THAT TOUCH OF PHRYGIA: ACCEPTANCE OF THE CYBELE

CULT IN REPUBLICAN LITERATURE

A thesis submitted to the faculty of the Classics Department,

San Francisco State University
In partial fulfillment of
The requirements for
The degree

Master of Arts in
Classics

by
Tom Wayne Lewis
San Francisco, California
May, 2002
 Copyright by
Tom Wayne Lewis
2002
 THAT TOUCH OF PHRYGIA: ACCEPTANCE OF THE
CYBELE CULT IN REPUBLICAN LITERATURE

Tom Wayne Lewis

San Francisco State University
2002

The Magna Mater is a figure whose cult was centered in the goddess’ temple on the Palatine Hill

in Rome. The cult of this deity existed in that city from its importation in 204 BCE until the

dissolution of Roman paganism, at the end of the fourth century CE—a period of no less than six

hundred years. Subsequent readings of the cult and its influence on Roman religion highlight

evidence for the unease and revulsion felt by the Romans for this ostensibly foreign cult. This

interpretation of the evidence stands in stark contrast with the fact that worship of the Magna

Mater took place, through regular ritual and festival practice, for the duration of the goddess’

presence in the city. The present work seeks to investigate the earliest literary evidence for the

cult’s existence in Rome— beginning with its importation in the final years of the Second Punic

War and ending with the last poets of the Augustan Principate—in order to evaluate the presence

of the goddess as an accepted figure in Roman society and state religion.

 4

PREFACE

This work represents the culmination of more than a decade’s research on the Cybele cult in
Rome. Societal and individual belief—and the associations such belief can produce within a
religious context—informs my academic inquiry. This serves as a motivating hypothesis to be
found throughout this paper. It is ultimately an articulated version of my initial question, upon
encountering the Magna Mater in Roman poetry for the first time: “how could the stern Romans
tolerate this deity and her Phrygian retinue for so long?” The answer, I have found, lies in the
Romans’ knack for syncretism and mythopoesis, a quality that served them both when they
stretched forth from Latium and adopted new gods into their pantheon, and when internal crises
demanded strong, dictatorial leadership partially legitimized through a new and highly imaginative
propaganda of associations. For five centuries, the Magna Mater served the Roman people and
their leaders well in both respects. This paper examines the formative period of the deep cultural
affiliation of the Romans with the goddess and her Phrygian priests.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Of course we know that “patience is a virtue.” With that in mind, I must acknowledge being
blessed to have worked on this project with the help of many virtuous people. Professor Pamela
Vaughn and Professor David Leitao encouraged me even after I appeared to have fallen off the
map. Dr. Eino Lyytinen and the Renvall Institute in Helsinki generously provided me with
resources while “off the map”—in Finland. And through it all I have relied on my dear wife
Susan, who stole me away to Europe and engineered our trips to Rome (including a failed attempt
to fake our way into the Vatican Library and a twilight stumble through Ostia Antica): this paper
could not have been produced without her tireless help and positive attitude through it all.
 5

CONTENTS

List of Figures ............................................................................................vii

Introduction..................................................................................................1

1. Staging Cybele........................................................................................21
Plautine Comedy at the aedes magnae matris...............................24
Terence: Playwright of the Megalensia? .......................................27
The Megalensian togatae................................................................31
Conclusion......................................................................................33

2. Processions and Ecstacies ......................................................................35

Parting the Veil of Mystery...........................................................37
Frenzy in the Streets......................................................................42
Catullus furens ...............................................................................52
Conclusion......................................................................................58

3. A Disturbance in the Games ..................................................................60

Conclusion......................................................................................69

Interlude .........................................................................................72

4. Cybele and the auctor res publicae renovatae.......................................75

Goddess of the Roman Diaspora ...................................................78
The fabula sacra of the Romans....................................................88
Cybele in Lyric Poetry...................................................................92
Goddess of the New Rome ..........................................................100
Conclusion....................................................................................104

5. Evaluating the Cybele Cult in Roman Literature..................................106

Notes ......................................................................................................108

Bibliography.............................................................................................128
 6

FIGURES

1. Asia Minor...............................................................................................9

2. Archaeological plan of the Palatine Hill .................................................13

3. The Troad...............................................................................................14

4. Temples of the Great Mother and Victory............................................22

5. A late first-century CE gravestone depicting Cybele..............................43

6. Cybele wearing a mural crown ...............................................................44

7. The southwest corner of the Palatine Hill..............................................47

8. Sketch of central Rome and the western corner of the Palatine .............76
 7

INTRODUCTION

The picture of the Cybele cult we know today is entirely syncretized, representing a diachronic

evolution of mythic tropes from (at least) three distinct ancient cultures: Phrygian, Greek, and,

finally, Roman. Of course each of these cultures evolved versions of the cult over time—and

eventually they merge into the “culture” of Christianity, through whose interpretation of ancient

paganism we must peer in order to view the reality of religious practice as it was nearly 2,000

years ago.

Thanks to the process of syncretism1—by which certain features of a religious system

are refined, highlighted, or suppressed in order to be adopted into a non-native context—we are

left with a variety of interpretations of the Magna Mater and her relevance to each culture within

which she was worshiped. Each interpretation adheres to a core of mythic and cultic narratives,

aitia, ιJεροvς λοvγ ος , rituals, at least superficially in common with the others. It is from their

differences that we are able to draw a sense of what aspects of the cult practice were important

(or at least relevant) to each culture exclusively.

When we consider the Roman cult of Cybele—the subject of this work—we should

acknowledge that much of our understanding of the cult comes to us through a handful of literary

descriptions (largely written by authors whose focus was some other topic) and in a very full
 8

(though hardly complete) archaeological and paleographical record.2 In order to complete the

picture of this cult and its significance to the Roman people, scholars have been forced to put the

fragmentary elements together, mosaic-style, and hope that the arrangement of individual pieces

was performed correctly. Interpretation of the fragments is often premature, due to what is to

modern morality the sensational character of the subject. Upon reflection, it becomes clear that

the pieces have traditionally been made to tell a story far removed from the intent that created the

primary texts, which serve as our earliest sources for the cult in Rome.

The cult of Cybele/Magna Mater existed in that city from its importation in 204 BCE until

the dissolution of Roman paganism, at the end of the fourth century CE—a period of no less than

six hundred years. The present work seeks to investigate the earliest literary evidence for the

cult’s existence in Rome—beginning with its importation in the final years of the Second Punic

War and ending with the last poets of the Augustan Principate—in order to evaluate the presence

of the goddess as an accepted figure in Roman society and state religion.

****

This paper was inspired by the ulterior motives that Sander Goldberg suggests plague modern

readings of ancient literary fragments:

This tendency to hurry over the evidence of fragments is in part a function of the
interpretive difficulties they present. These can be considerable, and also
discouraging . . . .The ancient scholars and antiquarians who cite the old epics are
rarely interested in the questions that concern modern critics. Yet the technical
problems inherent in the evidence as preserved are not the chief obstacles to
understanding these poems. Their reputations suffered most from the persistent
 9

habit of treating them in retrospect, of making them ancillary to larger, later

interpretations of someone or something else.3

While Goldberg considers the early evolution of a literary genre (epic), the present work is based

on a literary topos (the socio-mythological construct known as the Magna Mater cult) as it

occurred in middle and late Republican Rome. The fragments considered here begin with the

evidence for theatrical performance within the precinct of the Magna Mater’s temple on the

Palatine Hill, overlooking the Circus Maximus where the annual games and dramatic

performances of the ludi Megalenses were played every April in her honor. Instigated by the

question—can we understand the reception and transmission of the cult within popular Roman

culture, as the populace of the city responded and contributed to the cult’s spring festival?—the

research is based exclusively on the literary evidence from the end of the Second Punic War

(205/5 BCE) to the end of the reign of Rome’s first emperor, Augustus.

Treating the mythological trope that is the Roman Magna Mater, this paper constitutes a

literary history. As Goldberg defines it, such a work focuses on “the process of continuity and

change that determined the genre’s evolution,” with the purpose of getting “beyond the facts”

represented in the literary evidence, unearthing at length “the aesthetic and cultural conditions

that produced them.”4 Using the literary treatments of the Magna Mater extant in examples of

Latin literature—descriptions steeped both in “native” (Phrygian) and “Roman” traditions—I

propose to develop a literary history of the figure of Cybele, her Phrygian priests, and their

relationship with the Roman state and people. The aesthetic and cultural conditions discussed are
 10

intended to uncover the way Romans viewed the goddess, what the goddess “meant” to the

people of Rome, as their society developed over some two centuries.

****

Physically, this study is grounded almost exclusively in central Rome, within and around the

aedes Magnae Matris. The temporal dimensions of the work stretch from the late career of

Plautus (circa 191 BCE) through to the last great literary canonization of the cult’s mythic profile

with Ovid (Fasti, circa 15–20 CE).

Our literary evidence for the cult in this period is in some ways quite rich. We possess

detailed descriptions of the practice, priestly behavior, and its religious significance to the people

and state of Rome. The terminus post quem for the cult’s presence in Rome is certainly well

documented (in fact, the goddess’ coming to the city was adopted into the cult’s fabula sacra),

and it can be argued that the goddess’ long, secure residence in the city was largely due to the

people’s goodwill based on their memory of her miraculous lighting upon the shores of Latium.

Following the Augustan and Claudian religious reforms of the early Principate, the Magna Mater

was unquestionably accepted as one of the deities included in the Roman pantheon. This success

was soon derided in the slathering attacks early Christian writers made on her status, from which

we derive the largest extant body of literature describing the cult and its workings.5

The development of stories around the Cybele cult are significant, and they create a nicely

elaborated screen through which to view the real cult. Yet, just as the cult statue of Cybele was
 11

rumored to have a bare, black stone where its face should be,6 so our evidence affords us a finely

developed picture of the cult and its myth with figures that have been de-faced, their character,

motivation, dimension wiped clean by the passing ages. We are left with a mosaic picture laid

down and refined over 500 years of reinterpretation, crusted over with a thick layer of anti-pagan

persecution and slander. To view the picture in its “true” setting (if this is possible) requires one

to perform a serious cleaning and restoration of the original image.

We can stand in the temple precinct where Terence’s plays were performed, the shadowy

figure of Cybele staring down from within the cella of her temple; but we cannot say how those

plays were enacted, how Terence became such a playwright to have the bulk of his comedies

performed in the goddess’ annual festival. We can stumble across the dirt remains of the spina at

the center of the Circus Maximus (now an outsize soccer field for modern Romans), unaware that

the goddess’ figure, reclining “side-saddle” on a rampant lion, once took her place alongside other

spectacular statuary—all gazing stonily at the passing parade of chariots and racers. We can

imagine we hear the festal cadences of the galli’s song in Catullus’ treatment of the story of

Cybele and Attis (the only real example of the “galliambic” meter left to us), or visualize the

pompa Megalensis as described by Lucretius and Ovid—though the scene and its sounds must

always lie beyond view, out of earshot.

With all of the stories, legends, rumors, philosophical treatments, and aetiological

narratives hovering around Cybele—especially the goddess of the Republic—we might expect
 12

that more of substance would remain for us to sift through. However, our understanding of the

cult only truly begins with the golden age of Latin (circa 60 BCE–15 CE), after which period the

topoi surrounding this cult have been fixed, the goddess bound in thematic trappings particular to

her, and the recognizable Cybele can take shape for our consideration.

The following sections are intended to introduce the mythological and historical

backgrounds for the writing about the Magna Mater to be discussed in this work. As with many

ancient authors, the first question we will ask is “how could the Romans accept Cybele into their

city?” Next will be provided a historical overview of events leading up to the period in which the

bulk of Republican literature on Cybele was composed (i.e., mid- to late first century BCE),

followed by a brief discussion of writing on the goddess from the post-Republican, and post-

classical, period.

THE TROUBLE WITH CYBELE

There were certainly negative opinions of the Magna Mater in the Republican period, though

nothing remains of these in our Latin sources. A Greek author of the late Republic, Dionysius of

Halicarnassus, provides a very clear distinction of Roman traditional practices with the foreign

religions that had descended upon Rome by the first century BCE. To make his point, Dionysius

chooses the oldest—and to his mind the most extreme—example of a foreign cult at Rome, that

of Cybele.7
 13

With its cult center maintained in the city of Rome for nearly 200 years at the time

Dionysius is writing, the simple fact of Cybele’s continued presence in Rome creates a cultural

and historical problem that he does not recognize, or else finds irrelevant to the central question

underlying his account: how could the people of Rome intentionally import so alien a religion?

To his mind ουjκ ευjπρεπηvı —“not appropriate, out of place”—how could such a cult survive

throughout the Roman Republic, only increasing in prominence within the Empire?

While commenting on the exoticism of the Φρυvγ ια οjργιασμαv and the senatorial ban on

citizens participating, he does not report what must have been the general feeling of national

pride his native Romans felt toward this alien goddess and her priests. As we shall see, a

generation before Dionysius wrote these words, Cicero highlighted the goddess and her rituals in

a speech meant to show how closely allied Cybele was to the Roman state and its security.8 Still

other authors from this same period describe the goddess as a key figure in the foundation myth

of the city.9

Two generations after Dionysius, under the rule of Claudius, native-born Romans were

indeed allowed to walk in procession, play flutes, beg alms and worship the Phrygian goddess at

her festival. Soon after this important change, physical, and literary evidence show the religion

evolving: the goddess herself is no longer the center of worship in the first centuries CE. Rather,

those faithful to the Phrygian cult send their vows and prayers for everlasting life more often to
 14

the goddess’ self-mutilated consort Attis, now an apotheosized and resurrected god. While these

developments fall outside the scope of this paper, we will meet Attis in Catullus’ carmen 63.10

****

When writing about Cybele, virtually every ancient author touches on themes and symbols far

older than the Roman cult of the Magna Mater. We have already seen elements of this in

Dionysius’ summary of the “Phrygian cult practices” forbidden to Romans. An overview of the

pre-Roman myth of the Great Mother should be drawn at this point, in order to understand the

stories that inspired (or at least justified) the cult’s practices, and to underscore the “difficult”

aspects of the cult practices that provide our authors material.

The goddess known in Rome as the Magna Mater appears to be a very old divinity.11

Cult objects recognizable as an “Earth Mother” can be found throughout modern Turkey and the

Near East, some of which can be dated to the sixth millennium BCE—though whether these

represent a goddess, or a revered aspect of femininity, is a matter that has recently come under

fire.12

The goddess cult and its myths evolved over millennia. Cybele can be seen as a goddess

“gestating” within the prehistoric cultures of Anatolia, transplanted first into the Greek world

through early direct contact around the period that saw the composition of the Epic Cycle (circa

1000–700 BCE). There were Asian tales and stereotypes for the goddess, which were overlaid
 15

with Greek accounts.13 A complex of mythical interpretations ultimately arose with the Romans,

whose culture and religious practices was steeped in Greek mythology.14

We find that Cybele originates as a mother goddess in Phrygia, a region in central Asia

Minor (modern Turkey). Hittite and Aramaic sources indicate that the name was probably like

KUBABA, although MATAR appears in many of the earliest sources.15 Vermaseren finds that the

elements common to all spellings of the goddess’ name are KU-BE or KU-BA, which reflects, in his

opinion, the “cubic” nature of the meteorite allegedly worshipped as the goddess.16 The name

may reflect a kind of lallwörter, wherein syllables are repeated as a token of endearment or

intimacy (hence “mama,” “papa”). Whatever her name, she was the “mother of the earth” and

“mother of all things,” a title attested from at least 2,000 BCE. Her worship took on the features

of wild nature, in keeping with her association with the universe in its primal state. She is

depicted in the company of wild animals, lions or lionesses in particular.17

Figure 1: Asia Minor

(source: Suzanne Bernard, “Cities and
Locations of Ancient Greece,” http://plato-
dialogues.org/tools/loc/phrygia.htm)

Upon translation into the Greek world, her name becomes Κυβηvβη or Κυβεvλη. Her

aspect as goddess of wild things led to an association with the existing attribute in Greek of the
 16

ποvτνια θηρω'ν, the “maid of wild beasts” often identified as Artemis.18 Her traditional haunts in

Asia Minor were mountains and other uncivilized places: she occupies various peaks, such as

Ida, Dindymus, Cybele, and Berecynthus, as well as presiding over the Troad, the setting for the

Homer’s Trojan War.19 The Greeks considered Cybele identical to their Rhea, who was μηvτηρ

θεω'ν—“mother of the gods”) and consort of Kronos, and eventually the title “Rhea” was used of

Cybele herself.

****

Having named and placed the goddess, we turn to her ιJεροvı λοvγ οı. The following is most

generously called a pastiche of the thousand years of mythic development in the goddess’

biography, and is drawn primarily on late pagan and early Christian sources.20

In the highlands of Phrygia, Cybele falls asleep and reverts to the shape of a stone
peak. Zeus attempts to rape the goddess, but only succeeds in ejaculating on the
“fertile” ground nearby. An androgynous child, Agdistis, springs forth,
immediately posing a problem for the gods, who fearing Agdistis’ powers to self-
procreate. They enlist Dionysus to put an end to this threat to their supremacy.
The wine-god drugs Agdistis, who falls asleep under a pine tree, and Dionysus
ties the androgyne’s male genitals to the tree. When Agdistis awakes, he leaps up
and, castrated, and bleeds to death. The gushing blood impregnates the ground, and
a pomegranate tree grows from it. Later, a Phrygian princess appears and picks
the fruit, carrying it home in her apron. On arriving back at the palace, she notices
one of the pomegranates has disappeared, and, later still, she realizes she is
pregnant. Her father, King Sangarios, disapproves, but the princess gives birth to
 17

Attis. Sent into the mountains (where he can presumably do little harm), the
young shepherd meets Cybele while tending his flocks. The goddess and Attis fall
in love, there is a romantic scene, and Attis vows his eternal love to Cybele.
However, Attis’ eye soon wanders, and the omnipresent goddess spies the boy
dallying with the river nymph Sangaritis. Attis realizes that Cybele’s infuriated
gaze is upon him, and finds that he can never escape her. Driven mad, he ranges
through the wilderness and collapses under a pine tree. Attis then takes up a sharp
stone and “removes the parts of his body which were the cause of his infidelity.”21
He dies from the wound, and flowers spring from his blood.

Here are many of the themes revisited by authors who treat the “primordial” aspect of Cybele:

super-fertility, the maddened and maddening gaze of the goddess, castration, blood, and pine

trees (reflected in a later festival, the Dendrophoria, which will be brought into the cult practice

after the mid-first century CE).

The tale inspires—or at least explains retroactively—the single defining aspect of

Cybele’s cult as it appeared in the Greco-Roman world: the rite of public emasculation, practiced

by the highest initiates of Cybele. Our authors were hard-pressed to understand this ritual, and

we often find them offering theories as to why Cybele’s priests must be eunuchs.22 The act of

castration and its subsequent alteration of a priest’s lifestyle has been explained as symbolic

insurance of permanent chastity, as well as “the acquisition of magical or religious faculties which

are denied to men who retain their virility.”23 Roller, however, finds the opposite:

It may be that the goddess’s principal devotees, namely, her priests, were
expected to make a permanent commitment to sexual chastity through castration
 18

. . . .[however], we can see that the myth’s rationale for castration is exactly the
reverse of cult practice: the Mother’s priests did not castrate themselves in
imitation of Attis; rather, the tradition of eunuch priests was an old one in
Anatolia, and the myth was developed to explain this tradition by imputing the
action to a god, Attis.24

Whatever the reason for their castration, the priests inspired the most interest in the Roman

populace, to judge by the amount of Latin writing produced to describe or explain their behavior.

We may note in passing that transvestitism—nearly as attractive a trademark of the

Phrygian priesthood as the self-castration for ancient authors—does not appear in the ιJεροvı λοvγ οı

above, although many authors attest to the feminine garb the worn by Cybele’s priests.25 The trend

in representing the priests, known as galli (singular, gallus), may have drawn on their “unmanned”

nature as answer enough for why they should wear women’s clothing. They were commonly

referred to as “half-men” or “half-women” in the classical period.26

****

While the Phrygians provided an intriguing subject for Roman authors, the web of associations

present in the earliest times after Cybele’s arrival in the city proved to be equally fruitful.

Seeking divine aid against the invading Carthaginians, Rome turned to an oracle found in the

Sibylline Books—later confirmed by the oracle at Delphi—that called on the Romans to seek out

“the Idaean Mother” in times of trouble.27 Obtained from the Hellenistic king of Pergamon, she

was brought to Rome in 204 BCE, and was initially housed in the temple of Victory on the

Palatine.28 Later, her own temple was built on an adjacent plot and dedicated by M. Junius

Brutus on April 10, 191 BCE.29 Cybele’s presence in the city at this time was symbolic, an
 19

association with victory that was actual as well as supernatural.30 Beyond this, the very position

of her temple represents a view toward a broader victory spanning the archaic beginnings and

future development of Rome: the Magna Mater becomes a vehicle for presenting the imminent

post-war “rebirth” of the city to the population.

Figure 2: Archaeological
plan of the southwestern
corner of the Palatine
Hill. Note that the
Temple of the Great
Mother faces due south,
in the direction of the
Circus Maximus.
(source: Claridge, 124)

Further associations would in time connect the goddess with the era of Rome’s

foundation and its golden age. Her temple, the aedes Magnae Matris, was established within the

Germalus area of the Palatine, a portion of the hill that also held the original huts of Romulus.

The name of Rhea, shared by both Cybele and Rhea Silvia—the human mother of the twins,

Romulus and Remus—may have been recognized as symbolic in the first years after her arrival to

the city.31
 20

Because of her connection with Mount Ida, a peak located in the south of the Troad,

Cybele was also known as “Ilia.” From this the Roman people could claim the title Iliades—a

generic name for children of Ilium/Troy. According to legend, the Roman race originated with

Aeneas, the last prince of Troy, who, escaping the sack of Troy, was destined to “rule the men

of Troy in power—his sons’ sons and the sons born in future years.”32 Again, we find further

correspondences, as the “goddess of Mount Ida” literally overshadows the Trojan plain. The

goddess therefore has a bearing on the life of Aeneas, the progenitor of the Roman people.

Figure 3: The Troad.

(source: Carlos Parada, “Greek Mythology Link,”
http://homepage.mac.com/cparada/GML/Troy.html)

All of this leads to the general association of Cybele with the primeval glory of early

Rome: at some point she is accepted as an ancient figure in the Roman pantheon. Having been

withdrawn from her people for a time as they were sent into exile with the fall of Troy, she was

restored to them in the latter days of the third century BCE. Her presence in Rome would hearken
 21

back not only to the simple heroic past of Romulus, but to a pre-Roman civilization known

throughout the Mediterranean as the prize of antiquity. While there is no explicit indication in

early histories of the period to suggest that bringing Cybele to Rome was meant to bring back a

golden age, 33 the potential for ties with the legendary past may have been very real in the Roman

subconscious. Her connection both with Troy and with the beginnings of Rome, augmented by

the circumstances of her importation, must be considered as likely reasons for the decision to

allow Cybele into the city.

****

The preceding sought to answer, at least in part, Dionysius’ inferred question: how could such a

cult, ουjκ ευjπρεπηvı , be allowed to practice within Rome? The Romans appear to have identified

the alien goddess and her priests with their own recent history, associating the Magna Mater at

least with the victory over Carthage in the Second Punic War. It is perfectly likely that other

factors—identification with the early history of Rome, or even with its epic antecedents in

Troy—had some resonance in the period from the goddess’ introduction into the city to the first

clear treatment of her cult in the first century BCE. The best answer to his critical description of

the cult is, of course, its longevity in the city and the rich literary works the goddess inspired in

authors of Dionysius’ own day and after.

 22

EVOLUTIONS

Roman society evolved dramatically in the two centuries from the Second Punic War to the

accession of Augustus as princeps of the Roman state. Alliances in the east, quasi-colonialism in

North Africa, and military expansion in the west were all pursuits of the nascent world power.

