The ancient Roman festival that marked a boy’s transition toward adult status and honored Liber was called Liberalia.
Liberalia was held on March 17 in honor of Liber, the Roman god associated with wine, fertility, and freedom. Roman sources connect the festival with a family rite in which a boy who had reached an appropriate age could set aside the bulla, an amulet worn during childhood.
The boy could then dedicate the bulla to the household gods and begin wearing the toga virilis, the plain adult male toga. This act symbolized his movement into the civic world of adult Roman males.
Liberalia was also a public religious festival, so it should not be treated as only a private coming-of-age ceremony. The exact age and sequence of the family observance could vary, and Roman adulthood was shaped by legal and social status as well as ritual.