Pod Insights Let's Talk About Myths, Baby! | Greek Mythology & the Ancient Mediterranean RE-AIR: But What About Rome?! Roman Mythology & the Great Mother Cybele About this episode Naturally, as soon as Liv was ready to get settled in Toronto, she came down with a terrible cold and sounds half human half lawnmower, so today we're bringing you a little more ancient Rome, since it's all the rage right now.
Liv dives (or perhaps wades into the shallows) of Roman mythology and religion, and tells the story of how the Phrygian goddess Cybele ended up in Italy.
CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. Given it's fiction, and typically involves gods and/or monsters, I'm not as deferential as I would be were I referencing the real thing.
Sources: Theoi.com entry on Cybele, https://www.theoi.com/Phrygios/Kybele.html Agdistis https://www.theoi.com/Phrygios/Agdistis.html#:~:text=AGDISTIS%20was%20an%20ancient%20Phrygian,the%20goddess%20Kybele%20(Cybele)., and Attis https://www.theoi.com/Phrygios/Attis.html; Ovid's Fasti https://www.theoi.com/Text/OvidFasti4.html, translated by James G. Frazer; Roman Mythology by David Stuttard; Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybele#Roman_Cybele for sourcing, etc.; the Oxford Dictionary of Classical Myth and Religion.
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0:00 Liv Albert? Hey nerds, really quick note from me. I want to tell you that we now have the applications open for the next set of listener group trips. This is us going back to the original, the trips that we have held in the past that have been so much fun, so successful, and pretty affordable in terms of wandering around Greece with a bunch of nerds. So check out the details and get your applications in at mythsbaby.com/groups.
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1:53 Liv Albert? Instruct me to, I pray, my guide, whence was she fetched? Whence came? Was she always in our city? The mother goddess ever loved, Dindemos, and Kabele and Ida with its delightful spring
2:08 Liv Albert? And the realm of Ilium. When Aeneas carried Troy to the Italian fields, the goddess almost followed the ships that bore the sacred thing. Today's episode is brought to you by Quince. You know the ones I've been raving about them for ages. But now is the time of year when you might consider gifting Quince to the people in your life. There's nothing quite like having pieces in your closet that you love and you know you can count on for any occasion, except maybe giving someone else that same feeling. So this holiday season, think Quince. Quince, you know, makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials like Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton and premium stretch denim,
2:52 Liv Albert? the kind of pieces you'd be just as happy gifting as you would be to unwrap. You all know I love all of the stuff I have from Quince. I'm actually traveling in Greece right now and I have my go to woven leather bag. I seriously use it everywhere. That's why it's with me here. It's beautiful and it's practical and it's from Quince. And I actually have a parcel to pick up when I when I get back home, which has some goodies in there. I got this pair of corduroy high rise pants. I'm really excited to try those out as soon as I get home. And everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. They work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen. So you can give luxury quality pieces without the luxury price tag.
3:36 Liv Albert? So give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Let's Talk About Myths, baby. It's the best way to support the show.
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5:05 Liv Albert? But she felt that fate did not yet call for intervention of her divinity in Latium. And she remained behind in her accustomed place. Afterwards, when mighty Rome had already seen five centuries and had lifted up her head above the conquered world, the priest consulted the fateful words of the Euboean song. They say that what he found ran thus: "The mother is absent. Thou Rome, I bid thee, seek the mother. When she shall come, she must be received by chaste hands." The ambiguity of the dark oracle puzzled the senators to know who the parent was and where she was to be sought.
5:50 Liv Albert? Pian was consulted and said, "Fetch the mother of the gods. She is to be found on Mount Ida." Nobles were sent. The scepter of Phrygia was then held by Attalus. He refused the favor to the Aosnian lords. "Wonders to tell. The earth trembled and rumbled long, and in her shrine thus..." Did the goddess speak, "Twas my own will that they should send for me, Terry not let me go, it is my wish." Rome is a place meant to be the resort of every god. Quaking with terror at the words, Adalus said, "Go forth, you will still be ours." Rome traces its origin to Phrygian ancestors.