Throughout the changes in Rome, Cybele was not left forgotten in the shadows of her

temple on the Palatine. While there is no evidence from this time that her cult was receiving

greater acclaim or acceptance in Rome,34 records of the temple’s restoration are our best proof

that the cult was not neglected in the second century BCE, and in fact enjoyed the patronage of

political figures. When the aedes burned to the ground in 111 BCE, the Romans were on the brink

of war with Jugurtha, the Numidian king in North Africa. Notwithstanding the international

tensions, Cybele’s complex was restored in 109 under the direction of Q. Caecilius Metellus.

Perhaps the earlier war with African Carthage brought back memories of the circumstances that

had brought the Magna Mater to the city, and in any event it was important to maintain the

city’s divine favor. With the temple’s restoration, the presence of Cybele and her Phrygian

entourage was reconfirmed, and in the same year Metellus was named consul35—an indication of

the political capital such patronage afforded.

The political climate in Rome at the end of the second century was hardly secure,

however: the system’s internal imbalances coupled with a tendency to reject reform were

beginning to break the Republic. Beginning with the murder of Ti. Gracchus (133 BCE) and
 23

concluding with the Battle of Actium in 31, the century saw the Republic spinning into a death

spiral. In the end, the functions of the system were kept formally intact, while the core of

Republican consciousness was gutted.36

At the same time, Latin literature was reaching its first true peak. The period saw the rise

of Cicero, Varro, Lucretius, and Catullus—all of whom wrote, within the span of two decades,

the first great literature treating the Roman Magna Mater.

****

After Actium, Gaius Octavianus Caesar indisputably commanded the powers of the Empire.

Standing on the shoulders of Julius Caesar, his adoptive father, Octavian either inherited or

earned in his own right such political influence as had never been seen in the Republic. In 27 BCE

Octavian—now dubbed “Augustus” by the Senate—declared the Republic restored and formally

abdicated his powers over the state. However, this claim did nothing other than strengthen his

position. Instead of accepting the powers of dictator in perpetuum, as Julius Caesar had boldly

done, Augustus acted as a Republican statesman was expected by relinquishing power.37 This act,

in keeping with the ancient anti-regal sentiment in Rome, brought Augustus wide acceptance

while doing little to change his real standing in the political sphere.

Supreme in political might, the princeps senatus—a private citizen who maintained the

tribunician imperium —could dictate the workings of the Roman state, as well as calling for

literary propaganda to justify his rule.38 Latin writers of this latter-day golden age were induced
 24

by Augustus’ patronage to formalize the picture of Rome for themselves and for generations

after. This included the mythic profile associated with Cybele and her cult, described above.

With the early years of the Principate, Cybele’s ιJεροvı λοvγ οı becomes enmeshed in the

Roman fabula sacra, canonized and augmented in works of a number of Augustan authors of epic

(Virgil) or lyric poetry (Horace and Propertius), or of history (Livy). This period of refining

Cybele’s mythic and literary profile ends with Ovid’s “calendar of religious practices at Rome,”

the Fasti, which laid the capstone on the genre of Republican literature devoted to the Magna

Mater. Those who come after—Martial, Juvenal, Apuleius, and others—owe their depictions of

the cult and the galli to the texts of their Augustan forebears.

The same could be said of authors within the early Christian Church, whose motivation

was to compare the depravity of the pagan religions with the sanctity of their own faith. In these

later works were preserved the accretions of mythic identification that had been applied,

rearranged, and transmitted for millennia. By this point (second–fifth centuries CE), however, the

blending of traditions and anachronistic leveling among disparate “Cybele narratives” had

obscured whatever certain account of the goddess there had been in its original,39 Phrygian

manifestation. When Arnobius or Eusebius express moral outrage at the sources of certain

repulsive acts of the Magna Mater’s worshippers (which they painstakingly describe), 40 we feel

the acute “lateness” of these accounts. Cybele and Attis here are the constructions of early
 25

medieval minds, always to be rebuked, not the fully realized mythic figures whose relationship

with classical Rome appears so crisply in the works of Lucretius, Catullus, Virgil, or Ovid.

****

The goddess holds a place in the classical mind for at least a millennium. Cybele enters the Greek

world (analogized with Rhea) at the time of the composition of the Homeric Hymns (eighth

century BCE). She exists within classical Mediterranean cultic worship through the advent of the

Roman empire, finally absorbed41 by the nascent Christian faith, her worship outlawed with

Theodosius’ edict of 392 CE.42

Late and post-classical interpretations of the cult’s practice were based on fuzzy

readings, interpretations, and excoriations based on eyewitness accounts, mythical and literary

conflations of both the ancient world and the modern, as well as any number of disparate cultural

and religions viewpoints through which the cult was beheld and on which commentary was

based. This statement can be made for the early Church Fathers’ condemnation of the cult in the

same breath as we criticize the scholarly work of the nineteenth and early twentieth century.43

We will see in the following chapters that such interpretations do not accord with the literary

treatments of Cybele and her cult composed in the first two centuries of her presence in Rome.

Obviously, if the Romans felt horrified by the cult’s practices at any time in their history, evidence

from this earlier period should resonate with the offended sensibilities of the Roman people

through the works of the extant authors from that time. When treated as a marginal subject, the cult

of the Magna Mater appears in the Republican period as an oddity, an exotic subject for authors to

color their works. When discussed directly, the goddess and her priests invoke something like awe,
 26

and most often this feeling is coupled with a strong identification with the history and grandeur of

the Roman civilization.

 27

1. STAGING CYBELE

Mira, sed et scena testificata loquar.44

A marvel, but one corroborated on the stage.

The people of Rome would have experienced the Magna Mater first as a figure linked with

Victory: victory over Hannibal’s forces in Italy, then over Carthage in Africa. When she first

came to Rome, it was as a guest of the goddess Victoria on the Palatine. With the dedication of

her own temple thirteen years later, the structure now “dwarfed the shrines already present in

that precinct.”45 She would come to “dwarf” the deities housed within those shrines as well,

becoming a figure steeped in Roman national identity even as she represented an alien within the

city walls.46

Cybele was as much identified with her annual spring ludi as she was with the city’s

recent victory over Carthage; originally, the two ideas were equivalent, for the Megalensian games

were declared to mark that victory, public events that every April celebrated concretely the

victory she had brought to Rome. 47 While these festivals began with her arrival—or else soon

after the end of the Second Punic War in 202 BCE—the first attested performance of a drama at

the ludi Megalenses was given in 191 BCE, at the dedication of the goddess’ own temple. In this

time the Roman people clamored for festivals, craving both athletic and theatrical spectacles.48

They had developed a taste for Greek drama and poetry in the years of the Punic Wars—but in

its evolution that taste was defined on strictly Roman terms.

 28

To mark the dedication of the aedes in 191, the aediles chose Plautus’ Pseudolus. The

production notice (didascalia) accompanying the text informs us that the play was premiered at

the ludi Megalenses. Further didascaliae attached to another Plautine comedy, and to four plays

by Terence, indicate that these works were premiered at different Megalensiae, down to 161,

with the performance of Terence’s Eunuchus.49

Figure 4: Temples of the Great Mother

(left) and Victory (reconstruction of the
area, ca. 200 CE). Note the artificial plaza
that covers an underpass (the clivus
Victoriae) leading to the base of the
Palatine hill. According to Claridge, this
space held “a temporary stage erected in
front of the temple. The audience sat on
the (now missing) temple steps, which
spread out on both sides to embrace a
wide forecourt.”
(source: Claridge, 127)

We lose track of dramatic performances in any of the Roman festivals after the death of

Terence a few years later.50 Not only that: after Terence the tradition of composing and

performing “fabulae palliatae”—a Roman equivalent of the Greek New Comedy of Menander

and his contemporaries—changed into what became known as “fabulae togatae.”51 A direct

descendant of the earlier form, the togata plays were now set in a determinedly Roman
 29

landscape, transplanted from the stylized Greek landscape of the palliata.52 We possess only

fragments—mostly single lines and some titles—from this togata tradition.

When taken as evidence within this paper’s inquiry in the Cybele cult, the information

presented above is tantalizing. The play’s titles, both for palliatae and togatae, seem to reflect a

pattern.53 Perhaps a subgenre of comedies, beginning with Plautus54 and carried over to Terence’s

works, adopted the ludi Megalenses as a stage on which Rome could interact with the cult and

the goddess, through dramatic performance. This tradition continued with the togatae

plays—perhaps coming closer to telling the miraculous tale of Cybele’s arrival in Rome, a

picturesque anecdote related by Livy and Ovid.

If we could draw a connection between the texts in the plays, the didascaliae associating

those works with the Megalensia, and the experience of the Roman public as an audience before

the aedes, we might gain a better understanding of how early Roman comedies were composed,

put on, and received by the populace horum caussa agitur spectatorum fabula.55 At the same

time we might peer into the workings of this new cult in Rome, identifying the typology used by

state officials to present it as a new participant within the fabric of Roman paganism. This

evidence for a “Megalensian” play type will be considered in this chapter.

 30

PLAUTINE COMEDY AT THE AEDES MAGNAE MATRIS

As a cheerleader for comedy’s bawdy freedoms and simple pleasures, Segal is

interested above all in the sense of community created by comic laughter. It’s not
always easy for him to reconcile this focus with the fact that comedy often builds its
community through cruelty.56

Can we expect to see this comic “cruelty” presented against the backdrop of the “cruel and

unusual” cult practices (i.e., castration, transvestitism, etc.) that were part of the Cybele cult at

Rome? As we shall see, a century after her temple’s dedication, Latin authors took up themes of

alienness, exoticism, and cruelty in their treatment of the cult’s practices. Is this a vein of popular

perceptions that stretches throughout the goddess’ tenure in the city, such that later authors were

tapping into an existing system of stereotypes for portraying Cybele and her cult? The earliest

association of popular culture in Rome with Cybele may offer some illumination.

****

The first play we know to have been performed at the Megalensia is Plautus’ Pseudolus,

premiered in April 191 BCE57 as part of the inaugural season of the games. The evidence for this

lies solely in the didascalia for the play, a kind of production note attached to the surviving text:

58
M. IUNIO. M. FIL. PR. URB. AC. ME.

performed at the Megale(n)sia under Marcus Junius,

son of Marcus, praetor of the urbs

According to Ritschl, “AC” can be read as “FAC”—that is, “done” or “performed”—while “ME”can

be understood as aed(ibus) acta Megalesiis: “performed at the temple for the Megalesia.” The
 31

proof, from this limited evidence, that the Pseudolus was the inaugural play of the ludi lies

beyond the scope of this paper.59 The work is generally accepted as one of a series of plays

performed at the Megalensia.60

What other internal evidence marks the Pseudolus as “Megalensian”? As we shall see in

the plays of Terence, there is no direct reference to the context in which the performance takes

place. This should not be surprising, for public performances of so rigid a style as Greek New

Comedy—even when translated into Latin—were not expected to be self-referential, or to

highlight the specifics of the performance environment.61 They were self-contained, only

“punching through” the fourth wall in characters’ direct address to the audience in the prologue

and conclusion, as well as at other points. In each case, the playwright breaks through from the

comic stage to the outside world for comic effect and/or to move the plot along while avoiding

redundant exposition. We see this when Pseudolus refuses to explain to Calidorus, his master,

how he was able to finagle a letter from a Macedonian servant. The audience already knows how

he did it:

horum caussa haec agitur spectatorum fabula:

hi sciunt qui hic adfuerunt; vobis post narravero.62

This play’s being put on for their benefit:

they know what happened—I’ll tell you later.

This is hardly illustrative of the scene beyond and around the stage where Plautus’ work is being

acted. In fact, it is impossible to glean any information about the performance or the attending
 32

audience from such evidence: it ispart of the on-stage business, and therefore “informationally

generic.”

What of indirect, inferred references to place? At least one of Terence’s plays offers a

“walking tour of Rome” in topographical descriptions within the text, thus breaking the action of

the play “out” of the stage world (that is, a stylized Greek cityscape) and into the audience’s

reality.63 Perhaps the same study can be done in the Plautine topographical descriptions,64 but

nowhere does he appear to specifically describe the aedes Magnae Matris.

Lacking better evidence to underscore the hypothesis that the producers and the

audiences for such a play as the Pseudolus would be “in on the joke,” we should avoid

overreading neutral or ambiguous passages in the text. Perhaps Ballio is speaking of the temple

when he mentions his “domus.”65 Perhaps the sequence describing the celebrating slave and

master in a drunken revel, ending with the slave “begging” money from Simo (the master’s father)

refers to the practice of begging stips (alms) that was part of the Phrygian priesthood’s festival

practice.66 But all of this is speculation, reading too much into too sparse allusions, and forcing

the text to read in accordance with a theory instead of the other way around.

To be sure, there is a more fundamental reason for a lack of evidence for performative

context in this, the first of several “Megalensian” plays: if the Pseudolus is in fact the comedy

performed as part of the inauguration of the ludi Megalenses, it is a piece meant to fill a program

that introduced the goddess and her new Palatine temple to the audience, the populace of Rome.
 33

Whatever they knew of the goddess and her cult up to the end of the early second century, this

experience is the closest meeting the general public had yet enjoyed with the Idaean Mother and

her flock of priests for which we have evidence.67 As such, any overt (or hidden) reference to

Cybele and her priesthood might have been lost on the crowd—and losing the audience’s

attention, as shown in the failed productions of Terences’ Hecyra, could be fatal to a comedy.

This much must have been known to Plautus, who was a seasoned playwright by the

190s68—perhaps such risks could be fruitfully taken (by Terence?), after the Romans had become

accustomed to the typology of the goddess’ cult.

****

For the present study, the Pseudolus serves us only as a terminus post quem in the chronology of

Megalensian dramatic performances—and then only because of the unusual survival of a

performance notice for this play. The next (and only other) playwright whose works are

traditionally associated with the ludi Megalenses is Terence, who might fairly be dubbed “the

Megalensian playwright,” if we are to believe the regularity with which his plays were chosen as

part of that festival’s program.

TERENCE: PLAYWRIGHT OF THE MEGALENSIA?

We have seen that, of Plautus’ 21 plays, only two come down to us with performance notices.

One of these, the Pseudolus, is connected with the inaugural performance of the ludi Megalenses
 34

in 191. This information can be contrasted with the record of Terence’s works, all of which

possess quite elaborate didascaliae (perhaps too elaborate to be authentic?). Of Terence’s six

plays, the first four were premiered (or nearly premiered, in the case of the Hecyra) at the

Megalensia: Andria (166), Hecyra (first attempt, 165), Heautontimoroumenos (163), and

Eunuchus (161). The balance of his works—Phormio (161), Adelphoe (160), and the second and

third performances of Hecyra (both in 160)—were premiered at either the Roman Games

(Hecyra (3)) or at the funeral games of L. Aemilius Paullus (Phormio, Adelphoe, Hecyra (2)). 69

Terence’s biography includes some information about how plays in his lifetime were

chosen and staged at festivals.70 The curule aediles played a central role in the production of

festivals, acting as producers and casting directors for both the athletic and dramatic

performances. According to Suetonius, Terence’s “big break” occurred when the aediles of 168

encountered the young (?) playwright and, unsure of his writing abilities, sent him to Caecilius

for that elder comic author’s opinion.71 Caecilius almost immediately realized the quality of the

work (assumed traditionally to be the Andria), giving him a hearty acclamation non sine magna

. . . admiratione—“not without great admiration.” We are told that this stamp of approval

marked the launch of Terence’s career—though it was two years before his first play was

produced.72 The aediles in charge of the Megalensian games are listed in each Terentian

didascalia. Based on their record, and the traditional role of the aediles in a play’s selection for

state-sponsored performance, we might observe that Terence became typecast early in his career
 35

as an author of plays that were suitable for (or ex post scripto geared to?) performance at the

Megalensia.

Further evidence of the relationship with the festival lies in the (apparently) loaded titles

of Terence’s Megalensian plays:

• Andria—“The Woman of Andros,” or the αjνδροvı /αjνηvρ/“man” + -IA; i.e.,

“the feminized male”

• Heautontimoroumenos—“The Self-Tormentor” (possibly a nod to the self-castrated,

flagellating flock of Cybele’s Phrygian priests?)

• Eunuchus—“The Eunuch” (an allusion to the priesthood?)

Are these in-jokes? Would Terence’s audience associate his plays (or their titles) with the

typology of the cult, whose festival was hosting these comedies? Would they have heard

advertisements for the plays, and recognized the connection? If there was a public announcement

of the dramatic program, it might have read:

Eunuchus, a new play of Terence, to be performed at the

ludi Megalenses in honor of the Great Mother of the Gods.

Or perhaps the audience was kept in the dark about the upcoming comedy, finding not a little

amusement when the work’s title was announced before the play got underway?73

****

Thanks to the evidence available in the didascaliae, Suetonius’ vita Terenti, and more oblique

information related to dramatic performance in Rome, we know enough to ask such

questions—but are left with no satisfactory data to pose answers.74 When we turn to the texts
 36

themselves, we experience the same lack of information relevant to the present study: few clear

indications of the venue lie within Terence’s plays, and where direct address to the audience

occurs, it is precisely where we would expect it to be, based on the tradition of his predecessors.

In the Pseudolus, action revolves around the comic plotting of a “false slave.” Terence’s

Megalensian works are named for a slave girl from the isle of Andros (Andria); a father who,

believing he has sent his dear son to certain death “in Asiam ad regem militatum abiit,”75 indulges

in “self-torment” as penance for his bad parenting (Heautontimoroumenos); an Athenian youth

who dresses up like a eunuch in order to gain access to his beloved (Eunuchus); and a mother-in-

law (Hecyra).76 If there had been anything like an “in-joke” present in the plays’ titles, it clearly

did not extend to the content of the works, or else is buried too deep for further inquiry in this

direction. Even the “eunuch” of the play doesn’t behave like one: his state of false castration is

merely a plot device, allowing the aroused youth to obtain the object of his desire.77

Reading too much into the characters or what they say proves as fruitless as the attempt

to draw Megalensian imagery out of the Pseudolus. Heautontimoroumenos features a slave-girl

named “Phrygia,” but there is no way to know that her presence on the stage would be seen as an

association with the priesthood and cult. There are many other slaves in Roman comedy who are

named for their homeland, without any sense that they have been placed on stage as tokens

representative of their place of origin. Likewise, when we observe the plays of Terence

performed at venues other than the Megalensia, we are left with no internal evidence related to
 37

sponsorship and the like: perhaps Phormio and Adelphoe, both performed at Aemilius Paullus’

funeral, might be scoured for associations with that great figure of Roman military prowess, but it

would again be stretching the material to cover areas of theory not supported in the larger context

of the works and the purpose for which they were written.

****

Terence seems to be the Republican author most closely associated by tradition with the

Megalensia, and, superficially, his comedies’ titles appear to associate the works with the

practices of the priesthood. Upon closer examination, the works do not yield any associations of

the kind, and we are left to wonder if Terence’s contemporaries perceived him as an important

contributor to the comedies performed at the ludi Megalenses. All extant commentators and

writers on this playwright—in particular Donatus, Cicero, and Suetonius—are silent as to this

relationship with the cult festival. Beyond this silence we find only the evidence of the

didascaliae and the odd relevance of the play’s titles to the venue in which they were first

performed: any further claims to thematic association are impossible to prove.

THE MEGALENSIAN TOGATAE

Two plays with the identical title, Megalensia, performed one generation after Terence, are

attested. One comes from T. Quinctius Atta (died 77 BCE), the other from Lucius Afranius (late

second century BCE).

 38

Beyond the evidence for these titles and authors, we possess very little to tell us more

about the production or venue—let alone the plot, characters, and themes—connected with these

plays. We might assume the two were performed at the ludi Megalenses. Perhaps by the time

togatae had taken the stage over from the palliata plays, a tradition had been established of

performing stories based on the ιJεροvς λοvγ ος of the Cybele cult. This would lead to the statement

in Ovid, quoted above, referring to the “miracle” of the entrance of the goddess into Rome, hardly

believable but for its depiction on stage. Unfortunately, a link between staged works and Ovid’s

blurb exists nowhere else in our extant literature.

Both remnants of the plays offer little to enlighten us. The text of Afranius’ Megalensia

is presumably earlier than that of Atta:

. . . . exequias cántitant.78
. . . . they’re often singing the funeral rites.

Atta’s surviving text provides us a whole sentence, though it makes little sense, lacking context:

Nempe adstat sinus apud mensam, ubi sermo solet

Suboriri seditiosus.79

Of course the hollow in the table helps

where conversation’s wont to bubble up rebellious.

For each passage, we are given less reason to associate the works with the Megalensia than with

the plays of Terence and Plautus. At least here the textual tradition has preserved the title,

which, for lack of any substantial text or production notice, serves to link the plays with the ludi.

****
 39

The survival of the titles for these plays poses the only evidence for a post-Terentian tradition of

works about (and staged for?) the Cybele cult in Republican Rome. While Wiseman has argued

that Catullus’ carmen 63 was written for live recitation at the festival,80 there is very little

evidence for thematic consistency between the plays produced in the second century and

performances of the sort Catullus may have participated in around 60 BCE. As we have observed

throughout this chapter, the hallmark of early literature associated with the Cybele cult at

Rome—down to the works of Varro and Lucretius—is a lack of valuable evidence. If more

complete sections of the Megalensia comedies of Atta and Afranius ever come to light, this may

change. For the time being, the fact that they composed such works provides little information

for our study of the perception of the cult by the Roman people and authors in the Republican

period.

CONCLUSION

Can we find any connections between the content of these “Megalensian” plays and the ritual

context in which they were produced? Consider any modern Broadway musical or play for

comparanda: the great majority of these works do not contain references to the context in which

they are being performed.81

Yet the Roman dramatic festivals were only partly the age’s version of “Broadway”; they

were also, in equal measure, something akin to the Roman Catholic Mass.82 Perhaps we should
 40

view the palliatae as precursors to the medieval Christian mystery plays? But then, it proves

futile to seek out elements of sanctitas, pietas, etc., embedded in these ribald, elegant translations

of Greek New Comedy for the Roman audience and the state religion of Roman paganism.

The ritual significance of the plays lies in their performance, in the context of the

ludi—not in their content, or even in the nested allegories and themes to be found there. They are

at root entertainments, not entertaining sermones (διvδαγματα?) on the pagan deity or religious

superstructure they participated in celebrating. No, the celebration of the deity and its position

within the pagan religion came in the form of the entertainment itself.83

The content of Plautus and Terence’s plays—including their titles—is therefore irrelevant

when it comes to their premiere venue. That there appears to be a connection between some titles

must be only this—the appearance of a connection. Lacking any better evidence allowing for the

claim that Terence, his troupe, the producing aediles, or somebody involved with his plays was

trying to point up the Megalensian festival and the play’s role there, we can say no more about

the conscious association of the play with its venue of performance.84

 41

2. PROCESSIONS AND ECSTASIES

It is unlikely that the magistrates realized at first the ecstatic and

orgiastic nature of the cult . . . .85

The undisguised contempt of the Romans for the Galli comes across loud and
clear.86

One finds it hard to believe the Roman delegation to Pergamon did not recognize certain unusual

qualities in the transvestite priests they carried back with them to Rome, and that the populace

who greeted them and welcomed the cult into their midst were likewise blind to the alien behavior

of the Phrygians. The cult’s ritualized furor—to say nothing of the unusual garments the priests

seem to have worn—must have been patently foreign to the first Romans who met its

practitioners.87

Unfortunately—as we have observed in the previous chapter—Roman reaction to the cult

goes largely undocumented by our sources until the late Republic. There is very little in the

Republican literature to support Roller’s reading of Roman feelings about the cult of the Magna

Mater. Perhaps the later, awe-struck descriptions of the cult’s behavior (found in the poetry of

Varro, Lucretius, and Catullus) lend something to Scullard’s picture of Roman horror at the cult’s

“ecstatic and orgiastic nature.” Though she invokes the “undisguised contempt” of the Roman

people, Roller has little to go on until the mid-first century BCE.

