ABSTRACT
In 186 BCE, the Roman senate punished 7,000 worshippers of Bacchus for conspiring against the state, in what is known as the Bacchanalian conspiracy, a religious association of men and women, elites and non-elites, Romans and non-Romans accused, among other things, of engaging in acts of sexual deviancy. Such a secret co-existence posed a threat to moral decency and social order (Livy 39.8–19). After analysing the episode to identify elements of Hofstadter’s paranoid style, we then respond to the call for a comparative approach issued by Asprem and Dyrendal in their reconsideration of conspirituality as a conceptual framework useful for interpreting the narrative of the Bacchanalian conspiracy. While the sources, in true paranoid style, cast the conspiracy as an attack on Roman social, political, and cultural institutions, they simultaneously display a robust response by the elite, who become conspiracy theorists in their own right.
