Europe's inner demons

there were initiatory rites… To the religious element in them were added the delights of wine and feasts, that the minds of a larger number might be attracted. When wine had inflamed their minds, and night and the mingling of males with females, youth with age, had destroyed every sentiment of modesty, all varieties of corruption first began to be practised, since each one had at hand the pleasure answering to that to which his nature was more inclined… If any of them were disinclined to endure abuse or reluctant to commit crime, they were sacrificed as victims. To consider nothing wrong. . was the highest form of religious devotion among them.⁽³⁶⁾

But the Bacchanalia were not condemned simply as erotic and sometimes murderous orgies. The consul who had the task of enlightening the people about the danger is reported by Livy as follows:

Not yet have they revealed all the crimes to which they have conspired. . Daily the evil grows and creeps abroad. It is already too great to be purely a private matter: its objective is the control of the state. Unless you are on guard betimes, citizens, as we hold this meeting in the day-time, summoned by a consul, in accordance with law, so there can be one held at night. Now, as single individuals, they stand in fear of you, gathered here all together in this assembly: presently, when you have scattered to your homes and farms, they will have come together and they will take measures for their own safety and at the same time for your destruction: then you, as isolated individuals, will have to fear them as a united body. . Nothing is more deceptive in appearance than a false religion.⁽³⁷⁾

In other words, those who attended the Bacchanalia were regarded as conspirators aiming to seize political power; and the senate took stem measures. Decrees for the repression of the Bacchanalia were dispatched throughout the Italian provinces, and vast numbers of adherents of the cult — men and women, noble and plebeian— were executed or imprisoned. There has been much debate as to whether the Bacchanalia really needed suppressing, or whether the persecution was simply an exercise in government by terror. For our purposes the question is irrelevant. What the story shows beyond doubt is that by Livy’s time — that is to say, on the eve of the Christian era — erotic orgies of a more or less perverted kind belonged to the stereotype of a revolutionary conspiracy against the state. Directed against the Christians, the accusation of holding such orgies points in precisely the same direction as the accusation of cannibalism. By assimilating the Christian Agape to the Bacchanalia the pagan Romans were, once again, labelling Christians as ruthless conspirators, dedicated to overthrowing the state and seizing power for themselves.