The December Rite and Clodius's Scandal

The best documented episode in Bona Dea's cult is also the reason so much is known about a rite from which men were rigorously excluded: in December of 62 BCE, Publius Clodius Pulcher entered the house of Julius Caesar, where Caesar's wife Pompeia was hosting that year's nocturnal rite as the wife of a magistrate holding imperium, disguised as a woman musician. He was discovered, and the resulting scandal produced a public trial for sacrilege in which Cicero testified against him and which Clodius was widely believed to have escaped only through bribery of the jury. Caesar himself, despite testifying that he had seen nothing improper, divorced Pompeia over the affair, giving rise to the frequently quoted remark that Caesar's wife must be above suspicion regardless of what could actually be proven against her.

Nearly everything modern readers know about the private December rite comes from exactly this kind of hostile or scandalized male testimony describing the one night the exclusion of men was broken, since no participant's own account of an intact, undisturbed rite survives. Cicero returned to the episode repeatedly in his letters and speeches over the following years, using it as a standing example of Clodius's moral character in wholly unrelated political disputes, which is a further reason the scandal is so thoroughly documented relative to almost any other detail of Bona Dea's cult: it survived because it became useful ammunition in Roman political life long after the night itself.