If these feelings were associated with Cybele and her Phrygian priesthood, they go

unmentioned for 150 years—apparently enough time for Rome to get used to the cult within her
 42

walls. Anti-Phrygian parties had their chance to speak out immediately following Cybele’s arrival

to Rome, in the period that saw the senatusconsultum de Bacchanalibus88—and that age, as we

have established, is silent as stones with regard to the goddess and her cult.

This period of silence ends in the last generation of the Republic.89 In these first sources,

we witness an alchemy of the real into literature. A fragment of Varro gives us the first picture of

the cult from this time, though it is written in the form of a satire and is difficult to interpret

without the missing context. Lucretius’ vision of Cybele is (apparently) based on the goddess in

procession, viewed during at least one Megalensia of the 60s or 50s BCE. As mentioned in chapter

1, Catullus’ carmen 63 is also inspired by, if not actually written for, a performance of the

festival. This chapter will explore these first literary attempts to depict the cult in Rome.

To draw a map of “who was where, when” for this study, we must understand that the

experience of the ludi would have been a part of every socially engaged Roman’s year. Poets, and

writers in general, would be de facto students of the ambient culture, in order to reflect its mores

and meanings back to the audience through their work. When such authors respond to their

environments in writing, their subject matter can be assumed to have direct bearing on the mood

of their audience, their attitude toward chosen subjects being in dialogue with the feelings current

in their day.90 Put briefly, the sudden upwelling of works with themes identified with the

Megalensia in the 60s and 50s appears to reveal a shift in the broad cultural attitude toward the

cult. Taking this as our starting point, the following sections investigate how these authors—the
 43

first in Latin literature to address the Cybele cult directly—treat the goddess and her flock, in

order to better understand how the Romans coexisted with the Phrygians in their midst.

PARTING THE VEIL OF MYSTERY

In the case of a surviving excerpt of Varro’s Eumenides, the negativity that Roller and Scullard

find in the Roman attitude toward the Magna Mater may be justified. This is the earliest extant

Latin writing about the cult. Written in the years before the activity of Lucretius and

Catullus—or roughly synchronously with them.91 Varro is apparently describing the infiltration

of a ritual within the Temple of the Magna Mater itself.92

This short, fragmentary passage is certainly informed by the ancient desire of the

uninitiated to peek into the secret rites of a mystery cult—the poet describes a visit to the

temple during a ritual that is closed to the general public. Perhaps it is an essay on that part of

human nature that would peel back the veil of mystery and glimpse the forbidden—if only one

could return to one’s normal life after such an encounter.93

Beyond this resonance with other ancient cults and the attempts of poets to capture them

in descriptions for a general audience, Varro shows us an imagined interaction between the Cybele

cult and (possibly) a group of Roman citizens. Wiseman is convinced that it is set in Rome,

largely due to the episode that takes place in Cybele’s shrine, which does not seem to be modeled

on the Athenian Metroon.94 This is an appealing interpretation when we consider the rampant
 44

cross-breeding of Greek sensibilities with Roman topography and cultural perspective, witnessed

in the evolution of a Hellenically infused Roman literature from the time of Livius Andronicus

forward.95

If we can trust modern reconstructions of the Varro’s text, the plot runs like this: a group

of philosophers meet at a Cynic’s house,96 discuss the inherent madness of mankind,97 and decide

to leave the table in order to prove whose opinion most closely matches the real world.98 The

philosophers happen upon a ceremony at the temple of Cybele:

iens domum praeter matris deum aedem exaudio cymbalorum sonitum.

stolam calceosque muliebris propter positos capio.99
As I go home, I pass the temple of the Mother of the Gods
and overhear the clash of cymbals. I steal a stole and
womanly shoes that are lying close by.

The narrator is curious enough to “dress up” and enter the shrine, an illegal action,100 as well as

potentially dangerous, considering the sacrosanctitas of mystery cult practices.

cum illoc venio, video gallorum frequentiam in templo, qui dum e

scena coronam adlatam imponeret aedilis digno deae, eam gallantes
vario recinebant studio.
nam quae venustas his adest gallantibus!
quae casta vestis aetasque adulescentium!
quae teneris species!
partim venusta muliebri ornati stola
ut Naiades undicolae
aurorat ostrinum hic indutus supparum,
coronam ex auro et gemmis fulgentem gerit,
 45

luce locum afficiens

Phrygius per ossa cornus liquida canit anima.101

When I enter the place, I see a throng of galli in the temple,

and, while the aedile set a crown on the goddess’ icon, a token
he’d brought from the stage, the gallivanting priests cried out
worshipfully in polyhymnal excitement.
O such elegance we see in these galliwasps!
How pure their garments, pure themselves, innocent
in the bloom of youth! how like visions of tenderness!
Some of them dressed in the gowns of women.
As are the naiads, wave-dwellers . . .
There’s one, he shimmers in a purple frock, wears
a crown made of gold that shines with precious stones
and pierces the [darkened] place with light.
A horn from Phrygia sings into our bones with flowing breath.

Here the narrator marvels at the dress and behavior of the galli, clearly fascinated by the details of

the ritual.

Apart from the galli, we find an “aedile” in this tableau—another indication that the

setting is a specifically Roman shrine. Coronam e scena adlatam102 refers to the prize won by a

play during the ludi, placing the time of action for Varro’s passage as during or immediately after

the annual Megalensia. This is the only place in our literary sources where an aedile appears as

part of the cult practice. The only information we can glean from this mention is that the aediles

may have been responsible for participating in the post-festival ceremonial following a dramatic

performance.
 46

Varro continues his narrative:

tibi typana non inanis sonitus matri’ deum

tonimus <chorus> tibi nos; tibi nunc semiviri
teretem comam volantem iactant tibi <domine>, tibi galli.103
Not a hollow sound do we intone to you, Mother of the Gods,
your chorus roaring out for you on drum and tambour—for you,
mistress, your she-male galli toss their luxuriant swirling hair.

It is quite possible that these lines, set in galliambic meter,104 are direct quotations of the galli, as

composed by Varro, or could they be derived from actual hymns to the goddess?

At this point in our fragmentary text there seems to be a philosophical aside: one of the

philosophers argues for the good nature of the galli: pruditatem ac pudorem gallum, coepit, mihi

vide sis—“He began: ‘Please to witness how sensible, how modest, are these galli. . . .’” He is cut

short by the galli—perhaps distracted from their ritual by the sound of a “rational” statement in

discord with their furor—who wheel on the interlopers and cause the speaker to cling to the altar

for amnesty: ubi vident se cantando ex ara excantare non posse, deripere incipiunt—“They try to

pull me down when they see it’s no good charming me away from the altar by singing.”105

In the end someone offers a curse to the maddened priests: apage in dierectum a domo

nostra istam insanitatem—“Go to hell then! Keep that madness from my house!”106 The

philosophers’ party escapes from the temple and moves on to a cult meeting at the temple of

Serapis , and on to other venues for testing their theories—hopefully under less threatening

circumstances.107
 47

The last line of the scene parallels the final imprecation in Catullus 63: procul a mea tuus

sit furor omnis, era, domo: / alios age incitatos, alios age rabidos—“Mistress, may your furor

be far from my house: make others burn, make others mad.”108 The question of literary influence

need not be broached here: better to read the similarity between the texts as an example of “what

was in the air,” what angle the writers of this period felt made for a gripping conclusion to their

narratives. As such, Varro’s scene finishes off with his own punchy imprecation against being

dragged further into the priests’ close,109 while Catullus draws the audience back from the brink of

consummated Attis’ madness.110

****

Though fragmentary—and for this reason largely taken out of context—as evidence for cultic

practice and for the Romans’ feelings about that practice, the passage is just as deserving of

treatment as the other works discussed in this chapter. What we do not find here is a sense of

horror or disgust with the Cybele cult, its priests, or its deity. Scullard, Roller, and others who

read outrage in the Republican treatments of the Magna Mater are buying into a standard set by

Christian authors of late antiquity. As mentioned in the Introduction, these late authors provide

summary descriptions of the cult that are easy to digest, but are almost always anti-pagan and

over-simplified. The horrified sensibilities that these writers felt at the behavior of the Magna

Mater cult does not belong in a straightforward analysis of how the authors and audiences of
 48

Republican literature viewed that same cult. As far as our sources from that period indicate, this

attitude was not shared by the Romans of the first century BCE.

Varro’s scene presents an exoticized view of an otherwise hidden practice taking place

within Rome—contempt, loathing, and the desire for the cult to be expunged from the city’s

social and religious fabric does not appear in this passage, any more than the horrific scenes in

Euripides’ Bacchae led the citizens of Athens to expel the cult of Dionysus from their city.111

FRENZY IN THE STREETS

Thankfully, we possess other works roughly contemporary with Varro that shed more light on

the Roman attitude toward Cybele. An intact work as we have it, the de Rerum Natura of

Lucretius is hardly prone to ecstatic outbursts of manic poetry, and therefore may prove a better

standard for comparison with modern readings of the Roman cult. Staid, calm, philosophical,

Lucretius’ work is a cool versification of the Epicurean sensibilities to which the poet subscribed.

One feels, on reading the poem, that all questions pertaining to the natural world (and by

extension, the world of mankind) have an answer.

The presence of Cybele in the Roman milieu inspires a digression in the midst of

Lucretius’ discussion of atoms and their distinctive properties. This sidestep into a short

descriptive passage affords us one of the few clear descriptions in Latin (or at all) of the
 49

procession and clangor of the Phrygian priesthood as they draw the chariot of the goddess

through the city.

Lucretius “has a real, cultic event in mind” when he comes to describe the cult procession,

an event which, “of all the rituals surrounding the Cybele cult,” could not be “a more Roman

feature.”112 Although she is introduced in the passage as “she whom the learned old men of the

Greeks sing in verse,”113 in the next line we are presented a very solid image, of Cybele seated in

her lion-drawn chariot, hurtling forward much as the earth itself glides on through air, not resting

on another body but drawn by some force.114 What follows is an exegesis of various elements of

the cult’s myth and practice, apparently as it is performed per magnas terras.115 Nevertheless,

the pompa or procession as described here is found almost exclusively in Roman festival practice,

and there is little doubt that Lucretius is using a Roman model for his discussion.116

Figure 5: A late first-century CE gravestone

depicting Cybele on her lion-drawn chariot,
holding grain and a hollow drum. Attis
lounges nearby, also holding a drum.
(source: Sanders (1989), 294 pl. 3)

The didactic structure of this passage, barely 50 lines in length, provides questions the

poet assumes would come to readers’ minds, followed by his own answer to such questions. The

responses are based all the while on his central theme: the earth is a living thing, and rules over all
 50

that grows upon her just as this goddess reigns over the wild beasts and her enthralled human

followers.

****

Lucretius assumes that the reader will ask first, “why is Cybele enthroned on a chariot that is

pulled by lions?” (the question does not occur in the text itself). He answers: aeris in spatio

magnam pendere . . . tellurem—“in the void of space [they say] the great earth hangs,” pulled

along much as the goddess’ chariot is drawn forward by her lions.117 Why lions? Quia quamvis

effera proles / officiis debet molliri victa parentem—“because however wild one’s children, they

ought to be reined in, softened, in service to their parent.”118 Why does she wear a mural crown?

Quia sustinet urbes—“because she sustains cities.”119 Here she is the earth as divine being,

“parens” of the world’s wild creatures, as well as of those who dwell in cities: in this swift set of

images, the ποvτνια θηρω'ν is syncretized with the goddesses of civilization (Rhea and Hera,

mothers of gods and men).120

Figure 6: Cybele wearing a mural crown, symbolic of

urban security and one of the most common symbols
of the goddess in Roman iconography.
Silver denarius (obverse), 55 BCE (Boston 12.453),
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
(source: Maria Daniels, courtesy of the Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston)
 51

Next, Lucretius addresses the universality of Cybele’s worship: per magnas pradita

terras / horrifice fertur divinae matris imago—“throughout the wide earth is borne the image,

adorned with the awe-inspiring [crown], of the divine mother.”121 Then why are the Phrygians

prominent in their worship of her? Quia primum ex illis finibus edunt / per terrarum orbes fruges

coepisse creari—“because, they say, through all the world, the first land to raise grain as a crop

(where it was ‘begun to be produced’) was out of that land [of Phrygia]”; note the pun on

Phrygia/fruges underlying Lucretius’ explanation here.122

There is a further pun that resonates with the name given to her Phrygian flock (gallus =

“cock”), exploited by the priests themselves, as well as by later authors. Here we learn at least

that the “galli” are her priests, and that they are castrated. Gallos attribuunt, Lucretius explains,

quia numen qui violarint

Matris et ingrati genitoribus inventi sint,
significare volunt indignos esse putandos,
vivam progeniem qui in oras luminis edant.123

They assign [her] galli because it is they who would violate

the Mother’s power and be found ungrateful to their parents,
to show those who would bring living descendants into the world
that such creatures must be considered unworthy.

While not giving the derivation of their name (probably derived from the Gallos River in

Anatolia124), the poet makes it clear that they are negative examples for those who would violate

their Mother (the earth, it would seem) and have behaved disrespectfully to their parents.

Unworthy (indignos) of bringing children of their own into the world, their powers of
 52

reproduction have been wrested from them for all time. Here we must wonder what Lucretius is

trying to explain, for these are apparently faithful attendants, representing the first people to

worship and respect the goddess/earth,125 who lead her in procession. Are the most faithful

servants suspect, the most loyal children to be thought of as possible “violators” of their parents,

of the goddess, of the earth itself? Lucretius leaves this potential contradiction hanging in the line,

and moves quickly on to describe the procession itself.

****

In turning his gaze to the vision of the galli themselves, Lucretius dispenses with the allegorical

trick of the neoterics that had begun this passage, launching instead into a direct report of what he

allows us to witness.126 What docti poetae say is subsumed in a sequence that appears to be direct

reportage of something the poet himself—the latest of the docti, or their heir?—has personally

experienced.127 The passage scintillates with alliteration and the sonic qualities of the procession

itself:
Tympana tenta tonant palmis et cymbala circum
concave, raucisonoque minantur cornua cantu,
et Phrygio stimulat numero cava tibia mentis . . . 128

They thunder with their hands on tympana held,

they beat deafening noise from their hollow cymbals,
and strike fear in the crowd with a tune played
on rasping horns, the same tune’s Phrygian scales,
played on the hollow pipes, drive her priests mad. . .
 53

Here are the galli rampant, wielding weapons (“the wild emblems of their frenzy”: violenti signa

furoris129), and approaching the spectators (down, in procession, from the Germalus, along the

clivus Victoriae).130

Figure 7: The southwest corner

of the Palatine Hill, including
the Germalus, clivus Victoriae,
and via Nova, reconstructed for
the Severan period (ca. 200 CE)
in a scale model. The northwest
quadrant of the Forum Boarium
appears in the bottom left of the
image.
(author’s photograph, detail of
large model, Museo de Civiltá
Romana, Rome)

First, as in the above passage, we experience the sound of the priests—perhaps they are

heard before they are seen. Then, the fright-inducing weapons (tela) appear, whose association

with the act of castration Lucretius leaves to the readers’ imagination. His only comment on the

weapons (usually assumed to be knives by modern commentators131) as they relate to the furor is

that the “ingrate spirits” and “impious hearts” of the galli are thoroughly panic-stricken by the

goddess’ power, and the tela they carry are the outward indication of this panic.132 This reflects

back to the filial impropriety (seen in the repetition of words such as indignos, impia, and

ingratos throughout) Lucretius has already shown is punished with castration.

Though the crashing and thundering sounds of the galli in procession has frightened the

spectators of this scene (minantur), the poet then tells us that those who witness the goddess
 54

borne through the cities133 strew the road with bronze and silver, largifices stipes and roses (these

last to the degree that the “snow” of flowers creates a shade under which the goddess and her

entourage pass).134 The mute goddess responds with a silent greeting: tacita mortalis muta

salute.135

Now the band of Phrygian Curetes appears (described as a manus, perhaps to be

distinguished within or from the foregoing caterva Gallorum).136 These are militant followers of

Cybele who revel in bloodletting (exultant sanguine laeti), the plumes of their helmets shaking

and terrifying those who see them.137 Through a confusion of traditions, these are also the Curetes

in the legend of the infant Zeus on Crete: the Corybantes who made a racket to drown out the

sounds of the crying baby god, so that his father, Saturn, would not be alerted to his birth and

attempt to devour him.138

Lucretius thus answers the question, “why are they armata, as though prepared for

battle?” They remind all who see them of the noisy defense of Zeus on Crete . . . while at the

same time serving to equate the goddess Rhea (mother of Zeus) with the Magna Mater.139 These

are hardly effeminate eunuchs, and might be considered tolerable to the Roman military

spirit—hence, not deserving of reproach or moralistic scorn.

As we reach this stage in the procession, Lucretius pulls back, away from the street and

its festival noise. The poet winds up his digression on the Mother of the Gods and return to his
 55

philosophical discussion. He returns, in effect, to the didactic structure (“[quam ob rem . . .

?]—quia . . .”) that was briefly put on hold. “Aut quia,” Lucretius concludes here,

significant divam praedicere ut armis

ac virtute velint patriam defendere terram
praesidioque parent decorique parentibus esse.140

Or else it is because the Curetes show that the goddess commands

man to defend, with arms and manly courage, their fatherland,
and hold forth as both defense and delight for their parents.

Again, we find a distinctly Roman ideal here, upholding piety through honor of family and

nation.

Lest we be left in a sentimental glow over this passage, pondering the nobility of such a

patriotic ideal, Lucretius executes a philosophical clinamen in the next lines to wrench us back

into an analytical mindset:

quae bene et eximie quamvis disposta ferantur,

longe sunt tamen a vera ratione repulsa.141

Such a conceit is all well and good, it may be said,

but it’s a far cry from cool-headed logic.

****

While a key source for students of the Republican cult of Cybele, this passage merely

serves its author as a picturesque, albeit primitive, expression of the truth of his universal

atomic theory. Michels has observed that the image “added fuel to the arguments current

in philosophical circles as to the relations between gods and men,” which may have
 56

inspired the poet and made his work more stirring for his audience.142 Lucretius gifts us

with this vital, gripping image of the Megalensian pompa, only to swerve away from its

furor as soon as it passes us by, as if to say “back to serious matters now.”

Themes of universality (per magnas terras), cosmic singularity (neque posse in terra

sistere terram143), and duty to one’s parents and fatherland adhere to Lucretius’ goddess here, all

bound up by a “molecular” similarity of purpose.144 The entire universe is beholden to the Earth

(in the shape of Cybele here) and to the atomic structures present in the firmament. Mankind

must respect this order by worshiping these structures in its own manner—hence the compelling

tableau the poet has drawn for us, an outward manifestation of cosmic principles that are the

ultimate theme of de Rerum Natura.145

The passage has been described by Roller in this way:

Lucretius has integrated a frank acknowledgment of the problematic features of the

cult, including the public presence of the Galli and the violence and sexuality they
represent, into an endorsement of the traditional Roman virtues of filial piety,
honor to the gods, and willingness to defend the fatherland.146

Of course, these “problematic features” were exactly the furor, madness, and transgendered state

that so many writers in antiquity147 dwell on in their writings. Through the inversion of the

overarching meaning of the cult practice (as viewed in Rome, by Romans), Lucretius has indeed

made safe such disturbing business. He has incorporated it into the fabric of polite Roman

society (through the invocation of pietas, among other ploys), allowing its foreignness to speak

to a polite Roman audience—even for an upright Roman philosopher.

 57

The fascination with the cult enjoyed by ancient writers might be compared with

Hollywood’s periodic interest in the ancient pagan world of the Mediterranean. Often in such

“sword & sandal” epics, the ancient world is fetishized for its exotic, pre-Christian immorality.

In the final scene(s), though, the audience is nearly always shown that such “ways of the

ancients” were depraved, primitive, and soon to be overthrown by a new order. These epics are

constructed to show that, in a word, the ancient world was awaiting a redeemer, in the form of

the Christian soter148—a message that saves the audience from appearing prurient after watching a

few hours of moral dissolution depicted in the bulk of the film.

In much the same way, Lucretius gives his audience what they want in his “frank

acknowledgement” of the cult’s practices. Having invoked the exciting scene (though more

detached from the action than in Varro), he then turns from the rowdy procession and

concentrates once more on purer philosophical and scientific inquiry, seeking a noble truth in an

otherwise sullied human existence. For whatever disdain Lucretius finds with the primitive nature

of the cult in this passage, it would take a gross misreading to find contempt in his depiction of

the procession of the galli. That he transforms the scene into a vehicle for distinctly Roman

values, as well as a rough-hewn metaphor for his own vision of universal principles, does nothing

so much as justify the cult’s presence in the city, culturally and theologically.
 58

CATULLUS FURENS

We have observed that the Greek world has its hymn to the Μητεvρα παvντων τε θεω'ν παvντων τæ

αjνθρωvπων.149 No equivalent exists in Latin literature, though Catullus’ carmen 63 is the closest

work, programmatically, to a hymn to the Magna Mater.150 But while the Greek hymn

appropriately honors the goddess, Catullus appears to infuse his narrative with all the

apprehension and fear that the cult might have inspired.

This poem is the only surviving work from the Republican period whose subject is

exclusively the myth of Cybele in Rome and her priests. In each of the other literary sources

explored in this paper, depictions of the goddess and her cult overtly reflect some other theme,

provide context for some other argument, represent some other, larger idea within the Roman

world. As he does throughout his poems, Catullus here presents us with an exception to the rule.

As upsetting as the poem’s narrative is, can we conclude from this work that the Romans

were perennially horrified by the cult’s proximity to their homes, disgusted by the festive

procession, games, performances, that took place in their city every April? They were clearly not

so repulsed as to ban the Megalensia itself,151 or to lose sight of the historical significance of the

cult in the city’s past. As we have seen in Lucretius’ roughly contemporary treatment, the cult’s

otherness may have simply been a theme that attracted poets and writers, and just the “sexy”

angle their readers looked for—even as they were made uneasy by the subject matter. After all, as

Thomson writes, “every Roman of Catullus’ generation must have been familiar with the annual
 59

processions of eunuch priests, accompanied by music played to strange percussive rhythms, in

honor of Cybele.”152 As we have already observed, the setting and themes adhering to the cult

offer a compelling subject for a master poet, but it would hardly be new to residents of the city

who for generations had been exposed to the cult’s effeminate priests every year. We must

therefore read the poem as if we were an audience familiar with the presence of Cybele in its

midst.

****

Carmen 63 is made up of three scenes, with no introduction and a spare, three-line epilogue.153

The first scene describes Attis’ arrival by ship to Phrygia, followed by a concise treatment of his

frenzy, castration (the first true action in the poem), celebration, and collapse—“going to bed

without supper.”154 In the second sequence, Attis awakes, realizes what his frenzy has done to

him—what he has done to himself—and laments: “a backward glance at lost happiness.”155 He

first addresses his homeland,156 then curses himself, and at last poses an understandable question:

“what am I?”157 Finally, the second “act” of the poem occurs, in the form of Cybele sending her

furor (embodied in one of her attendant lions) to “whip” Attis up with frenzy.158 Attis is

cowed159 and driven back into the forest, where he/she will serve the goddess for the rest of

his/her life—as a member of her troupe, literally her slave.160

 60

Leaving his protagonist in thrall to the goddess forever, Catullus draws the curtain on this

tragedy, pulling us back from the phantasm and closing off this awful sequence of events with an

imprecation to the Magna Mater:

Dea, magna dea, Cybebe, dea domina Dindymi,

Procul a mea tuos sit furor omnis, era, domo;
alios age incitato, alios age rabidos.161

Goddess, great goddess, Cybebe, goddess, queen of Dindymus:

Mistress, may your furor be far from my house:
make others burn, make others mad.

