acolythus - Private Collection, Milan Italy Painting

This painting is featured on The PhotoPhore (Best new contemporary art site on the net): FROM THE COLLECTOR: Dear Geoff! I got the paintings!!! THEY ARE AMAZING!!!!!!!!!! So beautiful! I am so happy! Great works! The cult of Bona Dea in ancient Rome was for women only, and no joke. Men who glimpsed her rites could be punished with blinding, and males were forbidden even to know her name, which is why we refer to her as the generic 'Good Goddess' to this day. Her sacred sites were cleansed not only of human males but all animals bearing an X chromosome and even decor depicting the masculine sex. So it caused a terrific scandal when aristocrat Clodius Pulcher was brought before the Senate on charges of sacrilege and desecration (both punishable by death) for disguising himself as a woman and entering the precincts of the Goddess in lustful pursuit of Julius Caesar’s wife Pompeia. The evidence against him was overwhelming. Every acolythus (acolyte) testified to his guilt, but Clodius was popular with the people, who gathered outside chanting his name during his trial. In the end the Senate resorted to a tactic their counterparts today might envy - they acquitted Clodius of all charges, every senator rendering his verdict in writing that was completely illegible so that (as Plutarch tells us) "they might not risk their lives with the populace by condemning him, nor get a bad name among the nobility" by letting the bum off scot-free. The upshot was almost too predictable: Caesar divorced Pompeia - giving rise to his snarky remark that any wife of Caesar must be above suspicion - and went on to the heights of power, taking the odious Clodius along for the sake of political convenience, while the cult of the Goddess suffered a decline from which it never recovered. In less than a hundred years it slid from being a bastion of female empowerment whose rites were overseen by the Vestal Virgins and hosted by the wife of the Magistrate to a string of lowly street-shrines where the poor left meager offerings and men were welcome. So take a lesson ladies - politics and power never change. Your hard-earned rights will be snatched away if you do not guard them like a tiger.