Search Results

Citizens of ancient Greece and Rome were expected to reproduce, whereas violators of this guideline were penalized by governmental legislation. An exception was made for the Vestal Virgins and the eunuch‐priests of the Cybele cult because of their religious office. The obligation to reproduce hides a cultural conviction that sexual pleasure was potentially dangerous and antisocial because orgasm was associated with epilepsy and loss of vital spirit.

This chapter examines the portrayal of Imilce, Hannibal's wife, and Masinissa's mother, i.e. of two women from the periphery of the empire, to demonstrate the significance of gendered otherness. Imilce is fashioned as a reasonable Roman matrona, who denounces child-sacrifice, yet she is marked as a hybridic, unclassified, other. By contrast, Masinissa's mother promotes alliance with the Romans and is placed within reach of the centre, as she preaches Roman ideals of fidelity and piety. At the end, Claudia Quinta's intervention for the arrival of Cybele, a foreign deity, proves that the conflation of Romanness and otherness is no longer a threat but a necessary condition for a prosperous future.

Three major episodes set at what would be the sites of important Greek colonies are discussed as examples of a definition of space through colonialist discourse and ways in which the narrative complicates those claims. With the Argonauts’ landing in the trackless and void desert in North Africa (Book 4) and their carrying of the Argo following the prints of a horse that miraculously appeared to Lake Tritonis near the eventual site of Cyrene, the poem offers an archetype of the cultural production of space and claims this area for Greeks. The episode at Kyzikos (Book 1) is more mixed. The Argonauts kill their hosts by mistake in contravention of the basic Greek value of hospitality. This is memorialized by signs on the land, alongside other signs anticipating Greek colonization and the Argonauts’ ridding the area of earth-born giants and their appropriation of the Asiatic Cult of the Great Mother (Rheia/Cybele). The violence inherent in colonization is thus acknowledged. The episode at the site of Heraclea, by contrast, presents colonization as cooperation between newcomers and local people, with the mastery of the former acknowledged. But the strange aitia of the tombs of two dead Argonauts expose the limits of sign-making and spatial production.

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 provides the commentary for the play Phormio, which was written by Terence. It mentions that Phormio is the only play of Terence that does not retain the original Greek title, while in contrast, in Plautus, the majority of play titles were Romanised. It also mentions the Roman Games that were held annually in September in honour of Jupiter and the Megalensian Games that were held annually in April and were named after the Great Mother Goddess, Cybele, whose cult image was brought to Rome from Asia Minor in 205–4 BC. The chapter talks about the curule aediles, who were junior magistrates with duties to organize the games. It refers to L. Ambivius Turpio, who was a well-established actor-manager who produced all of Terence's plays and L. Atilius of Praeneste, who was named as co-producer for all Terence's plays.

The scenes at the Persian court invoke braided issues of erotic desire, gender, ethnicity, and class in a dizzying set of complex plots and counterplots. The woman Arsace is the focalizing figure of the entire episode. Occupying dual roles as erotic subject and political regent, both mistress and slave to unbridled passion, she caps the novel’s engagement with gender and power in a new hybridized version of the Phaedra motif, introduced earlier with the intrigue of Demanete, Thisbe, and Cnemon at Athens. Arsace’s passion for Theagenes goes further to stage a contest between Persian and Greek values and engages in a shifting dialogue regarding the two social classes of slave and freeborn. Her ultimate defeat after the melodramatic failures of her resentful enablers (the slaves, Cybele and her son, Achaemenes) puts an end to the dangers of erotic aggression and tyrannical rule as the couple faces new dangers in the journey to Meroe.

Christianity was the only religion in the Roman Empire that offered universal salvation. Porphyry came to the same conclusion, but opted for the creation of his tripartite soteriology to compete with Christian universalism. Yet none of the pagan cults was equipped to offer one way of salvation to everybody during times when people were looking for a sense of safety and well-being. With its central message of salvation through Jesus Christ for all people, Christianity could offer such a benefit, and its program of benevolence during the period of crisis undoubtedly reinforced its attractiveness. Constantinian universalism, which attempted to use Christianity as the primary unifying agent of the Roman Empire, cashed in on the stocks that had been bought by preceding pagan emperors, the major difference now being that there was One God, One Emperor, and One (unified) Empire.