Of the incredible density of image, nuance, thematic dynamism, and narrative fury,

present in this poem, we must be satisfied to pursue only a few simple questions relevant to the

present study. What is the message Catullus presents his readers? Are we to feel trepidation at

the wanton, raw violence inflicted upon Attis? Is this, at last, the image of the goddess (from her

post-classical readings) we have expected? An uncontained, uncontrollable force inciting

seemingly rational people to self-mutilation and rabid orgies of blood and noise? And is Catullus

warning his fellow citizens of the danger residing within the very walls of Rome?

On first encountering tales of the Magna Mater and Attis in Rome, we may wonder how

can the Romans have allowed such a cult into their city, let alone permit it to continue practicing

in the midst of a (morally restrained) population. If the cult, in its practice at Rome, was as

vicious and unruly in its pursuit of new “converts”—new galli—as the goddess appears to be in

Catullus’ poem, we might expect that the cult (however strong its association with Roman
 61

Victoria) would have been summarily chased out of the city before too long.162 Or maybe it would

have been housed somewhere outside the walls of the city—a liminal cultic presence whose

importance to Rome’s past was acknowledged, but whose existence was deemed too dangerous

by the state.

In contrast with the depictions of Varro and Lucretius, the narrative in Catullus does not

take place in Rome, not even in Italy, but in Phrygia. The poem begins with motion out of the

known world, into the exotic East, super alta vectus Attis celeri rate maria / Phrygium ut nemus

citato cupide pede tetigit . . . ,163 transporting us “over the high seas” to step, hot-footed, into the

Phrygian glade. Twice again we are made aware of the sea that separates Attis from his home.164

In his lament he calls out to his homeland, his “genetrix” and “creatrix” whom he has

abandoned.165 Attis has reached a place, in the shadow of Mount Ida, that is nowhere we have

ever been, and quite possibly nowhere the poet’s audience has ever visited.166

If we look for insights into the real cultic behavior of the Roman galli here, we miss the

point of the poem. Perhaps the festive scene—following his castration, when “the party begins”

with Attis taking up the tympanum in snow-white hands and ends with the heavy somnus of the

galli within the goddess’ house itself—has been colored by the poet’s personal experience of the

pompa Megalenses.167 In particular, the jaunty run of the galli up the slopes of Ida,168 leading

ultimately to “domum Cybebes,” brings to mind the procession of the Phrygians back up the

Palatine and to the aedes, following the lavatio ritual.169 Otherwise, there is no basis for
 62

associating the action of the poem with the behavior and habits of the galli in Rome: this is a

fantasy, shot through with “the intense vividness of a nightmare,” but not bound to any authentic

rite the Romans would have participated in or been threatened by.170 The assumed horror with

which the city’s magistrates would have first encountered the Phrygian priesthood171 is not

present here—it does not float to the surface of the text (notwithstanding the horrific imagery of

Attis’ emasculation and enslavement on the slopes of Ida). The Roman people—and we, modern

readers—are too far removed from Phrygia, Cybele, and the rest, to feel personally threatened by

this overwhelming furor.

What of the emasculation then, the central action of carmen 63 and the most striking

distinction of the Phrygian priesthood from other cults in Rome? If we are looking to Cybele as

the instigator of the furor, we still do not find her behind the “unmanning” of poor Attis. The

sequence comes just as he arrives in Phrygia, steps off the boat into the Phrygian wood, adiitque

opaca silvis redimita loca deae.172 Suddenly, stimulatus furenti rabie, Attis unburdens himself of

his manhood with a sharp flint.173 Although he has entered the “place of the goddess” (she has

yet to be named), there is no implication that he has done anything, nor even that he has been

innocently targeted by the forces of the goddess, to warrant this sudden seizure of his mind with

the fury: it just happens.174

When Cybele finally appears in the poem, it is in the third scene—the climax—of this

drama. She is not proactive in the pursuit of new galli who become her subjects through the
 63

incitement of frenzy—she only reacts when Attis (a volunteer, so it would seem: he has entered

her glade of his own will) shows the desire to leave her flock. Then, the jealous Mother responds

swiftly, viciously, to this indigna from her child/slave.

****

Can we determine the purpose for which Catullus wrote carmen 63? This is not a strict retelling

of the ιJεροvς λοvγ ος , meant to shed light on a dangerous, ecstatic cult that dwells in the heart of the

city. Nowhere in the poet’s works do we find a warning tone such as we might assume exists

here: it is no jeremiad, warning Rome of lascivious eunuchs and their plot to turn others to

worship the goddess. Instead, I take the poem should be read as a subtle treatment of but one

tessera—albeit widely recognized for its exotic color and shape—within the mosaic of Rome’s

cityscape. Such subject matter makes for great drama and captivating imagery—and throughout

his libellus lepidus Catullus reveals his eye for this sort of thing.175

The poem, then, cannot be read as a screed against the Cybele cult. Instead, it is the

thrilling distillation from the poet’s imagination, inspired by the presence of the Phrygians and

their goddess on the Palatine—a commentary on one aspect of Roman civic life, played for

dramatic effect and the kind of lascivious observations of that life Catullus was prone to write

about.
 64

CONCLUSION

The generation that saw the first flowering of “Megalensian” literature in Rome provides us with

clear evidence that people in the city were aware of the cult and its rituals. Boyancé offers an

opinion176 that the ludi Megalenses, described by Lucretius,177 were none other than the ludi of

65, put on by that year’s curule aedile, Julius Caesar, presents us with an interesting entrance

into the real-world function of the cult. If we work from his conjecture and observe that Catullus

and Cicero were most likely witnesses to the same procession, the theatrical performances, and

the games, of this same festival, we are drawn by a compelling realization of proximity: that

Rome was not very large, and that the events of a certain date might well have been participated

in, observed, or at least indirectly experienced, by all those figures we know to have been

contemporary to the period in question. This contextualization of the Megalensian games in the

middle first century CE shows that Romans of this time had developed a semiotic vocabulary for

treating the Magna Mater in their literature.

Varro’s description of the cultic rites of the Magna Mater forms the most concrete stage

upon which the Phrygian priests appear in literature of this period, and, apart from this instance,

similar examples appear only in the generation of the Augustan Principate and after. While

Lucretius dismisses her bloody rites, “practiced ‘round the world,” as a particular form of illogic

(only after providing a stellar description of those rites), Catullus presents us with a nightmare

vision of an unfortunate follower of Cybele who is unaware of the “ultimate sacrifice” she calls
 65

on her acolytes to make. The theme of the cult’s behavior as foreign and exotic adheres to the

Magna Mater with the publication of de Rerum Natura and the poem of Catullus, occurring in a

variety of other later Latin sources.

Written in the first upwelling of literature devoted to the Cybele cult in Republican

Rome,178 the works considered in this chapter lead us to conclude that the Romans of the middle

first century CE were not stricken with contempt for the Phrygian cult that their ancestors had

“unfortunately, unwittingly” allowed into the city. The existence of these poetic works points to

a simple fact: the Romans had accepted the cult as part of their cultural milieu, had adopted its

ιJεροvς λοvγ ος on their own terms,179 and—while still wrestling with the more exotic aspects of the

Phrygian priesthood and its rituals—were nevertheless resigned to acknowledge the Magna

Mater as a part of their city’s religious functions. Contempt? probably not, though “undisguised

curiosity” may well prove a more apt description of their feelings for the cult of Cybele at Rome.

In succeeding generations of Romans, “behind-closed-doors” accounts of the mystery

religions gained a wider audience.180 Perhaps this was born of the increasing cosmopolitanism in

Rome, where a new population, unaccustomed to the traditional cults, was keen to assimilate into

Roman society through participation in the rites of the natives. Syncretism of foreign religious

practices with those of the core rites of Greco-Roman paganism occurred in parallel with the

assimilation of foreign peoples into the fabric of the Roman Empire.

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3. A DISTURBANCE IN THE GAMES

As we have seen, there was an efflorescence of writing related to the Magna Mater in Roman

literature of the 50s BCE.181 Authors of the period developed their craft at a time when “local

mores” were becoming an accepted subject for artistic consideration. Those who give voice to

recognizably Roman themes (as opposed to the high artistic themes of the Greek world) draw on

common subjects and perspectives for their works, concerned at last with the res vulgati that

their predecessors had scorned as unworthy of comment.182

We have already observed treatments of the cult set in Rome (or its poetic facsimile) in

order to deal with the Magna Mater at a close distance—philosophically removed from the

pompa Megalenses (Lucretius), spirited away to the fantastic glades of Mount Ida (Catullus), or

lampooned (?) as a scene in a Menippean satire (Varro). In each example, the authors have

utilized the exoticism and implied danger of the Phrygian cult to produce excitement in their

poetry. The undercurrent of Roman piety that lay in Lucretius’ passage on Cybele183 is not

developed further by any poet of this time.

However, when we observe Cicero’s treatment of the cult in his speech, de Haruspicum

Responsis, exoticism gives way to a connotation for the Roman cult of the Magna Mater that has

not been seen before in Latin: the goddess is a rightful member of the Roman pantheon, and her

displeasure is felt as a disturbance of the pax deorum itself. Whereas earlier writers have touched

on the goddess and certain aspects of her priests’ behavior, Cicero arrives as our (chronologically)
 67

earliest author of a useful description of the Megalensia at Rome, presenting it as a bona fide

Roman festival worthy of the utmost reverence.

****

The speech was given before the Senate in May of 56 BCE. Cicero attacks his opponent, P.

Clodius Pulcher (tribune of the plebs, 58), for orchestrating the two-year exile from which he has

just returned. In this speech, the orator utilizes the “antiquity” of the institution of the ludi

Megalenses to underscore the profane behavior of his bitter enemy. While in exile, Clodius had

declared that Cicero’s house was built on “sacred ground,” a sacrilege that would anger the gods

and threatened destruction on the city unless the proper rites of purification and dedication could

be performed (that is, the confiscation and demolition of the house). In order to remedy this

profanation (according to Clodius), the structure was razed and a new shrine to Liberty was

dedicated on the site by Clodius.184

Cicero returned to Rome in late summer 57 and set about reclaiming both his senatorial

standing and his real estate.185 At Cicero’s success, Clodius, now curule aedile, fell to more

pseudo-religious machinations in order to seize the property for himself. An “underground

rumbling (the clash of weapons) in the Ager Latiniensis”186 was heard at some time after the

Cicero’s return. Clearly, according to Clodius, this must be the rumbling anger of the gods, whose

rightfully consecrated district had been again snatched away by Cicero:

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Responsum haruspicum hoc recens de fremitu in contione recitavit . . .

“Loca sacra et religiosa profana haberi.”187

In his ranting he read out this latest response of the haruspices regarding the noise:
“an area, sacred and religious, has been profaned.”

This cannot be, Cicero declares:

Nego ullo de opere publico, de monumento, de templo tot senatus exstare consulta
quot de mea domo, quam senatus unam post hanc urbem constitutam ex aerario
aedificandam, a pontificibus liberandam, a magistratibus defendendam, a
iudicibus puniendam putarit.188

I refute any claim that, concerning any public work, monument or temple, there
have ever been more senatorial decrees than have been passed with regard to my
house—a structure unique since the formation of our state, in that it was deemed
worthy by the senate to be put up with public money, to be absolved of priestly
jurisdiction, to be protected by the magistrates, and to be held as a ward of our
courts of justice against those who would harm it.

If his house is in fact “a pontificibus liberandam,” then whose property is in violation of the

divine law? As Cicero goes on to show, it is the aedes Magnae Matris that has been profaned.

Clodius, through his consistent disrespect of the powers of the state and of the gods, has called

down divine wrath upon the city: it is this behavior that has caused the portent.189

Cicero presents an earlier example of his opponent’s behavior, to show that this is

nothing new. Do not the patres conscripti recall Clodius’ shameless role in the Bona Dea

scandal?190 Cicero emphasizes what everyone knew of that deplorable crime, that his enemy had

been “burned” before when he attempted to manipulate a sacred festival to his own advantage.

And now it should not surprise anyone that Clodius is once again dabbling in religiosity
 69

motivated by his own only selfish and perverted desires: “P. inquam Clodius sacra et religiones

negligi, violari, pollui questus est. Non mirum, si hoc vobis ridiculum videtur.”191 Who could be a

worse arbiter of sanctity? Whenever an issue arises of sacred practice, morality, inviolability, he

is the first to invoke his own religious purity—and no wonder he should seem ridiculous in so

doing, as no reasonable person can take his protestations seriously. Such is Cicero’s attack on his

enemy’s moral character.192

Having dealt with the issue of his house satisfactorily,193 Cicero sets out to consider who

the real culprit in this ritual crime might be. The noises, according to the haruspices, are due to

the neglect of sacrifices to Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Tellus (Earth), and the celestial gods.194 What

postiliones—“religious duties owed the gods”—have not been adequately performed? Cicero

finds, once again, that Clodius is the source of this Gottesklage.

Occurring a month before this speech was given, a disturbance of the ludi Megalenses had

either delayed the performance of that festival (as an instauratio) or forced its cancellation

altogether. Cicero attributes this disturbance to Clodius, whose “hired guns” in the form of slaves

and street rabble195 had pressed into the temple and apparently burst onto the performance

stage.196 This seems to have led to a riot where the senators and other free spectators were

threatened by the slaves, forcing the audience out and effectively shutting down the festival.197

Cicero does not hesitate to conclude that Clodius’ plot was intended to intimidate the

defenders of Roman society198—and its execution is to blame for the portents interpreted by the
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haruspices. To which games do they refer when they declare “ludos minus diligenter factos

pollutosque”?199 Certainly they are the violated ludi Megalenses, “which the immortal gods

themselves and that Idaean Mother (Cybele)” had a hand in establishing at Rome.200

This explains the sounds heard in the Latiniense District. Because the Magna Mater is the

offended deity here, Cicero is sure that it is the goddess of wild things herself making noise in the

countryside, accompanied by the sound of clashing weapons familiar from the annual pompa.

The raucous footsteps of Cybele and her noisy entourage rumbled angrily in the woods, as she

made known her displeasure with the people of Rome over her incomplete games:

Ac si volumus ea . . . recordari, hanc matrem magnam, cuius ludi violati, polluti,

paene ad caedem et ad funus civitatis conversi sunt, hanc, inquam, accepimus
agros et nemora cum quodam strepitu fremituque peragrare.201

And please consider this: that it was this Great Mother, whose games were
violated, polluted, nearly turned into a slaughter and the city’s ruin, this goddess, I
say, was roaming the fields and glens when we heard that clashing and growling.

Cicero locates the goddess in the very midst of the lands of the Roman people, a

placement that further resonates with concepts of the relation between gods and men

common in Cicero’s day. Graillot finds in “fremitus” the roar of Cybele’s lions and the

wild shouting her attendants, perhaps invoking the procession of the galli, already

described in Lucretius.202
 71

Cicero continues:

Haec igitur vobis, haec populo Romano et scelerum indicia ostendit et periculorum
signa patefecit.203

So these are signs for you, for the people of Rome, both indicating the
crimes and revealing the tokens of the perils [that we face].

Had the games been disturbed by any natural mistake, they would have been repeated in

their entirety.204 But the disturbance here was hardly an accident: the very official

expected to arrange and lead this sacred festival (Clodius, as curule aedile) was the

perpetrator of its failure; more, he had sought the injury of members of the government

and of the aristocratic audience. Instead of reprisal, however, the slight to the goddess’

honor goes unavenged, for Clodius has not been punished for his willful sacrilege.

Cicero uses these points to underscore how profane to the gods Clodius has become, how

dangerous to his fellow citizens. As he concludes this section of the speech, Cicero makes his

overarching point: he can hardly be expected to abide by the ruling of such a scoundrel over

which property enjoys sanctitas and which does not:

Sequitur de locis sacris, religiosis. O impudentiam miram! de mea domo dicere

audes? 205

From areas sacred we are led to areas of ceremonial. O incredible impudence! that
you would dare speak [of the sanctity] of my house!?

****
 72

Throughout this passage—which comprises but the first volley Cicero will fire at his

opponent—Cicero identifies the Magna Mater and her games as essential to the working of the

Roman state, its institutions, and traditions. Cicero reaches his crescendo with the startling image

of the goddess: wandering the countryside, he implies that she bides her days in grief since her

games were wrecked, seeking vengeance on the whole of Rome for the outrage perpetrated by

Clodius. He has mined the particular cultural and historical resonance of the goddess’ cult in his

audience, providing a concise and selective overview of what the Magna Mater means to Rome.

Notwithstanding Liebeschuetz’s comment,206 there is great emotion here, the emotion of a man

who feels that he is defending his rights, as well as defending the rightful maintenance of the

Republic and its institutions.

Most importantly for the present study, the de Haruspicum Responsis provides us with

an idea of the Roman perception of the Magna Mater and her place in late Republican Rome.

Contemporary with the alleged “undisguised contempt” that Roller finds for the goddess’ cult in

other works of the period,207 we find in Cicero’s emphatic speech a foreign goddess upheld as a

rightful member of the Roman pantheon. Yet, instead of being one of the most ancient, most

Roman, deities in that pantheon, she is important by the very fact of her foreignness.

Cicero makes a particularly intriguing comment on the cult of Cybele at Rome here.

“Need I tell [you Senators] of those games?” Cicero asks: nam quid ego de illis ludis loquar . . . ?

Nostri maiores willed the games to be celebrated, ante templum in ipso matris magnae
 73

conspectu.208 These games were introduced more . . . maxime casti, sollemnes, religiosi—“in

custom most decent, solemn, sacred,” by none other than the great savior of Roman state, P.

Cornelius Scipio Africanus.

Where we might question the significance of a foreign, exotic cult in the fabric of Roman

paganism—might even expect it to be marginalized when set alongside the “indigenous”

cults—the orator makes that quality the very reason for its sanctity:

Ita ludos eos, quorum religio tanta est, ut ex ultimis terris arcessita in hac urbe
considerit: qui uni ludi ne verbo quidem appellantur Latino, ut vocabulo ipso et
appetita religio externa et matris magnae nomine suscepta declaretur . . . !209

Thus it was for those games, so great was their holiness that they called
out from a far distant land and settled in this very city: these
games—alone of all—known not by a Latin name, that by their title
they might declare themselves a far-off faith brought in to us, adopted in
the name of the Great Mother . . . !

Strikingly, it is the foreign provenance of the cult, by dint of its adoption through its history as a

part of the Roman tradition, which affords it that much greater (tanta) sanctity. Some scholars

find this to be reverence, not in her traditional function as a bringer of victory to the state

grounded in a historical sequence of events, but in the day-to-day reality of the non-Roman dress

and behavior of Cybele’s priests. Lenaghan, for example, finds the exotic nature to be an

important feature of the passage, since “both the cult itself and the participation of Roman

citizens in it were rigidly restricted . . . this very fact enables Cicero to emphasize its strangeness,

its sanctity, and its generally awesome nature.”210

 74

This is one aspect of Cicero’s claim of great sanctity for the games. However, the

overriding sense of this passage is that, because of their alien provenance, the ludi Megalenses are

all the more sacred. The institution was so special, it had to be brought over the sea, “ex ultimis

terris.” The implication is, perhaps, that “we, the Roman people, are fortunate to provide a home

for this deity, who might well have settled somewhere else in the world.” Cicero is hardly calling

for future immigration to the city, either by humans or by gods. Still, the idea that Rome has

grown great enough to warrant foreign gods to relocate within her pomerium may lie within his

thinking.211

At the same time, the cult of Cybele is spoken of in the same breath as Cicero’s

invocation of the mos maiorum—“our forefather’s customs”—a cornerstone of Rome’s heritage,

to whose adherence Roman would look for cultural identity and patriotic significance. Although

alien, then, Cybele and the practice of her cult are equated with the very essence of what it means

to be a Roman—and it is in the name of nostri maiores, “our forefathers”—that a good citizen

would celebrate the ludi Megalenses.

Cicero also underscores the sanctity of the cult “without a Latin name” by describing its

pollution by Clodius and his gang of slaves. Such is the scandal that this goddess—in some sense

a visitor of the state—should be shown such maltreatment by her hosts:

hos ludos servi fecerunt, servi spectaverunt, tota denique hoc aedile servorum
Megalesia fuerunt. Pro di immortales! 212
 75

These were the games: the slaves performed them, slaves watched them, and
the whole thing, thanks to this aedile, came out as a “Megalesia of the slaves.”
O immortal gods!

The imagery is that of the Saturnalia, the festival of inversion, here subverted by Clodius’

scheme, and a further outrage to the goddess.213

CONCLUSION

While Cicero employs a kind of “submythological” approach when he describes Cybele

wandering the Latin countryside, this scene is merely grounded in his much-beloved habit of

personifying deities to drive home his rhetorical point on the divine level.214 Cybele appears in

the speech because she is linked to the desecrated public festival (and thereby the deity wounded

by Clodius in this episode). Such use of a mythic figure in the real world of the Senate would

have been obvious and accepted, if not literally believed by all who listened (opinions are not so

easily altered, even when the gods are on your side).

Indeed, Cicero may merely be using the Megalensia as a colorful sub-theme for his attack

on Clodius,215 much as Lucretius does in his section of de Rerum Natura devoted to Cybele. He

appears to have read Lucretius around the time of the poet’s death,216 and would doubtless have

encountered the works of Catullus, who died around 54, as well. A cynical modern commentator

might easily question the devotion Cicero consistently shows for the grand old rituals and gods of

Rome in his speeches, manipulating tropes that he does not believe in but which suit his
 76

purposes and present the kind of pietas nominally expected from a citizen. All the same, it does

seem peculiar that both Clodius and Cicero lived within a stone’s throw of the aedes Magnae

Matris.217 Even if they were not directly involved in government (and therefore obliged to attend

State festivals), they could not help but be aware of the ludi taking place in their neighborhood

every spring, much less the year-round presence of the goddess’ priesthood in their midst. Not

willing to accuse his subject of facile belief in the gods, Lenaghan dismisses any real relevance the

case may have to the Megalensia:

It seems far more probable that Cicero introduced the Megalesia simply because the
games offered to him the most suitable explanation of “minus diligenter factos
pollutosque,” and that no more direct connection between the Magna Mater and the
response [of the haruspices] was needed. It is certainly unnecessary to assume that the
deity offended by the ludi had to be one of those specifically mentioned in the response
[i.e., those reported in 20].218

It may very well be that Cicero is using the facts of Clodius’ outrageous behavior to “turn the

tables” on his opponent, and the wrecked ludi provide a handy alternative to his own (putative)

sacrilege.

Nevertheless—and even if Cybele provides a picturesque figure for Cicero’s screed

against Clodius—his manner of upholding the goddess and her significance to the city must be

seen as a reflection of the late Republican image of the deity, as she lived and interacted with the

Roman people. In his speech, the orator invokes Roman pietas to juxtapose that quality with

Clodius’ shameful and sacrilegious behavior, using the offended sanctity of the ludi Megalenses

as his setting. Wounded by the outrages perpetrated there, Cicero claims that the suspicious
 77

noises heard in the Latin countryside are none other than the angry footsteps of the goddess and

her entourage, “stomping out the vintage” of divine wrath soon to be visited upon the city unless

punishment is meted out quickly to the blasphemers.

Although we see more of the Magna Mater de Haruspicum Responsis, he still only

brushes the surface of her significance to the Roman people. It is to be assumed that those people

would understand what he meant by connecting her to Roman history (even as he underscores

her foreign nature in the speech). Since they constitute an essentially pragmatic literary form,

Cicero’s orations can be only obliquely interested in the goddess cult and its significance to

Rome, offering a hint of cultural sensibilities while always portraying the facts and feelings

according to the case at hand.