6:58 Liv Albert? Well, hello and welcome. I am Liv and this is Let's Talk About Myths, Baby!, a Greek mythology podcast that sometimes dares dive in to Roman myth, but God's is Roman myth more difficult to dive into. And yet, here we are in August, continuing on our month of Rome. That passage at the top was from Ovid's Fasti, but we will get to everything that it means later. Of course, it's not like I've gone all of these six years without talking about Rome, but I really do prefer Greece, obviously. Still, the Romans deserve a bit of attention from me, so I'm going to be doing my best to give it to them. And now that we've heard the Roman foundation myth direct from actual Roman historians with
7:43 Liv Albert? last week's episode with the partial historians, we're going to dive in to the most important woman of Rome. I'm honestly not sure if that's what they would call her, but it seems like kind of it is to, you know, me, just a simple Hellenophile. And certainly, she was seriously important, so it's what I'm calling her. And while the Romans called her the Magna Mater, the great mother, so it's not much of a leap. That's right, today, we are looking at the great mother goddess, Cabele. But before we get to Cabele, I want to make a quick announcement for some locals. If you are on or near Vancouver Island, listen up. I'm going to be doing another book signing slash meet and greet slash, I don't know, come talk to me at the
8:27 Liv Albert? Indigo in Mayfair Mall in Victoria. It's very weird to say. I grew up, I worked in that mall for years. I get to do signings there. Wild shit. It's on August 26. 12 to 2 p.m. Come on by. If you have books and you want them signed, bring them down. If you want to buy one and have it signed there, they will have lots of copies. I will bring some old merch too that's kicking around my apartment and needs to be given away, so I will just give it to the first people who show up and want it. Come on by. Okay, thanks. Back to Rome and their Phrygian mother goddess, Cabele.
9:18 Liv Albert? This is episode 222, but what about Rome, Roman mythology and the great mother Cabele?
9:41 Liv Albert? Before we can really talk about a goddess like Cabele and how she fit into Roman mythology, we have to understand, well, Roman mythology. See, there's a reason I don't often dive into explicitly Roman content beyond Ovid, and it's not only because I think the Greeks were considerably more interesting and the way they did things is considerably more interesting. It's also that Rome, if we're generalizing for the sake of simplicity, tended to think about their mythology and their mythological stories in a very, very different way from the Greeks. And it's just also less great for storytelling, frankly. Because of how and when the Roman culture developed and what their priorities were
10:21 Liv Albert? and who surrounded them and just certainly countless other contributing factors, they didn't see mythology in the same way that the ancient Greeks did, and they didn't record it in the same way or tell stories in the same way. That's not to say they never did. It's just that what we have from them and how we understand them now just typically doesn't feature the same telltale signs, you know, that Greek myth has. We're not dealing with longstanding and deeply ancient oral traditions like the Greeks. Again, not to say they didn't have them, but if they did, not much survives, and it's simply just not how things tended to work there by and large. They're more concerned with the day-to-day, the how humans interact with the divine versus the stories of the divine like the Greeks.
11:06 Liv Albert? And certainly during the periods where we have so much Roman writing that survives, like towards the end of the Republic into the Empire, they often took real issue with stories that featured gods behaving, well, like, like the Greek gods tended to do, badly. They also generally had a very complicated relationship with specifically Greek gods. There's a lot to break down here. We're gonna do our best before we just dive straight into the wonder that is Cabelle. I want to explain this in a way that is, you know, simple enough to understand without an entire Roman history lesson, not least because I have no desire to learn and then give you an entire Roman history lesson. That's not how this is. Instead, because it's what I love about mythology, I do want to talk about the gods and their
11:51 Liv Albert? actions. So I'm gonna do my best to like, explain how the Romans did and did not see things, just, just enough that we can understand their mythology, so that I can talk about what we do have. Because their religion was just so much more about the religion itself, the practices and the worship of the gods. It's even more tied to their culture than the Greek mythology. Not to say that Greek religion didn't exist in a similar way, but it's separate from the mythology, the stories. It's tied to how they did and saw things, the rules surrounding their behavior, what was and was not acceptable, which in Rome was a lot. And because of all those things, in order to understand the complexity of their religion and thus their relationship to their gods, you have to understand Roman culture kind of broadly.
12:36 Liv Albert? And again, we're not doing a whole history lesson today. So we're gonna cover the basics, in the simplest way that I can sort them. Just like I said last week, if you want a real Roman history podcast, just head on over to the lovely ladies of the Partial Historians, or take a listen to any one of the many episodes that Ancient History Fangirl has done on Rome. Because, well, I just want to learn about Cabelle and how the Romans interacted with the Greek gods, who they adopted, who they didn't, what they changed. Basically, I want to understand them in relation to the Greeks, because I am me. And this is my show, so we're doing what I want. More often than not, when people talk about the Roman gods, they talk about them as if they are just like other names for Greek gods, or vice versa.
