The Roman Bulla: The Amulet of Freeborn Boys
The bulla, amulet of Roman children: shape and materials, Etruscan origins, the naming day, the toga of manhood and the accounts of Juvenal and Macrobius.
In Roman statues and reliefs one often sees children with a round locket hanging at the neck. This is the bulla, the amulet that the sons of free citizens wore from early infancy until they entered adulthood. More than an ornament, it was a sign of social status and a protection for the years considered most vulnerable, those in which a child was thought to be especially exposed to envy and malign forces.
Shape and materials
The bulla was made of two concave discs joined to form a small capsule, closed and hung on a chain or a cord. Inside it small objects believed to be protective could be placed, though the sources do not always specify what they were. Wealthy families had it made in gold, while poor ones made do with a knot or a little leather pouch. Juvenal, in his fifth satire, contrasts precisely the “Etruscan gold” with the poor boy's simple leather thong.
An Etruscan origin
Latin authors attributed an Etruscan origin to the bulla, and archaeological finds confirm it: decorated gold bullae have been found in Etruscan tombs, and figures wearing the bulla appear in the art of Etruria. Macrobius, in the Saturnalia, tells that King Tarquinius Priscus gave a gold bulla to his fourteen-year-old son who had killed an enemy in battle, thus beginning the custom. This is a legendary tradition, but it reveals the perceived link between Rome and its Etruscan neighbours.
From birth to the toga of manhood
The child received his name on the so-called dies lustricus, the ninth day after birth for boys and the eighth for girls, and it is around this time, in the common view of scholars, that the bulla was hung at his neck. He wore it throughout childhood, together with the purple-bordered toga praetexta. At about fifteen or sixteen, when he assumed the toga virilis, the young man laid aside the bulla and dedicated it to the Lares, the protective gods of the household.
On the Ara Pacis, the monument commissioned by Augustus and dedicated in 9 BC, some children in the procession are shown with the bulla at their necks, a detail that stresses their freeborn status and their membership of families of rank. Other bullae appear on bronze and marble portraits of children, as well as on the funerary reliefs of Roman families, where they often help to identify the deceased as a freeborn boy.
A sign of freedom
Originally the gold bulla is said to have been reserved for the sons of patricians, and it later extended to all the freeborn; the sons of freedmen, according to some sources, wore the leather version instead. Plutarch, in the Roman Questions, asks why boys wear the bulla and offers several explanations. According to Macrobius, generals celebrating a triumph also wore a bulla containing remedies against envy, confirming its protective value at moments of greatest public exposure.
The bulla thus combined three functions: it protected the child, declared his free status and connected him to the household and its gods. Laying it aside meant leaving childhood behind and entrusting that protection to the Lares, like a gift returned, on the day the boy fully entered the community of citizens.