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INTERLUDE

The course of this study has led us from the arrival of the goddess Cybele into Rome

(Introduction); the first attested public events devoted to her worship (chapter 1); the

development of a poetic idiom with which Roman poets sought to describe the Phrygian cult

residing in the heart of their city (chapter 2); and lastly, evidence, in the form of a Ciceronian

oration that the goddess was by the late Republic a fixture of society: an offense to her was an

offense to the state and the people of Rome. We find only a few contemporary Greek accounts

describing aspects of the Roman cult of Cybele to flesh out these Latin texts, providing a flimsy

skin of evidence to cover more than a century of Phrygian-Roman coexistence.219

To patch these accounts together with later, post-Republican depictions of the cult is to

encounter misleading conflations, distortions, and (most often) anachronisms that have filtered

into the tradition regarding the Magna Mater thanks to the evolution of her cult and the temporal

proximity of her (attested) worship with the rise of Christianity. It is understandable that

modern overviews of the cult draw on every scrap of evidence, arranging it out of chronological

sequence in order to present a coherent picture of the cult and its progress in Rome.220 Still, when

Roller sets a passage from Polybius (mid- to late second century BCE) alongside anecdotes by

Valerius Maximus (early to mid-first century CE) or Obsequens (“most plausibly dated to the 4th

or early 5th cent. AD”221 )—presenting the information gleaned from these authors as if it

represented a linear, uncontroversial account of the growth and local acceptance of the cult—we
 79

should wonder if such a patchwork has been properly constructed to reveal important themes

common to all the sources while eliminating interpretations that are anachronistic and

contradictory. To her credit, Roller acknowledges that the evidence “create[s] a variable

picture.”222

Compared with other works, the present study is intended to view the evidence—not

from a reconstructed chronology based on the times purportedly described by each source—but

to interpret the source materials in their proper chronological position, in order to reveal when,

for a certainty, such claims regarding the cult of the Magna Mater would have been made, how

they would have been composed to resonate with the authors’ audiences, and what gaps we find

in the primary sources for each period we address. As noted throughout this work, the

Republican-period silences about the Magna Mater are much greater than the scanty evidence we

possess for that time.

We have found evidence that the goddess’ annual cult festival served as a point of

association between the Phrygian priesthood and the Roman populace, an association that was

apparently otherwise forbidden, or at least discouraged, by the state. Through this annual event,

the cult and its mythology became more deeply associated with Roman virtues, in particular

piety and respect for the state and its gods in toto. While there seems to have been trepidation

regarding what the galli did behind the closed doors of their temple—especially considering their

exotic, effeminate appearance and behavior—such concerns come down to us in the form of
 80

distanced, imaginative accounts of the cult’s practice. These fantastic pictures should strike one

more as the product of Roman curiosity than of contempt and loathing, especially when we

consider that this goddess was also upheld as a protector of the state and its citizens, associated

with the acts of the maiores whose efforts brought the cult to Rome.

Later evidence for perceptions of the cult in the Republican period may provide us with

insight into how Romans reacted to Cybele and her priests before the end of that time, but we

should always be aware of the habits of later writers to infuse their accounts with aspects of the

cult, and opinions about it, from their own time. The “canonical” picture of the Magna Mater

was produced in the Augustan Principate, and all authors writing during or after that time must

be held at least partially suspect, for they are observing the cult according to the worldview that

Augustus and his descendants determined for it.

By means of the programs of literary propaganda he sponsored as patron of the leading

authors of his age, Augustus adapted the cult into the form recognizable to modern students of

the Magna Mater in Rome. The next chapter presents a (necessarily) brief discussion of how the

princeps effected the canonization of Cybele’s ιJερος λοvγ ος—in essence converting the sacred tale

into a Roman fabula sacra with the addition of the exclusively Roman tales of Aeneas and the

goddess’ journey to and settlement in the city.

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4. CYBELE AND THE AUCTOR RES PUBLICAE RENOVATAE

Sed et populus quondam universus ludorum die et accepit in contumeliam eius et

adsensu maximo conprobavit versum in scaena pronuntiatum de gallo Matris
deum tympanizante “videsne, ut cinaedus orbem digito temperat?”223

In fact, once, on the day of the Games, the people as one revealed their hatred of
him, and heartily approved with the greatest assent a line presented on stage by a
drum-playing gallus of the Mother of the Gods: “See how the queen beats the
drum with his finger!?”

Drawn by Suetonius to show the kind of slanders his subject—the emperor Augustus—suffered

in his lifetime, this anecdote equates the ruler with a “sodomite” follower of Cybele.224 As usual,

the biographer presents us with the kind of partisan distaste that makes a straightforward

discussion of Augustus and his contribution to Rome difficult to produce.225 Suetonius gives us

an idea that Augustus’ sexual preferences were anecdotally comparable to those assumed to be

common among the galli226—a popular notion at least when the biography was composed, a full

century after the death of his subject.227

There is more to Augustus’ association with the Magna Mater than this minor episode in

his biography implies. Concretely, Suetonius must admit that the emperor restored many of the

city’s public buildings,228 an architectural campaign that, according to Augustus himself, included

renovations of the aedes Magnae Matris.229

Yet it is as patron of literature that Augustus’ relationship to Cybele is most apparent.

The silence regarding the cult discussed in chapter 1, and the “efflorescence” of compositions

devoted to the goddess in chapters 2 and 3, do not prepare us for the wholesale adaptations of
 82

key points in the cult’s ιJεροvς λοvγ ος as they come down to us from some of the greatest authors

of prose and poetry writing at the time of the Augustan Principate. As an established figure in

the Roman festival calendar, Cybele herself becomes a worthy subject for “renovation” and

reinterpretation within the holistic revival of Republican religious and cultural themes in the final

decades of the first century BCE. In essence, the goddess and her mythological profile are

employed in that period to further the literary spirit and identity of the “res publica restitutio”

under Augustus.

Figure 8: Sketch of central

Rome and the western corner
of the Palatine at the time of
Augustus. Abbreviations: HA
– “House of Augustus”; HL –
“House of Livia.”
(source: Wiseman (1984), 124)

Such encouragement by political figures had its precedent in the late Republic, but the use

of literary propaganda to promote a regime’s legitimacy had never been utilized so vigorously by

a Roman leader:

The Dictator [Julius Caesar] . . . encouraged the studies of the learned Varro, to
revive interest in Roman religion and other national antiquities. As yet, however,
no systematic exploitation of literature on the grand scale. That was left for
Augustus.230
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By creating—and recreating—elements from Rome’s past and present in its new literature,

Augustus held a tool that could bend public opinion as he wished. As the head of state in a

“restored” res publica, he ruled with unprecedented powers that allowed him to just declare how

time-honored and traditional those powers were—if entirely on his terms and as justification of

his own supreme position.231

****

The following pages will provide an overview of the representations in Augustan literature of the

cult of Cybele. With the works considered here—Livy’s ab Urbe Condita, Virgil’s Aeneid, lyric

works of Propertius and of Horace, and finally two works composed by Ovid late in the

emperor’s reign—we encounter the culmination of mythic syncretism that had begun a

millennium before, when Greeks first encountered the Phrygian cult of MATAR/KUBABA and

adopted aspects of it in their own religious milieu. While our authors of the Augustan period

composed within vastly divergent idioms, setting their hands to treat the Magna Mater and her

mythic biography in unique ways, one derives the impression that there existed a “meta-author”

influencing them to present a specific picture of the goddess and her ιJεροvς λοvγ ος—just as we

perceive all of the writing from this period to be in some way affected by the new power

structure established in the empire.

That auctor—Augustus—presents through his stable of writers themes consistent with

his non-literary programs of building, imperial expansion, and identification with historical and
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semi-legendary antecedents. These elements, taken as a whole, convey a single, complex theme of

continuity, legitimacy, and the attainment of a new golden age:

magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo.

iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna,
iam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto.232

The grand cycle of the ages is born anew.

And now Virgo returns—Saturn’s rule dawns—
now fresh descendants appear from lofty heaven.

“The function of the myth [of the golden age] was always to hold up a mirror to present malaises

or to presage a future return to the idyll.”233 Having overcome the troubling civil wars that marked

the death of the Republic, Augustus could embody in his person, and in his social and political

campaigns, the new age occurring to the world.

GODDESS OF THE ROMAN DIASPORA

Αιjνειvαν δæ α[ρæ ε[τικτεν εjυστεvφανος Κυθεvρεια

Αjγ χιvση/ η{ρωι μιγει'σæ εjρατη/' φιλοvτητι
Ι[δης εjν κορυφη/'σι πολυπτυvχου υJληεvσσης.234

And Aeneas was born after fair-crowned

Kytherea joined with her hero Anchises
in the sweetest passion: she bore him
amidst the dense woods on Mount Ida’s peak.

A writer contemporary with the Greek ur-poet Homer, Hesiod offers some of the earliest extant

literature in the ancient Greek canon. This passage from his Theogony positively locates Aeneas

in the Troad, associating that hero with Troy centuries before the advent of Roman civilization he
 85

was destined to found. Equally significant for our study, both Hesiod and Homer connect Aeneas

with Mount Ida, the traditional haunt of Cybele.235 Generations later, the Roman tradition finds

Troy equivalent by association with Ida as well as with Phrygia.236 By the time Lucretius

composes his de Rerum Natura (fully seven centuries after the Greek epic cycle was formalized),

this web of associations has developed in full.237 Aeneas was now the bearer of Troy’s cultural

legacy, and it was this legacy that, transplanted to the Italian shores, brought forth the glorious

Roman state populated by Virgil’s audience.

With the presence of the Phrygian Mother on the Palatine after 204 BCE, we may assume

that reinforcement of Roman identification with the Magna Mater—through her Phrygian

connection to Aeneas—inspired each later generation to see the goddess more readily as a

progenitor of the Roman race. This connection was coupled with the recent, historical association

of Cybele with the victory over Carthage, and would have reinforced Rome’s conception of the

goddess, here as a protector of the city.238 We have already seen that such a dual

sentiment—historical and mythological, founding and protecting—existed among the Romans and

must have been tangible at each performance of the Megalensian Games in Rome.

Virgil’s construction of Cybele and her relation to Troy, Aeneas, and Rome—as drawn

from earlier materials, harnessed and activated by the poet—guarantees a representation of

Cybele “packed” with symbolism, connections, relationships. Here, the Magna Mater is shown

in her “true,” canonical association with the Roman people. Aiding the erstwhile Trojans on their
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way to Latium, she presides over her scenes, mural-crowned (much as she might in the

processions of the Megalensia seen by Roman spectators in Virgil’s day), fully taking on the role

of protectress of the Roman people, recognized now as the guardian deity of the Trojan diaspora.

****

How does Virgil describe the Magna Mater? She appears throughout the Aeneid, in important

though not necessarily memorable sequences, in lesser mythological scenes, and in passages

subordinate to the central narrative. Virgil often casts her as a divine ally of Aeneas and his men,

easily read as a kind of “fairy godmother” to the Trojan’s archetypal hero.

She is most often represented as the beacon for Aeneas and his men to follow, an icon of

the new city the hero is to found. The goddess remains tied to her old places—mater cultrix

Cybeli Corybantiaque aera Idaeumque nemus239 —“nurturing mother of (Mount) Cybele and the

Corybants’ bronze cymbals, and keeper of Mount Ida’s glade.” The symbol of the Trojans’

relocation, she stands as a saving deity of Aeneas and his men, overshadowed in that role by the

hero’s mother, Venus.

An early scene in the epic sets up the relationship between the deity and the Trojans.

Aeneas asks the prophet-god Apollo “whom are we to follow? where would you have us go, to

found our home?”240 The reply—Dardanidae duri . . . antiquam exquirite matrem241 —“Sturdy

Dardan sons . . . seek out the Ancient Mother,” effectively links the plight of the refugees with
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the goddess. The god’s language is of course oracular, resonating with similar lines describing the

Sibylline prophecy that brought the goddess (“antiqua mater”) to the city.242

Later, the shade of Anchises presents a more elaborated prophecy relating the goddess to

Rome’s history. Here Cybele is mentioned in the same breath as Anchises’ prophetic description

of the city’s foundation and success:

en huius, nate, auspiciis illa incluta Roma

imperium terris, animos aequabit Olympo,
septemque una sibi muro circumdabit arces
felix prole virum: qualis Berecyntia mater
invehitur curru Phrygias turrita per urbes,
laeta deum partu, centum complexa nepotes,
omnes caelicolas, omnes supera alta tenentis.243

Look, son! under the auspices [of Mars]

is Rome famed in its rule of the world,
that city’s spirit is lofty as Olympus,
and her seven hills shall be built round
by a single wall, blessed, vigorous in manhood:
just as when the Berecynthian Mother’s borne,
turret-crowned, through Phrygian cities,
of the gods content with her progeny, embraced
by her many offspring—each divine, every one
possessed of a heavenly abode.

Although she is part of the founding of Rome through her proximity, in a metaphor, to the

auspices of its beginnings, she is still held at a distance by Anchises’ phrasing: “as when she is

borne . . . through Phrygian cities.”244 She is in a sense “kept in reserve,” awaiting the later time

when her Roman “children” will seek her in remote Phrygia, their ur-motherland. That the

passage began as a description of Romulus’ lineage, and that it is colored throughout with the
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symbology of Mars, that patriarch’s war-god father, could perhaps refer to the association of

Rhea Silvia (Romulus’ mother) with the goddess Rhea, the mater deorum often confused with

Cybele.245

The miraculous episode of the burning of Aeneas’ ships,246 and their “resurrection” as sea-

nymphs247 provides the goddess with a moment to “shine” as the savior and protectress of the

Trojans, as well as the keeper of certain signs that indicate the ultimate triumph of Aeneas.

Presenting her powers to Aeneas as a hint (“you’re getting close to victory”), Cybele’s behavior

here, and the behavior of her creatures—incongruously cast as sea-nymphs—refers back to the

general expression of what the Magna Mater means to the Roman people: she is the goddess who

portends victory, the “saviour and miracle-worker” who points out the right path for the Trojans

to take.248 By offering the woods from her sacred mountain as timber for ships, she has provided

the materials for their escape and ultimate landing in their ordained new home.

Confronted with the miracle of the ships, Aeneas is at first dumbfounded, then moved to

give thanks for this harbinger of victory:

Stupet inscius ipse

Tros Anchisiades; animos tamen omine tollit.
Tum breviter super adspectans convexa precatur:
“Alma parens Idaea deum, cui Dindyma cordi
turrigeraeque urbis biiugique ad frena leones,
tu mihi nunc pugnae princeps, tu rite propinques
augurium Phrygibusque adsis pede, diva, secundo.”249
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Stunned he is, unknowing, the Trojan,

Anchises’ son—staring, contemplating,
lost in thoughts—yet his spirits rise at the omen.
Then with haste he makes a prayer over the hull,
“Saving mother of the gods, Idaean goddess,
for whom Dindyma rises dear—deity crowned
with walls and city turrets, leading lions
yoked to your chariot—let me now be master
of the battle, now bring close the prophecy,
fittingly: with following step give aid to the Phrygians.”

The goddess “follows” the Phrygian race of Trojans, both in her continued support of Aeneas

and his band, and in her future arrival to Rome. And, in “bringing near” (propinquo) the

prophecy, she will become propinqua to her Trojan/Roman people, a prophesied relationship

only made real through other prophecies—as found in the Sibylline Books and the oracle at

Delphi. Virgil is here layering his own legendary narrative’s time and space with the setting of

historical Rome, at once looking forward and reflecting on the past history that brought the

goddess to the city. Here, as in all Roman mythography of the time, Cybele and her Phrygians

are destined to be a part of Rome.

****

Such are the “glorious” aspects of Cybele’s relationship with Aeneas, as depicted in Virgil’s

work. But there is a down side to association with the goddess—or perhaps it is more

appropriate to say “it isn’t easy proving your virility if you’re from Phrygia,” at least according

to the Italian foes of Aeneas’ Trojan band. Identifying with the Great Mother—complete with
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the overtone of transvestitism ever-present when she appears—the Dardan sons must suffer not

a little stemming from their reputed effeminacy.250

A stupendous attack on the virility of Aeneas’ “Phrygians” occurs in Aeneid 9, in the

taunt of the Italian Numanus Remulus: Non pudet obsidione iterum valloque teneri, / bis capti

Phryges, et morti praetendere muros?251 In twenty lines Numanus skewers his enemies, boasting

vociferans tumidusque (“clamorous and proud”), at last concluding: O vere Phrygiae, neque enim

Phryges . . . sinite arma viris et cedite ferro.252 Thankfully, the speaker is thereupon skewered by

an arrow shot from Ascanius’ bow—I, verbis virtutem inlude superbis!253 —“Go make light of

[our] manhood with haughty words [now]!”

Roller finds this and other passages254 to be unusual, considering the ultimate triumph of

the Trojans in Italy, foretold in book 6 and alluded to in book 10. Instead of divinely proclaimed

victory, the Trojans’ taint of Eastern effeminacy becomes the focus here. The manly origins of

the city in Anchises’ vision—felix prole virum—are fundamentally called into question in these

passages. Surely such lines cannot refer retroactively to the Trojans of Homer’s epic. For all that

Paris appears as the stereotypically fey, Eastern archer (as opposed to the spearman who

embodies a true Hellenic warrior), the Iliad casts him alongside, and therefore affiliated with, his

mighty brother, Hector.

This seeming contradiction against earlier epic traditions can be seen as an attempt by

Virgil to meld the older, Greek pattern with the contemporary vision of the Cybele cult as it
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appeared in Rome. How can it be, the poet seems to be asking of his material, that these great

men of his nation’s legends could be related to a culture and a country where such habits as

transvestitism and ritual castration are practiced? This is the core question one must ask

whenever treating the presence of Cybele and her cult in Rome.

According to Roller, the very solution of this problem can be found in the final book of

the Aeneid. We find there an admonition in Juno’s final speech, that the Italians should retain

their voices and clothing (that is, their culture)—this, apparently, will exorcise the unpleasant

aspects of the goddess’ cult, while allowing her positive energies to thrive in this new homeland

of the Trojan race. The “madness and high camp” extant in the city in the form of “a sinister alien

goddess served by a priesthood of contemptible half-men”255 are hereby brought in check by the

true Queen of the Gods. By requiring those who dwell in Italy (both aboriginal Italians and the

Trojan refugees) to maintain Italian practices evermore, Juno is in effect limiting the powers of

the earlier mother goddess in this new land. The Trojan people, whose practices we are to

understand from this passage are distasteful to Juno, are to be replaced by a people “powerful in

Italian virtue.”256

****

Virgil’s Aeneid gives us an attractive back-story for the goddess’ arrival and continued presence in

the city. A narrative aetiologia, the epic serves to reinforce the dynamics of Cybele’s relationship

with her adopted city.257

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The goddess had a long-standing role in the history and development of the Roman

people, though this fact only appears officially in the work of Virgil. While not the first attempt

in Latin to explain the origins of Rome and its early history,258 the Aeneid represents a

consolidation into canonical expression of national identity and origins. Its plot can be

paraphrased as “the story of the early Roman people on their flight from Troy, their arrival in

Italy, and their triumphant settlement in their new home.” Such a story, when read by a Roman

audience, equates that audience to its mythic forebears: “we are all the children of pater Aeneas.”

This association was to bring the tales of Aeneas, first encountered in Hesiod and the Epic

Cycle,259 full circle: “The Greeks told this story first, but it was always our story.”

Virgil’s epic marks a crucial point in the Roman conception of the Magna Mater. As we

have seen, she never appears to be identified with Phrygian MATAR or the Greek Μηvτηρ Μεγαvλη

in Roman literature. Rather, by the time of Augustus, she has become a pastiche composed of

qualities drawn from those earlier deities—but always serving to link Rome with a distant, pre-

Roman and heroic past. If she evinced Greek or Phrygian qualities before Augustus, these have

not come down to us, so effective was the filter through which the goddess’ image in Rome was

processed.

Sanders summarizes this effacement of the goddess’ Greco-Phrygian origins: “Den

Römern gilt die vorrömishche Phase der Mater Magna nicht als phrygische, klassisch-griechische

ode hellenistische Vorstufe, sondern als trojanisches, d.h. römisches Erbe der Väter.”260 The
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generation struggling with the violent end of the Republic was drawing on a heritage (handily)

foretold in Homer and Hesiod, allowing them to bypass the adaptations brought by whole

centuries of influence from Phrygian, Greek, and Hellenistic cultures. Accordingly, the Romans of

this time can be seen stripping off the accretions of nearly a millennium, to find a deity from

outside the Greco-Roman sphere altogether. While they were obviously the inheritors of the

Greek and Hellenistic civilization, their ties with Homer’s Troad, and the goddess of that old

country, meant that they were simultaneously from another, non-Greek place, and could

therefore create their own terms by which they might be judged as a culture.

Within this reinvented Roman/ur-Roman identity, Cybele presents herself as a standard-

bearer for the manufacture of a new self-identifying symbolism. All that Rome means, or should

mean, to a citizen in the time of the Augustus is presented poetico-historically in the Aeneid.

From her third-century advent in Rome down to the Late Republic, the evidence in

Virgil’s text for Cybele’s role in Roman national identity seems clear: she was a goddess from the

Troad, the Roman people had sprung from the Trojan race (now in diaspora), and her return to

her people marked a restoration and a level of establishment unrealizable without her presence.

She arrives in Rome even as Scipio is putting out the last flames of the Second Punic War,

“restoring” an earlier power (Teucrian/Trojan/Latin) and simultaneously instating the early

Roman Empire within the Mediterranean sphere. Through her patronage, she takes some of the

divine credit for the military success, as witnessed in her association with Victory.
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THE FABULA SACRA OF THE ROMANS

If ever a foreign enemy should invade Italy, he could be defeated and driven out if
Cybele, the Idaean Mother of the Gods, were brought from Pessinus to Rome.261

If Virgil’s epic conveys all the key aspects of Rome’s glorious Trojan forebears (and how Cybele

is bound up in that heritage), Livy’s history of the coming of the goddess to Rome serves to

finally place Cybele in the midst of her long-abandoned children. An aetiology in some senses

akin to Virgil’s (though mirrored more closely in the later Fasti of Ovid), the sections Livy

devotes to Cybele represent a rarity in histories of religious development: we can use Livy’s

account to confirm precisely when and how this cult came to be in Rome, as well as the temper

of the society that was adopting it.262

While the goddess appeared in the city with a pre-Roman, Greco-Phrygian pedigree—as

we have seen, complete with a composite mythic profile of significant antiquity—her arrival

inspired a specifically Roman corpus of myth and legend. The seemingly miraculous defeat of

Hannibal forms part of this “local” legend, apparent in her cult’s early location within the temple

of Victory. Adhering to this story is the miraculous vindication of Claudia, a member of the

patrician Claudii whose descendants were reckoned part of Augustus’ extended family. This

narrative, bound up in the story of Cybele’s arrival as a secondary sequence, truly heralds, not a

reinterpretation of an older mythic identity, but an entirely new point of reference for the

goddess in the ancient world. Though not expressed prior to Livy in extant literature, the coming

of Cybele becomes with his account a kind of fabula sacra or “sacred tale,” to be set alongside
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the earlier, pre-Roman mythologies and ιJεροvι λοvγ οι , of the goddess, her priests, and

(increasingly) her consort, Attis.

The basic motifs of the goddess’ summons and arrival to Rome were collected nearly

completely and reported by Livy in ab Urbe Condita. At the time of its composition (late first

century BCE), the cultural and political upheaval of the previous generation had been swept aside

in favor of the monomaniacal reconstruction of Rome under Augustus the princeps. There can be

little doubt that the historian wrote under the influence of his times, and of the all-encompassing

program of regeneration enacted by the singular authority of the emperor.263

****

Cybele was brought to Rome in the spring of 204 BCE, in response to a reading of the Sibylline

Books by the decemvirs. As Livy describes it, the people of Rome had become progressively

more anxious with each year of Hannibal’s occupation of southern Italy.264 The Carthaginian had

controlled the region for fifteen years, stirring up dissension among the Italian allies, all the while

threatening Rome itself with his troops. In particular, a decade of military disasters, most notably

at Cannae and Trasimene, weighed heavily on Roman morale.