13:20 Liv Albert? I'm certainly guilty of that, you know, in the early episodes of the podcast, I'm sure I used the kind of age-old line that the Romans just borrowed or stole everything from the Greeks, like that meme that goes around all the time, you know, it's like the kid drawing, it's like they got a kitten, and then they got a kid drawing a kitten, and it's like Greeks to the Romans. It's funny when you explain a visual medium in a podcast, right? Anyway, that is how people tend to see the Romans. But that's just, it's, it's true, but it's also really, really not. The Romans were influenced by the ancient Greeks. They often saw them as like a kind of, you know, an older, much, you know, very intelligent
14:00 Liv Albert? culture that came before them, and thus, they were happy to adopt and adapt many things about Greek mythology. But they made them their own in a way that often separated them like entirely from their Greek origins. And they also adopted similar things from other cultures and then melded them together, and then later, those things become intertwined with the Greek? We're gonna get there. It's baffling, and also thankfully fascinating. The Romans didn't have works like the Iliad and the Odyssey to develop their religion and cultural history around. They didn't have like a Hesiod, you know, laying out the genealogy and background of
14:42 Liv Albert? their gods from a really early time, culturally speaking. They didn't have what the ancient Greeks had. And so they found their own cultural and mythological histories, they often developing or expanding upon things later. Because sure, they had Remus and Romulus, the mythological brothers raised by the wolf, you know, one killing the other to found the city of Rome. And while that is a great mythological origin, it's not the Iliad. And the Iliad is not even a mythological origin of a region or a city, it's just like an origin, a story, a cultural history, you know? For Rome, it's more about the actual founding of the city, the culture, it's more intentional,
15:25 Liv Albert? you know, than it is about a cultural heritage, like something like Homer. So those things developed more organically, more Slowly, and in the case of something like the Aeneid, you know, very late in the wider realm of their culture and very intentionally. The Aeneid, unlike Homer, was created very intentionally. You know, it's equally fascinating, I think, but it's also vastly different from to, you know, how these things came about for the Greeks. Of course, before they ever had the Aeneid, they had their gods. Now, I won't pretend like I can fully understand the how and the when of the Roman gods, but I can tell you who they were.
16:07 Liv Albert? You know, when and if they were based on a Greek deity and what the Romans did with them to make them their own.
16:14 Liv Albert? Rome was not only influenced by the Greeks, of course, they also had the Etruscans, which were a people on the Italian mainland who influenced what would become Rome. They had the Greeks down on Sicily. Sicily was a great colony for a very long time. They had the Sabines, who were, you know, woven into the foundation myths of Rome in that fairly disturbing way that you heard last week. And they had other indigenous cultures of the region, what we now know as Italy and beyond. So their culture was a result of influence of so many. And, and much of it came, you know, after other parts of the Mediterranean were already deep into their own established cultures. And because of that, it is all just very different. Their gods are just a direct result of all of this.
16:59 Liv Albert? And fuck, even trying to get a handle on Roman gods is ridiculously complicated without like a thorough understanding of their cultural history, which I do not have. Let's go with the basics. There are a load of Roman deities that fit perfectly with their Greek counterparts, you know? They were adopted and they sync right up in terms of what they're the god of, their role in the pantheon, et cetera. You know, like Jupiter or Jove is Zeus. Apollo is Apollo. He's really obvious. That's nice for him. Same with, you know, Bacchus, Dionysus. Pluto, Hades, these are explicitly, they took the names from the Greek, they just made it their own. And there are others that are a little less direct, but otherwise still kind of match up.
17:43 Liv Albert? Juno is Hera, Diana is Artemis, Keres is Demeter, Neptune is Poseidon. But then, there are deities like Saturn, who is Cronos, but also like so much more than Cronos? Where the Greeks tended to see Cronos in relation to his children, specifically in relation to Zeus and his siblings being eaten, to the Titanomachae, where the Olympians took control, leaving Cronos, you know, kind of in the proverbial dust in the later mythos. Saturn in Roman religion was a really important deity who was worshipped and revered in a way that Cronos never really was. Similar to, you know, Mars.
