added to the list.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: Naturally, the list included men accused of perjury, forgery of wills, fraud, as well as sexual duplicity, and sexual violence.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: When we take a look at the list of crimes, it definitely gives the impression that this is a sham trial.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: It is a chance for noble senators to take out rivals, silence critics, settle old scores, and assert social control.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: As usual, that's really what this is all about.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: The ability of powerful heteronormative men to reassert their power.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: They saw their women going out and acting in ways that were unacceptable.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: They saw queer people exploring their sexualities, they saw men and women engaging in homosexuality, they saw gender nonconformity, they were repulsed by it, and immediately assumed monstrous acts were behind it all.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: More alarmingly, they saw that men and women from all levels of society, from slaves and freemen all the way up to prominent members of the communities and people associated with senators themselves, were part of the group.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: Queer people were starting to challenge the Roman Republic with sexual and gender liberation.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: They simply could not have that.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: This episode from Roman history is a palpable reminder that the rights of queer men, queer women, gender nonconforming individuals, and heteronormative women alike from across socioeconomic status and all walks of life are all curtailed in the same senatorial decree.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: When the patriarchy is threatened, they attack all of us together, regardless of whether some Roman women might have been totally fine going after foreign women, or okay with the attack on queer men.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: The Roman Senate hunted us all down together.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: Ancient and modern people alike should never give in to factionalization when faced in divide and conquer techniques from the patriarchy.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's also worth noting that for this episode we have more or less followed the account of the Bacchanal Crisis given by the Roman historian Livy, who lived from 59 BC to 17 AD, or about a hundred and fifty years later.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: He wrote a monumental history of Rome, from the founding of the city, which begins with Rome's legendary past and ends with Caesar August's.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: His account is very suspect for a lot of reasons, not least of which is that it was written so much later.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: A bronze tablet was discovered in 1640 in Calabria, southern Italy, which contained a copy of the decree.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: The tablet tells a slightly different story, specifically that the Senate banned any new shrines to Bacchus without expressed consent of the praetor.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: The decree states that no man or woman should be the master of a Bacchanal organization, acting as priest or priestess to perform the initiatory rites in public, private, within Rome, or outside of the city.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: The decree even goes far as to say that no two men, no two women, or a man and a woman should ever meet to practice Bacchanal rituals unless the praetor had given approval.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: Furthermore, the worship of Bacchus shall be dismantled entirely.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: Any exception to the law had to go through a vote in the Senate.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: So we can see in the surviving text the actual law was extremely invasive.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine a civic bureaucrat having to give you written consent for you to be queer, or else you had to appeal your case to the Senate.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: Another thing that's very important to consider here is that Bacchic customs were introduced in Italy at least by the 6th century BC, especially in Magna Gracia throughout southern Italy.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: This era saw Orphic mystics, Pythagoreans, and all sorts of mystic traditions present in Italy.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, most of the enigmatic Bacchic tablets, which include mystic prayers, poems, invocations, and directions calling upon Bacchus to guide the souls of the initiated mystics to the better afterlife, actually come from southern Italy and date to the 5th century.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: So Livy's own social commentary aside, the Bacchic mysteries were definitely not a recent import from Greece in 186, rather, they had been there for centuries, possibly before the Roman Republic even existed.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: But however valid Livy's account may or may not be, Romans during the entire duration of the empire would look back at his treatment of the Senatus Consultium de Bacchanalibus as a morality tale.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know of one example where later Roman historians viewed the moral of the story as we really hurt some mostly harmless minorities.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: No, when later Romans reflected on this era, they concluded we have to do the same to oppress the same sexual minorities today.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: This argument works exactly as well whether it's given by a conservative Roman or a Christian commenter.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to end this discussion with the idea that right now, in a lot of places, especially in Western countries and the great English speaking democracies, state sanction violence and bullying has really come around in force.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: But we have faced it before.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: In my day it was attacks on the GSAs that were in fact attacks on queer people.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: In my grandparents' generation there were attacks on communism that were in truth thinly veiled attacks on queer people.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: In the Protestant Reformation there were attacks on different religious organizations that took the form of thinly veiled attacks on queer people.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: In the Middle Ages there were attacks on Satan that were in truth thinly veiled attacks on queer people.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: In late antiquity there were attacks on pagans that were in truth thinly veiled attacks on queer people.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: And in 106 BC there were attacks on the Bacchic religion that were in fact thinly veiled attacks on queer people.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: But I want to reiterate, not one of these states sanctioned violence, encouraged interpersonal violence, even the dreaded schoolyard bullying have actually defeated us.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: All of these actions by all of these very powerful men have not destroyed queerness through the ages.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: Though they definitely hurt, violence, bullying, and just plain being mean cannot defeat us.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: Stay strong this spirit day.