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This chapter explores the cult and rituals of Magna Mater (or Cybele) and Attis in imperial Rome. It briefly reviews the history and festivals of the goddess and the sacrifice of the taurobolium (focusing on the controversial account by Prudentius), throwing light on some of the very processes by which we can (or cannot) access ancient rituals and festivals. But the main focus is on the eunuch priests (or galli) and the unresolved tension between the incorporation of the cult and its rejection. The paper argues that Roman reactions to these priests, the hostility and the ridicule, needs to be seen in the context of constructive debates on the nature of what is Roman in Roman religion—debates that lie at the heart of Roman religious culture.

This chapter examines how the myth and cult of the Mother of the Gods (with the associated figures of Attis and the supposedly self-castrating Galli) were utilized in the rhetorical construction of religious identity in the fourth century AD. Christians in their characterizations of paganism gave a prominent place to the cult of the Great Mother, usually in salacious and shocking terms, and the chapter focuses on the examples of Arnobius and Firmicus Maternus. These Christian texts are then brought into dialogue with a pagan treatment of the cult, the discourse on the Mother of the Gods written by the emperor Julian. The chapter emphasizes the need to see Julian in context and in dialogue with his times and his contemporaries. A close reading of Julian’s text reveals that he is responding to Christian presentations of the cult, and that he is not just an apostate but also an apologist.

A symbol of disorientation par excellence, the Cretan Labyrinth has become an emblematic image of Catullus’s longest extant work, his “epyllion,” poem 64, on the marriage of Peleus and Thetis. Chapter 4 argues that due to this depiction and others like it of wandering and roaming in the spaces of Rome’s ever-growing empire, Catullus’s oeuvre represents the culminating example of the Republican poets’ interest in becoming lost as a theme related to expansion. After tracking the theme in the fragmentary “neoteric” poets Cinna, Calvus, Caecilius, and Varro of Atax, this chapter proceeds via a series of specific Catullan examples. In poem 22, Catullus underscores the disorientation of the erring self as a special concern by calling attention to each person’s self-delusional error (20). Catullus depicts a disorienting epic-style journey to Asia Minor, a site of Roman expansion, in another “epyllion” on the eunuch priest of Cybele, Attis (poem 63). Poem 61 represents the roaming, androgynous marriage god Hymen as responsible for producing youths to guard Rome’s imperial borders. The wandering course of the Argonauts in poem 64 again directs attention toward Rome’s imperial ambitions in the Greek East, while the fearful errores of the Cretan Labyrinth link the myth of Theseus to the Argonautic story so as to make wandering an ambiguously unifying theme of the poem as a whole. Such geographical movements become unstable analogs in Catullan verse for internal transitions from love to hate, erotic and familial attachment to isolation and abandonment, and even male to female.

This chapter examines a third major contact zone in NW Turkey around the 7^th-century BC. Here Greek colonists established themselves and will have come into contact with the Phrygian population, who took over the area previously occupied by the Hittites in the early Iron Age. Links between Phrygians and Greeks could be much older, perhaps going back to a time before the Phrygians migrated into Anatolia. NW Turkey is the most likely context for the transmission to Greece of the cult of the goddess whom the Greeks knew as Phrygian Cybele, although her divine personality may in fact owe a good deal to Greek ideas of the Great Mother. The question arises whether or not Phrygian Cybele owes something to the Hittite religion of five centuries before.

Chapter 6 collects what can be known about the cults of subject peoples in the Roman Empire, using as its template the invective of Firmicus Maternus Against the Error of Profane Religions. The testimony of Firmicus suggests that both Mithraism and the cult of Attis assumed a distinctive character in this period; in the case of Attis, Christian elements are visible, and connexions can also be drawn between Christianity and the worship of Serapis in this period. While these cults may have suffered a natural decline in the era of Constantine, he took positive measures to suppress the worship of the ‘Syrian goddess’. The cult of Theos Hypistos (‘God Most High’) can be related both to Constantine’s own use of the epithet Hypsistos and to his suppression of the shared ceremony in honour of the God of Abraham at Mamre. The chapter concludes with observations on Christian monotheism.