In the early twentieth century, the first serious scholars of the Magna Mater were hard-

pressed to justify the bringing of the goddess to Rome: considering her “difficult nature,” they

saw in the ancient evidence sufficient reason for fetching Cybele from Asia Minor, simply as a

kind of divine reinforcement.265 More recently, others wrestling with the problem have attributed
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the action to strategies for absorbing portions of the eastern Mediterranean into the budding

empire.266 A synthesis of these ideas has also been put forward, supporting the religious

dimension of the goddess’ arrival at Rome while underscoring a discernible increase of Roman

optimism—not fear—in the period from 210 to 202.267 There is a further rationale for the action:

namely, that the Magna Mater Idaea was a goddess of Rome’s Trojan forebears, and therefore a

member of their divine legacy.268

Whatever the level of anxiety, optimism, lust for conquest, or mythic identification with

their ancestors (perhaps a combination of all four) felt by the populace and leaders at Rome, the

consultation of the Sibylline Books took place, according to Livy, as a response to progressively

threatening portents and omens.269 The resulting oracle was to become a cornerstone in the

Roman myth of their Magna Mater:

quandoque hostis alienigena terrae Italiae bellum intullisset, eum pelli Italia
vincique posse, si mater Idaea a Pessinunte Romam advecta foret.270

Whenever a foreign-born adversary brings war against the Italian land, he shall be
thrown out of Italy and vanquished, if the Idaean Mother is brought from
Pessinus to Rome.

We might say that “the rest is history.” The Romans dutifully sent a delegation to Asia Minor,271

which was received “comiter” by Attalus of Pergamum and led to Pessinus in order to receive the

“sacrum lapidem” that stood for the goddess herself. 272

Livy leaves this narrative to address other matters in Italy and Rome, returning to the

story of the goddess’ journey a few chapters later. Informed that Cybele had been obtained by
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the delegation,273 the Senate deliberates de matre Idaea accipienda—“on how the Idaean Mother

ought to be received.”274 Publius Scipio, son of Gnaeus and a cousin of Scipio Africanus, is

chosen as “best of the good men” within the city, and hence worthy of presiding over the

goddess’ reception.275 Accompanying Publius are certain matrones of the city, including one Livy

refers to by name, Claudia Quinta. Her role in the ceremony appears to have taken on the

trappings of legend within her lifetime,276 though Livy “gives an unadorned account”277 of the

event that Ovid would later describe as a “miracle.”278 While both named figures in this story are

not historically important beyond the account, the overall sense is one of virtue and dedication to

the city and its salvation.

Once on dry land and accepted within the city, the goddess is set up in the temple of

Victory:

pertulere deam pridie idus Apriles; isque dies festus fuit. Populus frequens dona
deae in Palatium tulit, lectisterniumque et ludi fuere, Megalesia appellata.279

They carried the goddess [through the city] on the day before the ides of April,
and it was a festival day. The thronging people bore gifts to the goddess on the
Palatine, and there was a banquet for the gods and games, known as the Megalesia.

Unadorned indeed: we find Livy’s treatment of the events of Cybele’s arrival to Rome rather

spare. Although he affirms that she was set up in the temple of Victory,280 we are given no

further commentary on her efficacy in stopping Hannibal and winning victory for the Roman

people. Of course, that turn of events remains to be described by Livy in subsequent chapters of

his historical account. At least the reference to the festus and the sense of gaiety in this final
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passage serves to contradict the earlier dread that led to the summoning of the goddess in the

previous year.281

****

The passages in ab Urbe Condita concerning the arrival of Cybele in Rome describe the tenor of

the times in which these events occurred. While Livy bases his narrative history on earlier

sources, it should be remembered that his text more closely reflects the attitudes of his times

toward the cult and its mythic associations with the ruling party. His mention of Claudia, whose

descendants will be part of the “royal family” of Augustus, surely accords with the aggrandizing

pattern the princeps encouraged in authors associated with his administration. Cybele’s physical

association with the temple of Victory provides a link to the post-war dedication of her own

temple in 191 BCE,282 while pointing to the renovations of the temple Augustus would enact in his

reign.

CYBELE IN LYRIC POETRY

Tympana tenta tonant palmis et cymbala circum

concave, raucisonoque minantur cornua cantu . . . .283

They thunder with their hands on tympana held,

they beat deafening noise from their hollow cymbals,
and strike fear in the crowd with a tune played
on rasping horns . . . .
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Lyric poetry fit less well in Augustan propaganda. A brief laudatory poem, however canny,

hardly does the work that an epic such as the Aeneid can to illuminate the glorious age in which

Rome found itself. The great poets of these tenuis grandia—“thin sublimities,” Propertius and

Horace, pepper their lyrics with oblique references to Cybele or her entourage, in particular

playing on the noise of her galli in procession. For both, the idea of the goddess, her attributes, or

those of her servants provide little more than picturesque images for their verse. Each poet plays

on the metaphoric quality of noise, mined before by Lucretius, for which the cult of the Magna

Mater was already famous.

****

Horace is particularly intrigued by the sound of the Phrygians, describing in several passages

their Berecynthian flutes or pipes and the atmosphere they inspire. The goddess and her

followers are put up as examples of noisy confusers of the mind, comparable to Bacchus and his

entourage—and, as with “Pater Liber,” the Magna Mater’s presence represents festivity and joy,

raucous music being as intoxicating as fine spirits.

An example of this is found in Horace’s play at tenuis grandia in carmen 1.16, where the

poet compares the effect of his own “bad verse” to divine possession and destruction: non

Dindymene . . . quatit / mentem sacerdotum . . . non acuta / sic geminant Corybantes aera.284 Two

odes later, he returns to the image of madness inspired by the cult’s practice, this time juxtaposed

with the madness induced by too much wine:

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Saeva tene cum Berecyntio

cornu tympana, quae subsequitur caecus amor sui
et tollens vacuum plus nimio gloria verticem
arcanique fides prodiga, perlucidior vitro.285

Hold quiet those frenzied drums, along with

the Berecyntian horn: these things lead to blind love
of oneself, exalting an empty head with boastful
overconfidence, inspiring a lavish belief
in secrets clearer than glass.

The noise of the saevum tympanum cum Berecyntio cornu is to be silenced, noise that leads to a

“blind love of self,” boastfulness, and a “faith that lets on its secrets,” making it more transparent

than glass—of course Horace is thinking of a glass drained of its wine. Perhaps we can read a

latent dig at the faithlessness of the foreign priests here (“Phrygica fides”?), though once again

Horace appears to focus on a superficial quality of the goddess’ worship rather than commenting

on more fundamental characteristics of the Phrygian priesthood.

Indeed, when it comes to treating Cybele and her galli, Horace avoids deep consideration,

as befits the lyric poet he is at pains to remain. Apparently in his stock of imagery,

“Berecynthian” (and all that the term represents) stands exclusively for loud music and clamor.

His invocation of the sounds associated with the Magna Mater in other poems bears this out: cur

Berecyntiae / cessant flamina tibiae?286 and illic . . . Berecyntiae / delectabere tibiae / mixtis

carminibus non sine fistula287 are set in poems dealing with drinking parties. In the revelries

Horace describes, it would seem Berecynthian flutes are a fitting accompaniment to a party.

Clearly, as in carmen 4.1, they will “delight” those who hear them.
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We find nothing more in Horace to substantially increase our understanding of the cult of

the Magna Mater in his time. In another mention of the Phrygian cult, Horace tosses off an

interesting description of the “sort of girl” who deserves a castrated gallus as a lover:

Illam ‘post paulo’; ‘sed pluris’; ‘si exierit vir’

Gallis, hanc Philodemus ait sibi quae neque magno
stet pretio neque cunctetur, cum est iussa venire. 288

Philodemus says a girl who comes up with a line like

“in a while,” “but pay me more,” and “if the husband leaves,”
she’s meant for a gallus—the girl for him won’t charge
a huge price, and she won’t dilly-dally when called for.

As Roller observes, “women were considered especially susceptible to the charms of the Galli,

whose sterility may have made them a favored choice among women for extramarital

relationships.”289 All the same, Horace’s reference to the gallus here is not an observation that

“girls go for galli,” but is meant as an attack on fussy women (call-girls?): if the girl gives a man

any “trouble,” all she deserves is a eunuch.

In Horace, then, we find two clear generalizations with regard to the Magna Mater and her

priests: they are loud (though their presence can be agreeable, in the context of a rambunctious

party), and the Phrygian priests can be the butt of sexual jokes. Certainly, Horace is no Virgil,

and throughout his career he avoids the role of epic poet that his patrons wanted him to take on.

It is altogether possible that Horace chose these generalizations as part of his overall recusatio: “I

don’t have the skill to write of Claudia Quinta’s chastity, or of the noble delegation that fetched

the goddess from Pessinus—those are subjects for epic, which I am not capable of composing.”
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Removing the loftier aspects of the Cybele cult in Rome290 from his palette, the poet is left with a

highly useful, if misleading and simplistic, caricature of the goddess and her Phrygians—a view

that became easily translated into later satire and, ultimately, the attacks of Christian authors on

paganism.291

****
In Propertius we find another poet who avoids treating lofty subjects, focusing almost

exclusively on details of his own personal life. When he does use mythic expression, it is to

highlight the minuscule themes with which he is perennially obsessed. Again, the goddess and

entourage are fit to “join the party,” providing music and a festive atmosphere:

mollia Dircaeae pulsabunt tympana Thebae,

capripedes calamo Panes hiante canent,
vertice turrigero iuxta dea magna Cybebe
tundet ad Idaeos cymbala rauca choros.292

Soft timbrels will beat for Theban Dircaeus,

goatfooted Pans will play on hollow reeds,
and close at hand will great mother Cybele—
turret-crowned goddess—giddily thump
on resounding cymbals for Ida’s dancing throng.

Now tricked out with a raucus cymbalum herself (uncharacteristically), the goddess participates

in the poet’s lively invocation of Bacchus. Earlier in the poem, Propertius gives us a subtle

parallel image:

tu quoque enim non esse rudem testatur in astris

lyncibus ad caelum vecta Ariadna tuis.293
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For you also, there’s proof in the stars that you’re

no stranger to love, having borne Ariadne up there
to heaven with your lynxes.

Bacchus’ “lynx-drawn chariot,” described here, brings to mind the more common image of

Cybele’s lion-drawn chariot. And, we should remember, the Roman cult of Cybele was evolving

even in Propertius’ day, to allow the appearance of a deified Attis—risen from unseemly death

into immortality to join his consort ad caelum.294

Beyond celebratory imagery, Propertius uses Cybele to convey exoticism, as in carmen

3.22:

Frigida tam multos placuit tibi Cyzicus annos,

Tulle, Propontiaca quae fluit isthmos aqua,
Dindymis et sacra fabricata inventa Cybebe,
raptorisque tulit quae via Ditis equos?295

Tullus, did all those years in cold Cyzicus

please you, the Propontic waters flowing
along the isthmus, the unearthing
of Dindymene Cybele’s sacred relics,
and the road taken by ravaging Hell’s horses?

The poet calls his friend home from foreign lands and all the peculiar sights one finds there,

invoking in the last stanza his home country:

haec, tibi, Tulle, parens, haec est pulcherrima sedes,

hic tibi pro digna gente petundus honos . . . .296

Your mother, Tullus, is this place, this

the resting place most lovely, here
you should rightly seek out honor for your people.
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Propertius means to draw Tullus homeward, invoking his duty to homeland and family. The lines

can be compared with the longing for home that Catullus sets beyond Attis’ grasp in carmen 63:

for Tullus, though, the lure of the wild East need not keep him forever from returning to his own

pulcherrima sedes.

In the closing poems of Propertius’ fourth book, his themes become darker and more

introspective:

ecce coronato pars altera rapta phaselo,

mulcet ubi Elysias aura beata rosas,
qua numerosa fides, quaque aera rotunda Cybebes
mitratisque sonant Lydia plectra choris.297

Here are others, taken on a crowned barque

to the place where holy breezes are kissed by
Elysian roses, where sound so many lyres,
and Cybele’s bronze cymbals chime, where
the Lydian plectra ring for filleted dancers.

The poet dreams of visiting his dead Cynthia in Hades, with Cybele’s cymbals used to convey a

register heard in the somber tones of the Underworld. Invoking a ghost in the final poem of this

book, Propertius makes reference to the legendary Claudia:

turpior assessu non erit ulla meo,

vel tu, quae tardam movisti fune Cybeben,
Claudia, turritae rara ministra deae . . . .298

That woman will be reckoned no worse

in speaking for me, nor you, Claudia—unusual
attendant of the turret-crowned goddess—
who moved the barge for tardy Cybele . . . .
 105

The speaker of these lines is Cornelia, “the daughter of a Cornelius Scipio, whose wife Scribonia

later married Octavian and bore [his] daughter Julia,”299 and therefore a relative of the emperor.

With this we can assume that the poet has found the will at last to discuss a more

grandiose theme associated with Magna Mater (referring to the tale of Claudia Quinta and the

ship), though only in passing. Propertius gives us little sense of the figure’s significance to the

imperial family, and the only other clear reference to Claudia in the Augustan poets is found in

Ovid.300

****

The lyric poems of Horace and Propertius provide us with an indirect view of the goddess,

creating a skein of metaphors that happen to include her, rather than facing her head-on. We can

recognize the stereotypes of the Cybele cult (noisy gatherings, exoticism, hypersexuality) current

at the earliest in Catullus’ time, and which were to be mined poetically in the generations of

writers to come. By the frequency of their use, such stereotypes provide us with an idea that

Roman authors thought the cult worthy of inclusion in their works (therefore underlining its

cultural currency), but the tendency to generalize or inflate the aspects of the cult lead those

authors to distort its image for modern readers. Such interpretations become less and less

informative, conveying a flattened stereotype when we would rather see details of the cult’s

development and practice.

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GODDESS OF THE NEW ROME

Ter sine perpetuo caelum versetur in axe . . . . 301

As a collector and maker of hybrids of the myth that passed before him, Ovid represents the

culmination of mythic production in the ancient world. In this regard, his works are both essential

to students of Greek and Roman myth—and particularly dangerous for anyone who would draw

generalizations based on evidence in texts of the early Principate. More than the lyric poets who

are roughly his contemporaries, Ovid presents an interpretive obstacle course in his singular

genius for synthesizing themes, topoi, and imagery, producing a single, almost seamless fabric out

of the patchwork and overlays of a millennium’s mythological development. In the entry on the

cult in the Fasti,302 Ovid creates a picture of the fully syncretized Magna Mater as she existed in

Rome at the end of Augustus’ reign. While her inclusion in the Metamorphoses is much less

informative, everything we need to know about the cult of the Magna Mater can be found in the

Fasti. All the same, we should tread carefully here, for the canon Ovid establishes does not

necessarily jibe with the traditions he inherited, while his canonical picture of the cult becomes

the de facto source for most of its literature and interpretations that come after.

Even more dangerous is the fact of Ovid’s times and connection to the princeps. “To

understand Ovid’s Fasti,” a recent edition of the poem states, “is to understand Augustan

Rome.”303 It should be remembered that the reverse is also true: Augustan Rome enjoys a vivid
 107

presence in all of Ovid’s works, particularly those written late in his career, immediately prior to

or during his exile to the Black Sea coast.

****

As stated above, the brief passage on Cybele in the Metamorphoses provides us little new

information about the goddess and her position in Rome. In fact, the most important aspect of

the passage is its very inclusion in the poet’s mythological epic. That Cybele warrants a place in

this huge work indicates that the goddess “belongs” in Rome’s mythic canon, just as Augustus

finds that she belongs within the physical Rome: her Palatine temple is worthy of renovation,

and she belongs among the scores of legendary figures explored by the poet in his

Metamorphoses.

Ovid’s Cybele, as she appears in book 10 of that work, is an avenging deity who distorts

improperly enacted passion into subservient animalism. Atalanta and Hippomenes—“forgetful

of all Venus has done for them”304—happen to find a temple devoted to the Mother of the Gods

and are persuaded by the love-goddess to have sex within the temple.305 Ovid spins her fearful

anger into an aetiology: in a vivid sequence, the goddess transforms the pair into lions, aliisque

timendi / dente premunt domito Cybeleia frena leones306—“and in tamed teeth they clench

Cybele’s bit, these lions who to others are a source of fear.”

****
 108

The complex treatment Ovid gives the goddess in the Fasti is too rich for anything beyond a

cursory discussion here.307 We have seen many of the elements in earlier texts: the fabula sacra of

the goddess in Phrygia (Catullus); its continuation into the Roman world—first in her association

with Aeneas and the displaced Trojans (Virgil), and later with Cybele’s introduction into the city

in 204 BCE, with the attendant theme of Roman victory (Cicero and Livy); the noisy procession

of the galli during the ludi Megalenses—or the general identification of the goddess with clamor

(Lucretius, Horace, and Propertius); even the dramatic aspect of the festival (Plautus and

Terence), comprehended here in a single line: mira, sed et scena testificata loquar.308

Ovid describes a new—or, at least, previously undisclosed—aspect of the cult practice in

the ritual banquets (convivia . . . dapes) enjoyed by patricians during the festival.309 Attached to

the ritualized begging and alms-giving already seen in Lucretius,310 these banquets have their own

special dish: herbosum moretum—an “herb salad,” mixed together with candidus caseus—“white

cheese,” cognoscat priscos ut dea prisca cibos—“that the primeval goddess should recognize

primeval food.”311

Such details, whether gleaned from personal experience of the festival, sources not extant,

or else from the poet’s own imagination, serve to flesh out many aspects of the cult’s story and

practice in ways we have not seen in any earlier texts. Here, at last, is a complete survey of the

Roman cult of the Magna Mater for contemporary and subsequent audiences. Where Lucretius’

text began to take shape with the formula “cur . . ? quia est . . .,” only to lose the thread of
 109

inquiry as that poet drove on in pursuit of his philosophical interests, Ovid completes the

missing information using much the same formula.

Owing to the comprehensive rendition of the cult in the Fasti, it has been attractive for

modern scholars to “read backwards” from Ovid, in order to see elements as he presents them in

the treatment of the cult by earlier authors. In the absence of earlier evidence, this method has

been considered appropriate—but it should strike us now as anachronistic, running together two

centuries of dynamic evolution and integration of the cult within the sensibilities of the Roman

populace, state, and the authors who are our spokespeople for the contemporary society of

Rome. A Roman of Terence’s time could not discuss the significance of Cybele’s cult in as

elaborated a form as Ovid does—and this is not merely because Ovid is writing within the

context of the Augustan age. The cult had grown with the city through an explosive period in its

history, and the evolved view of the cult at the end of Augustus’ reign must be seen as distinct

from that of Cicero’s time, to say nothing of prior generations.

Another point to consider when reading the Fasti: if we are to believe that the Romans

were made uneasy by the presence of the Phrygian priesthood in Rome, we are hard-pressed to

find discomfort or offended morality in Ovid’s treatment, perhaps the single most detailed

summary of the Roman cult of Cybele. As with his treatment of other religious practices, Ovid

presents his account non-judgmentally, in this case his commentary coming from the mouth of a

divinity (the muse Erato). The ways of the Magna Mater may be unusual to a newcomer to
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Rome—they may even stand beyond mortal understanding—yet they are shown by Ovid to

belong within the firmament of Roman paganism. One may deride the Phrygian mores (as in

Varro, Horace, and later authors of satire), but Ovid’s treatment presents the facts of the

goddess’ worship, and therefore transcends a particular (read: human) viewpoint.

****

Ovid was an Augustan poet, the last great one. Exiled to the Black Sea town of Tomis in 8 CE, he

was technically the first poet of the post-Augustan regime; there is evidence in his revised text of

the Fasti that he sought the favor of Tiberius.312 He had outlived the princeps, yet his works were

defined to the last by the Augustan literary program of renewal and recreation. The

Metamorphoses is his renovated literary monument to, a verse library of, classical mythology.

The Fasti is a literary representation of the new calendrical time enforced under the Augustan

principate.313 These poems constitute a section within the mosaic of Augustus’ imperial

sensibility, the poet deferring ultimately to the auctor whose patronage he had once enjoyed,

only to spend his last years seeking its restitution while he wasted away in exile.

CONCLUSION

It is fitting that Augustus should identify his rule of city and empire with the god Janus.314 He

looked both backward to the legendary antecedents and Republican mores of earlier times, and

forward to the revitalized, fully renewed civilization that he began to shape in the Principate.
 111

Something more than human, Augustus became the genius of his age, inspiring—in fact,

willing—the production of literature that spoke to that time. Perhaps his identification with the

zeitgeist allowed him to recognize that his contribution to Roman cultural identity would be felt

for ages to come, well beyond the borders of his extensive temporal rule. Whether he did sense

this is, ultimately, irrelevant: the reorganization of Roman culture did affect everything in the

West that came after—not least European literature.

Augustus the auctor oversaw the transformation of Rome’s literary self-perception,

including its myths and religious rituals. As we have seen in this chapter, these changes effected a

transformation of Cybele’s ιJεροvς λοvγ ος into the fabula sacra of the new Rome. This

transformation influenced the representations of classical myth and legend for all time, creating

the first dense layer of canonical interpretations that we have been at pains to remove in this

study, in order to understand the pre-Augustan, Republican picture of the Magna Mater at

Rome.
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5. EVALUATING THE CYBELE CULT IN ROMAN LITERATURE

With regard to the cult of the Magna Mater in Rome, the authorial intent that created the primary

texts for the cult in the Republic can be organized in two categories. First, we encounter those

works that address the cult of Cybele indirectly, using the aedes Magnae Matris as a venue to

produce a message falling outside the function of the cult itself. Second are the works whose

primary purpose is to discuss aspects of the cult of the Magna Mater, its presence and that of its

Phrygian priesthood, or to describe the cult’s function within the Roman milieu.

There is no chronological progression that separates the two categories. The cult is

associated only marginally with what we have called the “Megalensian” plays of the second

century CE, and aspects of it appear only as stereotypic elements in early Augustan authors

(Horace and Propertius). Parallel to these texts are those treating the cult directly and in some

depth: in Varro and Catullus—Republican poets—whose narratives are subsequently absorbed

into a more comprehensive reinterpretation of the cult by Augustan authors: the epic poet Virgil,

the historian Livy, and the mythographer-poet Ovid.

While we have considered equally each reference to the Cybele cult in Latin—starting

with the “Megalensian” palliatae in the period immediately following its importation in 204 BCE,

through the final years of the Augustan Principate (15–20 CE)—it should be clear that the second

category of literary evidence is more critical to our understanding of the cult’s presence in the

city and its relationship with the Roman people. Mention of the cult by Varro and Lucretius
 113

constitutes our first example of a Roman treatment of the cult and its rituals, while Cicero’s

linkage of the cult’s association with the mos maiorum provides us with a sense that Romans of

the orator’s day recognized that this goddess belonged institutionally to the city. These

associations were heightened under Augustus, due to the desire of the princeps to represent

Cybele as an ancient, divine forebear of the Roman race.

In our evaluation of the presence of the goddess within Roman society and state religion,

we have found that the Magna Mater was nothing if not an accepted figure—whether through

existing cultural institutions associated with her (that is, the ludi Megalenses), the reactions of the

individual authors who wrote about her priests and the goddess herself, or, finally, in the

development of a total state sanction through her associations with Trojan legends that heralded

the coming of Rome.