In the years between Plautus and the heyday of Terence (160s BCE), Rome made a series of momentous conquests, including victory over Antiochus III in Asia Minor. Beginning from this historical background, Chapter 2 considers the wandering, exilic journey of a soldier, Clinia, in Asia while in service to an unnamed “King,” and his Odysseus-like return to his waiting girlfriend, Antiphila. Clinia’s story forms a part of Terence’s Heautontimorumenos, a play put on at the Roman festival of Cybele in 163 BCE. Other plays of Terence as well as the fragments of Caecilius Statius and Ennius add depth and context to the discussion. The chapter argues that Clinia’s lovelorn wandering presents an amusing image of Greek military activities in the East, but simultaneously alludes to Roman expansion through its recollection of Seleucid aggression. Further, by portraying the residents of an Attic deme struggling with the negative effects of an alluring Dionysiac figure, the itinerant prostitute Bacchis, Terence presents Bacchus’s cult in a less favorable light than that of Cybele. Bacchis’s submissive lover, Clitipho, who expresses a close bond with Clinia, is in his own fashion becoming lost, morally as well as spatially, from the moment we first meet him. The behavior of the comic adulescentes Clinia and Clitipho, the chapter suggests, is usefully regarded as queerly deviant in Ahmed’s terms, because seeing their behavior in this way helps illuminate the connection between their failure to live up to Roman gender expectations and the disorienting effects of the East.

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.

The eunuchs serving the cult of the Great Mother appeared in Greek and Latin literature during the Hellenistic period, and they persisted as a popular motif up until late antiquity. From the very beginning, the figure of gallos or gallus evoked feelings of bewilderment, abhorrence, and disgust. The authors mocked their unmanly behavior and womanish appearance and denounced their alleged moral failings and indecency. Whereas the Greek references generally retained an amusing tone, the Roman portrayals of galli often oozed with contempt. Many features of the descriptions were designed to induce disgust responses and, thus, to marginalize the galli in order to counter the potential threat they posed to the existing social hierarchies. For, the self-castrated cultic officials defied several basic assumptions and categorizations upon which ancient societies rested. In particular, they seemed to challenge the fundamental gender division along with its inbuilt belief in male superiority. Chapter keywords

For Propertius, the barbarism of Rome’s enemies was symbolized by their trousers, bracati militis arcus, a characteristic well suited to rousing racial prejudice in a Roman. Virgil, however, offers us a rather more complicated ideologue on languages, clothes, arms, and customs. Although the Trojans in the Aeneid are often condemned by their rivals and enemies as luxurious orientals, the Virgilian narrative does not in fact display the anti-Trojan prejudice that we find in Homer. Only by combining Phrygiis…armis (11.769) with barbara tegmina crurum (11.777) do we find an allusion to the possible identification of Trojans with barbarians.

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.

This chapter focuses on a cluster of epigrams connected with Cybele’s cult and her priests and priestesses, in particular her galli (emasculated priests). In most of these poems, the galli make a dedication to Cybele that is related to the restraining of a lion in a cave through music typical of the goddess’ orgiastic rites. The chapter examines the relation of the epigrams to Catullus 63, which intriguingly comes before a string of negative or indignant portrayals of Cybele’s galli in imperial Rome and after critical remarks on the lack of control caused by her music in various literary sources. The chapter argues that Catullus reversed the motif of the lion’s encounter with the gallus in the cave, which was used in several epigrams to offer a defensive or eulogistic presentation of Cybele’s cult, in order to express an opposing position.

This chapter looks at the role which physical geography plays in promoting regional integration by examining how the forests of Mt Ida functioned within the Troad. Mt Ida has often been imagined as a place free from, even hostile to, human intervention and habitation. We encounter this characterization not just in the literature produced by urban elites who may not have had first-hand experience of the forests, but also in the religious practices of those who lived around Mt Ida in antiquity, and indeed in the folklore of the Turkmen who live there today. Yet the reality, as revealed in particular by the evidence of Theophrastos’ Historia plantarum, is that the forested uplands of Mt Ida were intensely cultivated by the lowland cities of the middle Scamander valley and the coastal Troad. Mt Ida has historically been an important source of resources, above all pitch and timber, which have been crucial to the lowland economy and which gained significant value through convenient access to water-borne transport via the Scamander and the Aegean. It is thus precisely the environmental differences between the forests of Mt Ida and the lowland Troad which bring them together. This is true not just economically, but also culturally: the idea of the forests as the antithesis of lowland urban society has played an important role in identity formation for precisely those communities which know these forests best.