in today’s world you come of age on the day of your birthday, almost without noticing. in ancient rome you lost your childhood all at once, on a fixed date in the national calendar, in a ceremony loaded with status, religion and military duty. that day was 17 march, the liberalia, and by the end of the day the child had vanished for ever.
the liberalia was dedicated to liber, an ancient italic divinity of fertility and wine — member alongside ceres and libera of the aventine triad — whom the romans would end up identifying with bacchus. the festival had its popular side — old women crowned with ivy selling along the streets oil and honey cakes they fried on the spot — but its central piece, the one that marked a household, was the rite of passage of young men into full citizenship. it is worth adding, moreover, that 17 march, the feast of liber, was the most popular date to take the toga — though other dates were also valid — and that the very link between the festival and the rite is a correlation that scholarship takes as probable, not certain.
the boy began by removing the bulla, the amulet that had hung from his neck since infancy to protect him from the evil eye. he consecrated it to the lares familiares, the tutelary gods of the household, on the understanding that he no longer needed childish magic to survive. immediately afterwards he took off the purple-bordered toga of childhood, the toga praetexta, and wrapped himself for the first time in the toga virilis, of an unblemished plain white: the heavy uniform of the full citizen. then the whole clan escorted him to the forum to enrol his name in the state registers and in a tribe.
with the white toga came all the rights of the citizen. and, in the same package, the obligation to die for rome.
it is worth correcting a couple of clichés often repeated. first, the age: there was no fixed number. popular accounts usually say “fifteen”, but the sources show the ceremony was performed between fourteen and seventeen, and that it was decided by the father or guardian according to the boy’s maturity, not by a uniform law. second, it was not a privilege exclusive to patricians: any free-born male with right of citizenship went through this rite. what changed according to lineage was the pomp of the retinue, not the act itself.
the day was, without doubt, the proudest in the life of a young man and his family. cicero, in his letters, follows with the visible emotion of a father the preparations for his son’s toga virilis. it was the official entry into the world of men, with the right to vote, to contract, to inherit, to act in the courts. all the legal weight of rome descended on him at once, wrapped in white wool.
but that same legal package brought a clause nobody celebrated aloud. with the white toga on, the young man was a citizen in full standing; from the age of seventeen, and if he met the property census, he entered the iuniores liable to the levy (dilectus): he became available to be conscripted and sent to the legions, to garrison and to die on the frontiers of rome. the day on which the roman child became a man was, exactly, the day on which the state signed him in as available combatant. coming of age and the conscription roll, in the same ceremony.