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NOTES

1
Merriam Webster’s Encyclopedia of World Religions, 1048–9: “Syncretism, Religious”: “fusion
of diverse religious beliefs and practices . . . .The fusion of cultures that was effected by the
conquest of Alexander the Great, his successors, and the Roman Empire tended to bring
together a variety of religious and philosophical views that resulted in a strong tendency
toward religious syncretism.” See also OCD3, 1462: “syncretism.”
2
Collected in Vermaseren, Corpus Cultus Cybelae Attidisque (CCCA), 1–8.
3
Goldberg, 11.
4
ibid., 16.
5
Vermaseren (1977), 180–2.
6
cf. Roller, 269.
7
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, 2.19: ΡJωμαιvων δε; τω'ν αυjθιγενω'ν ου[τε
μητραγυρτω'ν τιı ου[τε καταυλουvμενοı πορευvεται δια; τη'ı ποvλεωı ποικιvλην
εjνδεδυκω;ı στολη;ν ου[τε οjργιαvζει τη;ν θεο;ν τοι'ı Φρυγιvοιı οjργιασμοι'ı κατα;
νοvμον και; ψηvφισμα βουλη'ı.—“The decree of the Senate proclaims that no native
Romans may appear as a begging priest of Cybele, nor may they play on the flute through
the city bedecked in a multicolored gown, nor may they worship the goddess according to the
Phrygian ways.”
8
see chapter 3.
9
cf. Virgil, Aeneid; see chapter 4.
10
see chapter 2.
11
Vermaseren (1977), 12–21; Roller, 27–39.
12
see Eller, The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory. Boston, 2000.
13
e.g., in the Homeric Hymns, “Hymn to the Mother of the Gods,” 1: Μητεvρα . . . παvντων τε
θεω'ν παvντων τæ αjνθρωvπων, “mother of all, both of gods and of men.”
14
Feeney, 50–1.
15
Roller,
16
Vermaseren (1977), 22
17
ibid., 13–20.
18
OCD3 183: “Artemis.”
19
Wardman, 12.
20
I have derived some of this retelling from sections in Vermaseren (1977) and Roller, 239–41:
“The first part, dealing with the origin of the goddess, appears less frequently in the surviving
sources, although it is known in two quite different versions, that of Diodoros [Siculus], and
that of Pausanias and Arnobius. The second part, the relationship of Cybele and Attis,
appears in virtually all references to the myth.” (239)
21
Vermaseren (1977), 92.
 115

22
Roller, 258: “Greek and Roman misunderstandings of older Phrygian rites, particularly the
rites of mourning for a dead priest-king and the eunuch status of the Mother’s priests, appear
to have been critical in the formation of the written versions of the myth as we know them.”
23
A. D. Nock, “Eunuchs in Ancient Religion,” 1925.
24
Roller, 253 and 256.
25
e.g., Varro, Eumenides, frag. 16–17 (see chapter 2).
26
cf. Ovid, Fasti, 4.183: ibunt semimares et inania tympana tundent—“The half-men will go and
beat on the hollow drums.”; Anacreontea, 12.1–2: οιJ με;ν καλη;ν Κυβηvβην ⁄ το;ν
ηJμιvθηλυν Α[ττιν ⁄ εjν ου[ρεσιν βοω'ντα ⁄ λεvγ ουσιν εjκμανη'ναι —“They say half-
woman Attis went mad shouting for fair Cybele in the mountains.”
27
see chapter 4, “The fabula sacra of the Romans.”
28
Livy, ab Urbe Condita 29.14; see chapter 4 for the circumstances of her adoption by the
Roman state.
29
ibid., 36.36.
30
If there was an “anti-Phrygian” sentiment in Rome, it is assumed that they did not generate
enough negative feeling for the cult to have it banned in the first generation of its presence in the
city. Witness the senatusconsultum de Bacchanalibus (186 BCE) described by Livy (AUC
19.8–18) for a contemporary example of the official process for expelling an unwanted cult.
31
cf. Roller, 279 n. 74, discussed below in chapter 4.
32
Iliad 20.355–6; cf. Bremmer and Horsfall, 12–24.
33
cf. Livy, op. cit.
34
Though we have Plautus’ Pseudolus, which served to dedicate the aedes in 191, as well as four
of Terence’s comedies that were premiered at the Megalensiae of the 160s; see chapter 1.
35
Valerius Maximus, 1.8.2; Ovid, Fasti 4.348. Roller (291) reads C. Metellus Caprarius, a cousin
and rival of Q. Metellus (cos. 109), in these passages, but the evidence is inconclusive. cf.
Boyle and Woodard, n. 4.347–8.
36
see Scullard (1959), who describes this period as “the century in which the Republic failed to
meet the challenge [of its increasing responsibilities] and in consequence crashed to its ruin amid
civil war and military dictatorship.” (1)
37
Res gestae divi Augusti, 34.1–2: postquam bella civilia exstinxeram— “after I snuffed out the
civil wars . . .”
38
cf. Syme, 459–75.
39
Roller, 237–59. Note this author’s less careful treatment of the immense span of time within
which her sources are writing, from Hesiod (eighth century BCE) to later pagan and Christian
writers of the down to fifth century CE, where evidence from Arnobius or Pausanias is melded
with information from the fourth century BCE!
40
Arnobius, Disputationes adversus gentes, 5.5–17; Eusebius, Praeparatio evangelicum, 2.3.18.
41
In fact, literally built over: see Vermaseren (1977), 45–7.
 116

42
Chuvin, 71.
43
This is as true of early twentieth-century scholars, such as Graillot and Showerman, as it is of
more recent interpreters of the cult’s history, viz. Roller, 301: “The undisguised contempt of
the Romans for the Galli comes across loud and clear.” See chapter 2 for more discussion of
this problem.
44
Fasti 4.262.
45
Wiseman (1984), 127.
46
Roller, 287: she is given “a distinctly Roman stamp,” to distinguish the goddess from her
Asian manifestation.
47
Livy, AUC 29.14.14; see chapter 4: “Rome’s fabula sacra of the Magna Mater.”
48
Beare (17) refers to it as a “craze.”
49
Martin (Terence: Adelphoe, 10–11) describes the current evidence for a chronology of the
Terentian plays.
50
The cult appears to have been affected by a sumptuary law in 161 (Valerius Maximus, 7.7.6),
but it does not seem to have disrupted public performances at the annual Megalensia.
51
cf. Beare, 128–36.
52
ibid., 128: palliatae gave way to the Romanized variation because the former, “in renouncing
Roman topics . . . left the field open for the rise of a new, native type of comedy, which
would try to invet its own plots and find its characters in Italian life.”
53
Both Atta and Afranius authored plays entitled Megalensia—reflecting a standard setting in
this genre?
54
or with Caecilius? cf. Beare, 87: among the forty-two titles given under this playwright’s
authorship is an Androgynos, as well as an Andrea.
55
Plautus, Pseudolus, 720; see n. 62 below.
56
Joy Connelly, reviewing Erich Segal’s The Death of Comedy: New York Times Book Review,
October 28, 2001.
57
or in 194: Roller, 288.
58
Lindsay, “Pseudolus,” app. crit. didascaliae. Beare’s list of Plautine plays (49) includes the
conjectured dates of performance.
59
cf. Gruen (1992), 186.
60
As one of a number, cf. the play’s prologue and concluding statement: Exporgi meliust lumbos
atque exsurgier: / Plautina longa fabula in scaenam venit—“Better get up and stretch your
limbs: there’s a long Plautine play due up on stage next” (prologue); fabulam in crastinum vos
vocabo—“I’ll tell it you in tomorrow’s play” (1335). The only other comedy of Plautus
accompanied by a didascalia is the Stichus, which is linked in place and time to the Plebeian
Games in the year of G. Sulpicius’ and G. Aurelius’ consulship: cf. Roller, 288.
61
Beare, 50–55.
 117

62
Pseud. 720–1.
63
Gilula, “A Walk Through Town,” Athenaeum (O.S.) 79: 1991, 245–7; see also Hallett, “The
Political Backdrop of Plautus’s Casina,” Transitions to Empire, 1996: 409–38, for an attempt
to “topicalize” a work of Plautus.
64
e.g., Pseud. 595–9: hi loci sunt atque hae regiones . . .—“here are the places, here the districts”;
961–4: habui numerum sedulo . . .—“I counted off the [street addresses] carefully.”
65
Referring to the new passage up the hill via the clivus Victoriae? ibid., 1234–5: nunc ne
exspectetis dum hac domum redeam via; / ita res gesta’st: angiporta haec certum est
consectarier.—“don’t you think that from now on I’ll come home by this way . . . after
what’s happened, I’m resolved to follow the back-alley.”
66
ibid., 1283–1313, etc.: quid ergo dubitas dare mi argentum?—“so did you doubt at all you’d
be giving me the money?”; see Lucretius, DRN 2.626–8, and the discussion in chapter 3,
“Frenzy in the Streets.”
67
This is a matter of speculation, depending on how we liberally we are to read populus frequens
dona deae in Palatium tulit, etc., in Livy, AUC 29.14.14.
68
cf. Cicero, de Senec. 14.50; Norwood 16–17; OCD33 “Plautus.”
69
cf. Martin, 11; Brothers, 10; Ireland, 2; and Gratwick, 4, for dating information.
70
Suetonius, vita Terenti.
71
Beare, 91–2.
72
ibid, 93: “Caecilius’ death is put by Jerome in the year after the death of Ennius, i.e. in 168
B.C. . . . .If the Andria was approved by Caecilius, why did the aediles leave the honour of
producing it to their successors of 166 B.C.?”
73
If they had not heard the play’s title announced prior to the Prologue’s appearance on stage,
then certainly they would hear it in that introductory speech: Terence is careful to declare
what his works’ Greek antecedents are, and in each case names his play as well.
74
Tradition preserves an association of Terence with the Aemilian clan—both with Aemilius
Paullus and his birth-son, Scipio Aemilianus—present in the didascaliae informing us of
Terence’s plays premiered at Paullus’ funeral games and perpetuated in Cicero’s picture of
the “Scipionic Circle” in his de Amicitia et al. Such evidence allows for further speculation: if
Terence was indeed a “Megalensian playwright” as well as being connected to the Aemilians,
does this imply that the most reputable family of the period was somehow connected to the
ludi Megalenses and the Cybele cult itself? Perhaps the legacy of Scipio Nasica—who
brought the cult statue back from Asia Minor in 204 BCE—bears some weight here,
considering Terence’s reputed friendship with another scion of the Scipios. A study of the
Aemilians’ building projects in the Forum and other sectors within the central urbs, the
association with Terence and other members of the “Scipionic Circle” in this generation, and a
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second-century link of the Aemilian-Scipionic dynasties with the cult of the Magna Mater
remains to be presented.
75
Heaut. 117: “he went off to Asia to serve in the king’s army.”
76
εJκυραv being the Greek expression for this relative: Bovie, 356.
77
Perhaps this particular brand of sexual depravity resonates with contemporary rumors of the
sexual antics of Cybele’s priesthood (extant only in later accounts, as in Martial and Juvenal);
again, the evidence is too vague for any concrete statements here.
78
Afranius, frag. 219 (Ribbeck, CFR).
79
Atta, frag. 10 (op. cit.).
80
See chapter 2.
81
Mel Brooks’ The Producers is a notable exception, as would be any self-referential work of
this sort. But I would argue that the reference to place is limited in these cases, made for the
sake of some plot- or setting-dependent point within the text. In Brooks’ musical, Broadway
has become a stylized reflection of the real street, bound up with the theatre industry that the
name itself conveys (dare we call it “metatheatrical”?). Since Plautus and Terence set their
plays in a stylized, New Comedy version of Greece, the only reference possible would be to
the Greek temple of Cybele, the Metroon. If we look to the togata plays, we would expect
some reference to the aedes Magnae Matris, which may have occurred but has not been
preserved in the extant passages.
82
An apt equation, since the rituals of Catholic Church were largely inherited from the practices
of Roman paganism; cf. Wagner.
83
We must be prepared to revise such a statement if future discoveries of palliata or togata
plays—whose subject is the goddess and her myth within the Roman sphere, à la Ovid—are
made. At present, such texts do not exist.
84
cf. Beare, 9: “How then are we to proceed, if every line of reasoning proves so unreliable? At
least we can describe what is known. The plays exist; each of them, whatever its source, is a
unity; it owes its present shape to some one mind; and the comedies at least were evidently
composed for performance.”
85
Scullard, 400.
86
Roller, 301.
87
e.g., Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 2.19.
88
see above, Introduction, n. 30.
89
i.e., ca. 70–40 BCE.
90
As we saw in chapter 1, a semiotic vocabulary with which to describe the Cybele cult had not
been developed, or was not preserved for later transmission, in the period when Terence’s
comedies were performed at the Megalensia. It would seem that, in the final decades of the
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Republic, such a vocabulary was being processed and published in works that we now
possess.
91
OCD3, 1582 “Varro”: “prob. 81–67 BC”; Roller, 308: “Eumenides . . . one of his Menippean
satires, composed around 70–60 BC.”
92
Reconstructed by Jean-Pierre Cèbe (Varron, Satires Ménippées, 1977: 748–54); R. Astbury
(M. Terentius Varro: Saturnarum Menippearum fragmenta, 1985: 22–9); F. Della Corte, La
poesia di Varrone reatino recostruita (Turin, 1938); W. W. Merry (1898, 201–05); and T. P.
Wiseman (1985) provides the text, with his own translation and additional commentary
(269–72). I use the numbering system provided by Cèbe here.
93
cf. Euripides, Bacchae, for a famous example of this topos: I find Dodds’ reading of the
“tempting of Pentheus” interesting (“In the maddening of Pentheus . . . the supernatural [is]
attacking the victim’s personality at its weakest point. . . . The god wins because he has an
ally in the enemy’s camp: . . . the Dionysiac longing in himself.” Bacchae, 172), but it does
not take into account the simple curiosity of the non-initiate for an outlandish, striking cult
practice—the Dionysiac rites akin to and paralleling the ritual of Cybele. See also Bacchae
78–81, where the goddess appears as βροvμια to Dionysus’ βροvμιον.
94
Wiseman (1985), 269: “Cèbe believes that the action of the satire takes place in Greece. Some
of his arguments simply underestimate the degree of cultural hellenisation in late-Republican
Rome, or take too literally what may be mere allusions.” cf. Roller, 308–9.
95
cf. OCD3, 1545: “translation.”
96
Eum. frag. 1: Quod ea die mea erat praebito, in ianuam ‘cave canem’ inscribi iubeo—“As it
fell to me on that day to host the meal, I had the expression ‘beware the dog’ inscribed on the
doorway.”
97
ibid., frag. 2–6.
98
ibid., frag. 15: “Et ceteri scholastici, saturis auribus scholica dape atque / ebriis sophistica
α{περαντολοvγ ια, consurgimus ieiunis oculis — And we, the rest of the thinking men, with
ears full from the scholarly meal and intoxicated on this elegant haperantology, rise as one
with eyes all hungry.”
99
ibid., frag. 16–17.
100
Consider the episode of Clodius and the Bona Dea scandal (see chapter 3, n. 190), above and
beyond the senatorial ban on citizens mixing with the Phrygian priests.
101
ibid., frag. 18–23.
102
An emendation of Cèbe’s text by Wiseman (1985); cf. Roller, 308, n. 82—Roller
acknowledges that “the goddess clearly enjoys the official approval of the state” as evidenced
by the presence of the aedile, yet she does not make the connection between the official’s
place in the fragmentary narrative and the real world role of the aedile as go-between for the
Roman audience of the ludi Megalenses and the Great Mother’s priests.
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103
ibid., frag. 24: some versions of the text omit “domine,” and read “famuli,” for galli here; cf.
Cèbe, n. 140.
104
according to Cèbe, n. 140.
105
ibid., frag. 25 & 27.
106
ibid., frag. 26.
107
Roller, 308.
108
Catullus carmen 63.92–3.
109
and so “to avoid possible castration; cf. Roller, 308.
110
see the discussion of carmen 63 below.
111
Can we find parallel evidence in the ancient world of “undisguised contempt” for the
madness-inducing Dionysus?
112
Summers, 337 and 342; cf. Boyancé.
113
DRN 2.600: hanc veterse Graium docti cecinere poetae . . . ; an early twentieth-century
commentator, Merrill, attempts to name these poets—Pindar, Sophocles, and
Euripides—though Summers disagrees with this simplistic identification of Greek antecedents
for what follows: “It is more likely that Lucretius draws from a store of common attitudes
toward Cybele and her rites that emerged from manifold sources—Hellenistic poems, Greek
hymns, philosophy, literature, and popular oral tradition.” (341)
114
ibid., 601–603.
115
ibid., 608: “throughout great lands,” or “through all the wide earth.”
116
Summers, 344: “It is likely . . . that Lucretius is describing a procession . . . of the strictly
Roman celebration and games of the Megalensia.”
117
DRN 601–3.
118
ibid., 604–5.
119
ibid., 607: see figure 1 for image of the goddess with mural crown, the symbol of urban
security.
120
Roller, 298: “Lucretius is particularly interesting here because of the way in which he
combines his rather terrifying vision of the Mother’s rites with the positive values of Roman
society.”
121
ibid., 609.
122
ibid., 612–13; so Roller, 298: “By playing on the Latin words Phrygias (Phrygian) and fruges
(fruits, i.e., grain), the poet uses the goddess’s Phrygian background to emphasize her role as
bringer of fruits—that is, fertility—to mankind.”
123
ibid., 614–17.
124
Sanders (1972), RAC; Vermaseren (1977), 94: the most common etymology was one espoused
by the priests themselves, since the galli “took the cock (gallus) as their symbol. . . . But
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according to others their name was derived from King Gallus, who in a state of frenzy had
emasculated himself, or from the river Gallos, a tributary of the Sangarios near Pessinus . . . .”
125
DRN 2.610–13.
126
Näsström, 21–2: “The followers of [neotericism] diverged extensively from earlier Latin
poetry . . . their key-words were doctus the learned, and as docti the learned ones they strived
for doctrina the taste which found its literary expressions in intellectual and delicate motives .
. . . Lucretius, whose didactic poem . . . reflected the materialism and atheism of Epicurus
belonged to this circle . . . .”; Summers, 340: “in 611–17 Lucretius is interested in what variae
gentes assert allegorically about Cybele’s attributes . . . , not what they related about the
visual images of her cult. From 618 onward the reference to how others interpret aspects of
the cult is
dropped . . . .”;
127
per Boyancé; see below, n. 176.
128
ibid., 618–20.
129
ibid., 621.
130
Apparently, they would continue through the Forum Boarium and to the Via Appia, which
intersects with the Almo to the south of the city: Lanciani, 320: at “a distance of 2107 metres
from the [Porta Capena].”
131
or some other sharp implement, as Merrill, n. 2.621: “tela: probably sickles.”
132
ibid., 621–23.
133
i.e., cities per magnas terras: 609.
134
ibid., 626–28.
135
ibid., 625; the line serves as the core of Stewart’s study, “The Silence of Magna Mater”—
where he finds the passage true to Lucretius’ scientific program: “most of the things which
actually go together to make up the data of our experience, color, sights, sounds, smells, etc.,
are in fact based on atomic structures . . . . Nature itself is deaf and dumb.” (77)
136
Showerman (297) sees this confusion as evidence for syncretism between the Cretan Rhea and
Cybele, while Greek literary (e.g., Strabo, 10.3.7) and inscriptional evidence (e.g., Sammlung
der griechischen Dialekt-Inschriften, 5039.14) seems to indicate that the term Κουρη'τες was
used to distinguish groups of ecstatic revellers. cf. also Roller, 157 and 172, for associations
of frenzied “Kouretic attendants” with Μαvτηρ.
137
DRN 629–32: ludunt in numerumque exultant. . . / terrificas capitum quatientes numine cristas.
138
Merrill (n. 2.629) attempts to make some sense on this point: “Strictly, the Corybantes were
Phrygian, but the Curetes were not placed in Phrygia, although the Corybantes were
transferred to Crete.”
139
ibid., 633–9.
140
ibid., 641–43.
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141
ibid., 644–45; cf. Stewart, 76: “allegorical interpretations are clever inventions of the docti
poetae Graium, but not sound; and, [Lucretius] adds later (655–660), such adventures are at
best an interesting waste of time.”
142
Michels, 675–79.
143
ibid., 602–3.
144
q.v., d Rerum Natura 2.613–17 and 641–43.
145
We find similar appreciations of the “universal association” of primitive mythopoetics in
Frazer and those who follow him.
146
Roller, 299.
147
In Latin, only after Lucretius.
148
See, for example, the mass crucifixion scene at the end of Spartacus (1960)—Spartacus
becomes the agent for an intangible liberty, just as Jesus is later to become the savior, freedom
fighter, and martyr in the name of spiritual liberty. Also, in the 1956 film, The Egyptian, there
is a grandiose association of Sinuhe’s monotheism (based on a grossly simplified account of
the pharaoh Akhenaten’s religious reforms) with the future teachings of Jesus, particularly in
the film’s epilogue: “These events took place 13 centuries before the birth of Jesus Christ.”
Admittedly, such touches ground the action of these films within a chronology
comprehensible to the modern audience, but they simultaneously bring to mind the passions
of the Christian messiah. In a sense, then, the Sinuhe and Spartacus of these films are
protagonists in a kind of retroactive proto-passion play—complete with the imposition of a
Christian undertone as creative rationalization for the pre-Christian themes presented in such
films. In the recent Gladiator (2000), a Christian subtext is absent from the narrative—here,
republicanism and freedom are (albeit anachronistically) the state of grace the fallen hero
attains through his martyrdom; perhaps this is a reflection of the global, postcolonial attitude
currently in fashion in Western culture.
149
See Introduction, n. 13
150
Wiseman puts forth a theory that the poem was composed as a hymn, to be performed during
the Megalensia (Wiseman (1985), 205–6).
151
By a senatusconsultum or other official condemnation.
152
Thomson, 372.
153
This arrangement can be compared with that of Quinn, who also sees a tripartite structure
(Quinn, 284, introduction to 63); he finds “frenzy” (1–38), “repentance” (39–73), and
“escape and recapture” (74–90) as the major rubrics on which Catullus has built his narrative.
Traill sees seven parts in this narrative sequence: 1) submission to the goddess and onset of
furor; 2) Attis’ first speech, to the other galli; 3) climbing up Mt. Ida and sleep; 4) darkness
gives way to the light of day; 5) Attis awakes and discovers what he has done; 6) Attis’
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second speech, voicing his regret; 7) Cybele instills furor on Attis and drives him back into
the nemora.
154
Catullus 63.1–38; 36: somnum capiunt sine Cerere—they seize slumber without sustenance”;
Thomson, 380: “they are so tired that they cannot trouble to make a meal.”
155
Thomson, 371.
156
63.50: patria o mea creatrix, patria o mea genetrix . . .—“o homeland, my birth parent
homeland, source of my life . . . .”
157
ibid., 43–73; see especially 63: quod enim genus figurast, ego non quod obierim? —“what
sort of shape is it that I have not taken on?” i.e., “I have been a boy and a man, and, now, am
a woman.”
158
i.e., fac uti furoris ictu reditum in nemora ferat — “make in his chest such a frenzy as would
bear him back to to grove.”(79)
159
i.e., illa demens . . . fera (89); the lion is literally “maddening that wild creature.”
160
ibid., 90: ibi semper omne vitae spatium famula fuit — then forever, for the length of her life,
she was a slave; see also 52 and 68 for other use of the word famulus.
161
ibid., 91–93: compare with Varro, Eumenides, frag. 26, above, and note the poet’s use of the
Hellenic or Lydian variant of the goddess’ name.
162
As the senatusconsultum de Bacchanalibus did for Bacchic worship in the city.
163
ibid., 63.1–2: “Over the high seas was Attis drawn on speeding ship / when with a hot foot he
stepped into Phrygia’s wood . . .”
164
ibid., 48 and 88.
165
ibid., 50.
166
Recall, though, that Catullus had spent about two years in Bithynia, on the Black Sea coast of
Asia Minor (circa 57–6 BCE: Quinn, xiv–xv). He might conceivably have spent time in the
Troad as well, visiting the mountain range of which Ida forms a part.
167
Catullus 63.8 and 36.
168
ibid., 30–5.
169
see figure 7, above.
170
Quinn, 282.
171
As described by Scullard and Roller.
172
carmen 63.3: “he entered the shady place of the goddess, bounded by forest . . .”
173
ibid., 4–5: devolsit ili acuto sibi pondera silice.
174
as in Catullus 85.2: nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior. In many ways, Venus is the antithesis
of Cybele for Catullus (cf. Näsström, The Abhorrence of Love, Acta Universitatis
Upsaliensis: Uppsala, 1989), and many have seen this poem as an allegory for the more
universal torments of love and loss as depicted in his Lesbia poems (cf. Martin, 170).
175
And he was not alone, if we can believe his exhortation of an otherwise unknown Caecilius in
carmen 35 to finish a romantic poem entitled “Domina Dindymi.”
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176
Pierre Boyancé, 342: “La célébration de Mégalésies par César, si elle a eu le caractère brillant
signalé par Dion Cassius, ne serait-elle pas ce qui a attiré plue spécialement sur la Déesse
l’attention de Lucrèce? En 65, celui-ci, si on le fait naître en 94, avait une trentaine d’années.”
177
DRN 2.600–60, writing as an eyewitness to a real event
178
cf. OCD3 218 “Augustus”: “Varro had taught the Romans to be at home in their own city. . . .”
179
Roller, 319: “Thus we can see that the public and patriotic character of the Magna Mater
made her a Roman deity of a very composite nature.” Nevertheless, a Roman deity.
180
cf. Apuleius, Metamorphoses 9.9–10, for an example from the early second century CE.
181
Roller, 292: “From this point on, we get a much fuller picture of the goddess and her place in
Roman Society.”
182
Consider the “vulgarities” achieved by Whitman in nineteenth-century America that heralded
a truly American poetic voice; cf. Rothenberg and Joris, 30: “Like Blake, Whitman cast aside
the restrictions of the old line, to set the standard for the century to come, both in the U.S. &
outside it—a new vernacular & a natural measure, he shows us . . . .”
183
see Roller, 299.
184
An interestingly secular rationale for this ploy by Clodius has been put forth by Cerutti,
417–26. Based on descriptions of the neighborhood by Cicero in his letters and in the speech
de Domo Suo, Cerutti has found that “Clodius’ object . . . was actually . . . to enlarge his own
house and make it one of the most sumptuous residences in the city.” (417) The plotter
meant to wait for the scandal of the incident to die down, after which time Clodius could
“deconsecrate” the shrine or to remove it to another location, then attend to “the construction
of sumptuous additions to his house. . . . Although never realized, Clodius’ aspirations seem
to have been imperial.” (420)
185
cf. de Domo Sua 106: Quae tua fuit consecratio? Tuleram, inquit, ut mihi liceret—“On what
grounds was it consecrated? [Clodius] said ‘I had carried the vote allowing me [to act as I
did].’”
186
MacKendrick, 178: “The soothsayers attribute it to neglect of the sacrifices, without
specifying by whom.”
187
de Haru. Resp. 9.
188
ibid., 16; Lenaghan: “Again there is a certain elusive honesty in Cicero’s claim. Other notable
men had been given houses or lots at public expense after some egregious service to the
Roman State, but Cicero was the only man whose house was publicly restored,
reconstructed, freed from religious claims, etc.”
189
cf. Cicero’s earlier statement (in 5) that this case was not a quarrel between two individuals,
but a condemnation of a traitor of the state: Nihil enim contra me fecit odio mei, sed odio
severitatis, odio dignitatis, odio rei publicae— “For [these things] he did against me were not
precipitated by loathing for me, but by his hatred of proper gravity, of dignity, of the
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republic itself.” Lenaghan observes that “here again Cicero diplomatically shifts from a
private quarrel to a quarrel of the orders, the nation, and even religion. He is especially
concerned to show that this is not just another private feud, which the other senators may
ignore or, as in the case of Pompey, may divert to their own purposes.” (n. 5.9–10)
190
de Haru. Resp. 4: cum illum ambustum religiosissimis ignibus cognovi muliebri
ornatu ex incesto stupro atque ex domo pontificis maximi emissum—“[that day] I
knew he was burned by the most sacro-sanct flames, rushing away from his wicked
debauchery, out of the house of the Pontifex Maximus, dressed as a woman!”
191
ibid., 8: “Publius Clodius, I say, made noises over these sacred rites and ceremonies that were
neglected, violated, and polluted. No wonder if it strikes you all as laughable.”
192
Rundell describes this as “routine abuse” and “partisan reporting” of the scandalous events.
Rundell, citing Nisbet (1961) and Lenaghan (1969), finds commentators who are more willing
to believe in an “anti-Ciceronian” reading of the speeches. “His portrait of Clodius,” he
concludes, “created out of spurious invective and closer to caricature than anything else, was
fully formed by 56 BCE, and has not been substantially modified in the intervening millennia.”
(328) Apologists for or revisionists of his targets’ historical legacy notwithstanding, this
speech relies on some relationship to the “facts” of the case, if highly manipulated by the
orator: Clodius is transformed into a literary trope, and this is the Clodius we recognize two
thousand years later.
193
de Haru. Resp. 18: sed quoniam mea causa expedita est . . .—“but as I’ve set the matter
straight regarding my own case. . . .”
194
ibid., 20.
195
ibid., 22: vis . . . innumerabilis incitata ex omnibus vicis collecta servorum ab hoc aedile
religioso—“an enormous force of slaves had been gathered out of all the streets and whipped
up by this ‘scrupulous’ aedile”
196
ibid.: in scaenam . . . immissa—“[the gang] were let loose on the stage”
197
ibid., 22; cf. figures 4 and 7, for a sense of the narrowness of the constrictum spectaculis for a
sense of the chaos such an attack might cause.
198
ibid.: senatus equitesque Romani et omnes boni.
199
ibid., 21: “games performed less attentively and polluted.”
200
ibid., 22.
201
ibid., 24.
202
cf. Graillot, 83.
203
de Haru. Resp. 24.
204
ibid., 23; cf. Cicero, de Divinatione 1.55, and Livy, 5.52.9.
205
ibid., 30.
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206
Liebeschuetz, 31: “The reader of Cicero’s address . . . is not left with the impression that fear
of the gods’ reaction to the various acts of sacrilege mentioned weighed heavily with Cicero.
Cicero wanted to keep his house.”
207
See chapter 2, and Roller, 301.
208
de Haru. Resp. 24: “before the temple, in view of the Great Mother herself.”
209
ibid.
210
Lenaghan, 123.
211
Comparable, though trivially, to a major league sports team relocating to a new city today?
Another question: did Clodius think he could get away with scuttling this “outsider” cult
festival more easily than a patently native one?
212
de Haru. Resp. 24
213
Lenaghan, 124: “Clodius, in turning the Megalesia into a sort of Saturnalia, was committing
an especially outrageous crime against Roman property.”
214
e.g., in Catilinam 1.
215
as in Liebeschuetz, n. 206 above.
216
Cicero, Qfr. 14 (2.10 (9)).
217
see Introduction, figure 2; Cerutti, 417: “Cicero’s house almost certainly stood along the
higher leg of the Clivus Victoriae, along the northwest side of the hill running from the north
corner to the precinct of the Magna Mater.”
218
Lenaghan, 115.
219
Polybius 21.6 and 37.4–7, concerning an encounter between Roman troops and galli in Asia
Minor, circa 189 BCE; Diodorus Siculus, 36.13, describing an embassy of Phrygian priest of
Cybele from Pessinus to the Roman senate in 102 BCE; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 2.19.3–5,
providing in his circa 23 BCE description the “most explicit statement of the ambivalent
response to the Magna Mater” (Roller, 293), quoted in the Introduction.
220
see Roller, 287–325 (in particular, pp. 290–93), for a recent example.
221
OCD3 1058, “Obsequens, Julius.”
222
Roller, 292; see also her discussion of the problems inherent in any study of the cult’s
development (cf. ibid. 9–24, “Prolegomenon”): “Scholars of Roman religion . . . have framed
their discussions of Cybele and ATtis within a . . . biased vision.” (22)
223
Suetonius, Divus Augustus, 68; Carter, n. 68: “The present episode must belong to the period
of the triumvirate, probably 41–39 B.C.” The crowd understood the gallus—or the actor
playing a gallus—to say “look how the queen rules the world with his finger,” an alternate
reading of orbis not lost on those who despised the young triumvir Octavian and delighted in
rumors about his bisexuality.
224
“cinaedus,” Chambers-Murray Latin-English Dictionary: “a sodomite.” Carter notes the
connection of the Magna Mater’s castrated priests with passive homosexuality.
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225
OCD3 216, “Augustus”: “no narrative history of his lifetime survives except for the account
of Cassius Dio. . ., and the rest of the evidence is very deeply imbued with partisan spirit of
various kinds. An estimation of his personal contribution is hard to achieve.”
226
Common by the mid-first century CE, at least: viz. Martial, 5.41 and Vermaseren, 96. Note,
however, the disputed name of the Martial’s target: if “Dindymus” (per Vermaseren), then he
may be a gallus; if the name is “Didymus” (per Shackleton Bailey), the additional association
with the cult evaporates. Still, the final line, non licet maritorum—“you’re not allowed [to
warm the benches of] married men” seems to have but one appropriate reading.
227
ibid., 1452 “Suetonius”: “De vita Caesarum . . . composed in the early 2nd cent.”
228
Hence the famous paraphrase of Cassius Dio (56.30.4) in Suetonius, Aug. 28: urbem . . .
excoluit adeo, ut iure sit gloriatus marmoream se relinquere, quam latericiam
accepisset—“he improved the city to such a degree that he could rightly brag that he’d left in
marble what he had received built of brick.”
229
Res Gestae Divi Augusti 4.8; cf. Roller, 310–1: a marble base found in Sorrento, “originally
designed to support three statues . . . bears sculpted reliefs on all four sides depicting Roman
deities. The Magna Mater appears on one lateral face, shown in her standard Hellenistic
iconography of a figure seated on a throne, wearing a turreted crown, veil, and tunic, with a
lion crouching at her right. She is attended by a dancing Corybantic figure at the left, and at
the far left by a standing veiled woman, probably Juno Sospita . . . . the coupling of the two
on this clearly Augustan monument is [an] indication of how Augustan iconography
preserved and enhanced the old order of the gods . . .”
230
Syme, 460.
231
see Introduction, “Evolutions,” for a brief summary of the history of this period.
232
Virgil, Ecloga 4.5–7.
233
OCD3 642, “golden age.”
234
Hesiod, Theogony 1008–10; Homer, Iliad 2.819–21: “And the noble son of Anchises led the
Dardanians— Aeneas whom the radiant Aphrodite bore Anchises down the folds of Ida, a
goddess bedded with a man.” The hero is allowed a speech for himself in Book 20, where he
declares: “I am Aeneas, and I can boast Anchises’ blood, the proud Anchises, but my mother
is Aphrodite.” Soon after, Poseidon proclaims the destiny of Aeneas beyond Troy: “He is
destined to survive . . . . now Aeneas will rule the men of Troy in power—his sons’ sons and
the sons born in future years.” Note that there is no hint here, given by any god or mortal, of
the location of Aeneas’ rule.
235
Of his escape from Troy, the Iliou Persis (ca. 776 BCE) states: οιJ περι; το;ν Αιjνειvαν υJπεξη'λθον ειjς
τη;ν Ι[δην. . . that Aeneas’ followers in distress (δυσφορηvσαντες ) withdrew secretly to Mt. Ida
after witnessing the death of Laocöon and his sons in the episode of the Trojan Horse;
compare with the Aeneid’s more tragic and heroic leavetaking of Troy. The mountain appears
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as a safe haven; cf. Roller, 206: “The sanctuary to the goddess on Mount Ida, well known
during the Roman era, also appears to have been active during the Hellenistic period, and
terracotta figurines found in several sections of the Trojan settlement attest to the goddess’s
presence in private cult”; D. B. Thompson, 79; and Dionysius of Halicarnassus 1.61.
236
cf. Bremmer and Horsfall, 12–24, who find little evidence for a real connection between Troy
and Rome before Virgil. There does not appear to have been an earlier Aeneas hero-cult in
Magna Graecia. (17–18) While Fabius Pictor, Cato the Elder, Naevius, and Ennius seem to
connect Aeneas with the Alban Mount or an Italian settlement of “Troia” in Latium, a
focused tale is lacking, and the “elaboration of the narrative reaches its climax in [Dionysius
of Halicarnassus] and is simplified only by Virgil.”(22) They conclude: “Virgil adopted a
Trojan theme which had long since ceased to be purely national and had become substantially
the property of the Julian house. Paradoxically, the Aeneid made Aeneas a national hero at
Rome in a way far beyond the reach of the diplomacy and propaganda of earlier generations.”
(24) See also Perret; Canciani, LIMC (Lexicon Iconographicum MythologiaeClassicae) 1:
“Aineias”; Gruen (1992).
237
DRN 2.610–12.
238
see Introduction “Evolutions.”
239
Aen. 3.110–11.
240
ibid., 3.91–92: quem sequimur? quove ire iubes? ubi ponere sedes?
241
ibid., 3.95, 96.
242
cf. Livy, AUC 29.10.5; Ovid, Fasti 4.195: Mater abest; matrem iubeo, Romane,
requiras.—“The Mother is absent: I bid you, Roman, seek the Mother.” It is a reflection of a
common theme in contemporary Roman myths of the Magna Mater: when in doubt, look to
the Great Mother, for she is absent, forgotten, or lost.
243
Aen. 6.776–794.
244
as in Lucretius, 2.606-7.
245
cf. Roller, 279 n. 74: “Graillot . . . and Wiseman . . . have proposed another connection with
Rome’s legendary origins, namely, the identification of the Magna Mater with Rhea Silvia,
mother of the twins Romulus and Remus, through the Greek Meter’s conflation with Rhea,
wife of Kronos. This would make the Magna Mater both the Mother of the gods and the
Mother of Rome. The connection between the two Rheas is certainly made in the first
century B.C. and later . . ., but it is uncertain whether this tradition was active in the third
century B.C., at the time of the Magna Mater’s arrival.” Virgil’s text, as the first full account
of the Aeneas myth that we possess, appears to be making this connection for the first time
in Latin.
246
Aen. 9.80–122.
247
ibid., 10.156–255.
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248
Wiseman (1984), 120.
249
Aen. 10.249–55.
250
Is this trope—the reputation for softness as the source of one’s hard manhood—akin to that
found in Johnny Cash’s unusual pop song “A Boy Named Sue”?
251
Aen. 9.598–99: “Have you no shame, twice-captured Phrygians, to be ‘held between a rock
and a hard place,’ the walls sheltering you from death?” Note the juxtaposition of similar (but
semantically contradictory) terms: teneri, praetendere.
252
ibid., 617, 620: “O Phrygian women—yes, women, surely not men—let the men do the
fighting: surrender to the sword.”
253
ibid., 9.634.
254
e.g., Aen. 12.97–100; Turnus: da sternere corpus / loricamque manu valida lacerare revolsam
/ semiviri Phrygis et foedare in pulvere crinis / vibratos calido ferro murraque
madentis—“grant me this: to lay his body low, to tear his corselet, ripped by my hand, from
the Phrygian half-man, and to defile his hair with dust—that hair he curls with heated irons,
drenching it with myrrh”; Roller, 302–03.
255
Wiseman (1984), 119.
256
Aen. 12.827. Parallel logic can be found in the biblical justifications for preserving the
“Hebraic” elements in early Christianity, while eliminating certain moribund aspects of the
Law found in the Torah. Considering the Jews to be conquered—in a sense, “a failed
people”—the passages of the Old Testament devoted to “unsavory” practices were revoked,
maintained by Christians only as fossils revisited in the preserved biblical texts. So too with
the cult of Cybele: the Romans allowed the cult to exist in the city—since its earliest
foundation owed something to the Phrygians. But as the Trojans had ultimately been defeated
on their native soil, so the Romans were not expected to preserve those elements of Phrygian
religion that (ex post facto) promoted the failure (seen as effeminacy and martial weakness) of
the Trojan people.
257
Horsfall (1991) 206–7: “some of the most important ideological motifs in the Aeneid are
presented, implicitly at least, in aetiological terms.”
258
viz. Ennius and other early, comprehensive historians.
259
see above, Theogony 1008–10.
260
Sanders, 275; trans.: “The Romans take the Magna Mater’s pre-Roman period to be, not of
Phrygian, classical Greek, or Hellenistic origin, but of the Trojans’, and therefore she is taken
as the legacy of Rome’s forefathers.”
261
Livy, AUC 29.10—Sélincourt translation.
262
We enjoy a somewhat comparable terminus post quem in the histories of Christianity and of
Islam, which are both products of one (semi-) historical figure’s inspired mission; but in the
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world of antiquity, such a clear context is never seen—with the exception of Cybele’s
acceptance into the fabric of Roman paganism.
263
Note that Syme lists the historian, along with Virgil and Horace, as “the enduring glories of
the Principate . . . all three were on terms of personal friendship with Augustus.” (AR 464)
264
This anxiety leads to a crescendo of public concern, precipitating the delegation to Pessinus;
ibid., 29.10.4: Civitatem eo tempore repens religio invaseret. . . .—“A sudden religious panic
swept the city. . . .”
265
Showerman, Graillot, and later Vermaseren (1977) derive their arguments from passages in
Cicero (de Haru. Resp.), Livy, and Ovid.
266
Burton, 63, maintains this line of reasoning: “The episode [of summoning the Magna Mater to
Rome] . . . served—quite incidentally—to reconfirm friendship between Rome and the
Attalid kingdom, but the larger goals of Roman diplomacy in the East in 205 were simply
precludd by the Romans’ intense interest in (and religious anxiety over) solving the immediate
crises of 205 and ultimately, ending the Hannibalic War.”
267
Gruen (1990), 6–7; his position, as summarized by Burton (36–7): “[Gruen’s] analysis begins
with the rejection of the picture of wartime anxiety at Rome . . . : the summoning of the
Magna Mater during the later stages of the Hannibalic War was not a manifestation of a crisis
mentality prevalent at Rome, but an indication of renewed vigor after ‘the tide had been
reversed’ by the victory at the Metaurus in 207, and by subsequent events.”
268
Roller, 271: “By establishing ties with this Magna Mater, the Romans were able to import the
cult, not as a foreign deity in the city, but as their own ancestral protector who was coming
home to her own people.” This reading of the decision to fetch the goddess relies on the
assumption that Romans in the time of the Second Punic War believed in their lineage from
Aeneas, and therefore that they were Trojans in diaspora; see above, n. 236, and Bremmer
and Horsfall.
269
AUC 29.9.
270
ibid., 29.11.3
271
ibid., 29.11.
272
ibid., 29.11.7. Note that they make their Asian journey as guests of the Hellenistic king—an
established ally of the Roman state, 29.11.2: iam cum Attalo rege propter commune adversus
Philippum bellum coeptam amicitiam esse—“there had already been begun an alliance with
the king Attalus, on account of a common struggle against Philip.” Regarding the “sacred
stone,” see Roller, 269: “The image of the Mother in Pessinous was said to be so ancient that
it was not made by human hands, but had fallen from the sky.” That is, the stone was a
meteorite; in a later account, Appian identifies the “showers of stones” seen in Rome prior to
the consultation of the Sybilline Books as parallel in nature to the attribute of the goddess in
this icon (Appian, Hannibal, 7.9.56).
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273
AUC 29.11.8.
274
ibid., 29.14.5.
275
ibid., 29.14.8: P. Scipionem . . . iudicaverunt in tota civitate virum bonorum optimum
esse—“They judged P. Scipio to be the best of the good men in the city.” According to Roller
(267), “despite the fact that he never did have a particularly distinguished public career, his
name became legendary and was frequently cited by later authors as a symbol of Republican
virtue.” Viz. Cicero, de Haru. Resp. 13.27
276
Vermaseren (1977), 41: “When Scipio accepted the statue from the hands of the priests who
had escorted her from Pessinus, it was taken by ship from Ostia up river to the gates of
Rome. But the statue was heavy and the water was shallow: the ship ran aground, and could
not be moved; but hardly had Claudia touched the rope . . . than the vessel was refloated.”
277
ibid.
278
Ovid, Fasti 4.233–282 (line 262, quoted in the epigram to chapter 1 above, refers to Claudia’s
amazing feat). Roller, 267: “Scipio Nasica and Claudia Quinta [enjoyed a] reputation as
saviors of Rome . . . . Claudia too became symbolic as the embodiment of feminine virtue. . .
.Silius Italicus and Statius make her a Vestal Virgin, a version allowed in subsequent retellings
of the story. This seems to be a transformation of the original tale about a chaste woman into
an assumption that she must represent the ultimate symbol of official chastity.” A further
miracle related to Claudia is described by Valerius Maximus (1.8.11), who tells of the
destruction by fire of the aedes in 111: her statue was miraculously untouched by the flames.
279
AUC 29.14.14.
280
ibid.: in aedem Victoriae quae est in Palatio.
281
viz. AUC 29.11.4, cited above.
282
ibid., 36.36.3.
283
Lucretius DRN 2.618–19.
284
Horace, carmen 1.16.5–8: “The Dindymene goddess [Cybele] doesn’t shake up priestess’
minds in their sanctuary [as much as my pones iambis] . . . nor do the Corybants make such a
racket with a crash of their cymbals.”
285
ibid., 1.18.13–16.
286
ibid., 3.19.18–19: “why do the Berecynthian flutes cease their blasts?”
287
ibid., 4.1.21–24: “in that place Berecynthian flutes—not lacking reed-pipe
accompaniment—will charm in combination with songs.”
288
satura 1.2.120–212.
289
Roller, 302.
290
i.e., the connection to ancient Troy embodied in the goddess, her association with victory over
Carthage, etc.
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291
for first-century CE satire, see e.g., Juvenal, Satura 2.110–16 and Martial, 5.41; for Christian
authors, Augustine, in Hoseam 1.4.14 and Civitate Dei 2.7; Arnobius, Adversus Naturam
5.42
292
Propertius, carmen 3.17.33–6.
293
ibid., 7–8.
294
Roller 315–16: “During [Claudius’] reign, Attis was officially admitted to the Roman
pantheon . . . . Attis received his own festival, the Hilaria, celebrated on March 15–27 . . . .”
See also Fasce, Attis e il culto metroaco a Roma, and Sfameni Gasparro, Soteriology and
Mystic Aspects in the Cult of Cybele and Attis, for a complete survey of evidence for the
development in Rome of the tradition of Attis’ deification.
295
Propertius, Carmen 3.22.1–4
296
ibid., 3.22.39–40.
297
ibid., 4.7.59–62
298
ibid., 4.11.50–2
299
Lee, 198 n. 13.
300
Roller, 313.
301
Ovid, Fasti 4.143: “Let heaven turn three long times on its axis . . . .”
302
Composed and revised sometime between 1 and 18 CE: Boyle and Woodard, xxvii–xxix.
303
ibid., xlvi.
304
Metamorphoses 10.682–3: “nec grates immemor egit, / nec mihi tura dedit.”
305
ibid., 10.686–7. Interestingly, this is a temple quae quondam clarus Echion / fecerat ex
voto—“which once esteemed Echion dedicated as an offering”: perhaps a nod to the aedes in
Rome, dedicated to Cybele for her aid in the victory over Hannibal? There is a shade of that
greater temple invoked here.
306
ibid., 10.703–4.
307
cf. Boyle and Woodard, “Introduction: The Poem” for a good discussion of the difficult
structure and themes of the work.
308
Fasti 4.262.
309
ibid., 4.287–8: cur vicibus factis ineant convivia, quaero, / tunc magis, indictas
concelebrentque dapes.—“I ask, why do they go in for banquets at different houses more
often at this time, and why should such announced meals be celebrated?”
310
DRN 2.626–8.
311
Fasti, 4.301, 305–6.
312
Herbert-Brown, 32: “After the death of the Princeps in AD 14, Ovid redesigned the proem and
Julian entries to book 1 for the purpose of incorporating into the calendar the proem’s new
dedicatee, Caesar Germanicus.”
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313
Boyle and Woodard, xxxix: “The Julio-Augustan organization of the Roman calendar
transformed that calendar ideologically, restructuring the life-patterns of Roman citizens and
filtering those patterns through its own discourse of power.”
314
Res Gestae 13.