18:26 Liv Albert? Mars is Ares, yes, he's a god of war, but Ares, while important in the Greek world, doesn't remotely match the reverence and importance of Mars in the Roman world. That is, of course, not unrelated to the fact that the Romans were, you know, much more interested in wars and conquering by and large than the, you know, collective ancient Greek polies. And where Athena was the goddess of war and that the Greeks were more interested in, you know, Athena was the one they really thought of more when it comes to the broader concept of war. Mars was the Roman, you know, war god.
19:05 Liv Albert? And speaking of Athena, another fascinating example of a Roman deity who gets often directly connected with a Greek one and yet just really does not fit in the grand scheme of things is Minerva. The Roman Minerva is Athena, she's always, you know, referred to as Athena in these kind of generalized concepts, but she's really not. Like, Minerva is a goddess of crafts, like Athena is a goddess of crafts, but she's not a goddess of war like Athena, because the Romans already had one of those, the goddess named Bologna. And so these are great examples of gods that came from other cultures, were turned into
19:45 Liv Albert? what the Romans needed them to be, and then later, kind of like, transferred into an equivalency in Greek? It's difficult.
19:56 Liv Albert? But, there's one goddess who stands out among all of these Roman deities, gods and goddesses with origins all around the Mediterranean. All these others who were molded and transformed to fit the Roman culture, what they wanted and needed from their gods and their cults of worship. And that goddess who stands out among them all is, of course, the Magna Mater, the great mother, Kabele.
20:43 Liv Albert? Kabele's mythological life begins in Phrygia, Anatolia, not too far from where my boy Bellerophon defeated the most wonderful mythological creature there ever was, the fire-breathing goat-headed chimera.
20:57 Liv Albert? There, in what is now modern Turkey, there was a sacred mother goddess worshipped, and her name was Kabele. Kabele is old, very, very old. She's also a goddess who meant many different things to many different cultures. She originated in Phrygia and Anatolia as a mother goddess, a mother-earth goddess. She also has ties to fertility and wild animals and many other things. She also might have been as ancient as one of the best-preserved Neolithic sites in the world, Kethalhoyak, where figurines were found that some say could have been representing Kabele herself. And in case you're not well-versed in the intricacies of the prehistoric world,
21:42 Liv Albert? that's like, seriously old, like 7,000 BCE old.
21:49 Liv Albert? Now, for all Kabele was originally an Anatolian goddess, a goddess who was developed and worshipped by the ancient people of that region, the version of her story that I'm gonna tell you comes from a Greco-Roman perspective. Just like when I covered Aphrodite's eastern origins, for all I would love to be able to tell her story from a more eastern, you know, accurate, local standpoint, from her origins there with people who were very much not Roman or Greek, my knowledge and research expertise is in the Greco-Roman world, emphasis on Greco. And so, we're going to have a look at her through that lens. Fortunately, for all the episode is an introduction into some more specifically Roman mythology,
22:30 Liv Albert? Kabele was also worshipped by the Greeks in certain areas and contexts. The cult of Kabele spread to Greece in around the Archaic period. By then, she'd reached much of the Greek world, though she wasn't a deity that kept her own kind of distinct identity. Like what the Romans would do with countless other foreign gods, the Greeks kind of adapted Kabele to fit with some of their own goddesses, like Rea, Gaia, Demeter. She served as a protector too, but she was often depicted as the foreigner that she was. She was a foreign goddess and seen as such. She was mysterious, eastern.
23:10 Liv Albert? Sometimes, she even had a lion-drawn chariot, which might be one of the coolest things a goddess could possibly have. She also, particularly in Greek worship, had a priesthood of ritually castrated priests. This comes from a connection she had to another mythological figure named Attis. Now, the stories we have of Kabele and Attis come from later, from the Greek world. So it's likely this he was a Greek invention, or if he wasn't invented by them, they still likely adapted him to suit their culture, their version of Kabele. You will see some connections that make him seem quite Greek. Still, he was seen as a Phrygian god, just like Kabele.
23:56 Liv Albert? She also had ties to a figure called Agdistus. But frankly, those ties are even harder to tease out. According to Pausanias, though, Agdistus and Kabele are like, in some way, the same character? With Agdistus having been born intersex and then changed or mutilated by the gods to become female and therefore Kabele? This seems to be tied to an idea that they would have been too powerful as an intersex deity. It's not all horrifying, I guess. But it is, well, like, very hard to figure out if it was a widespread idea, if it was particularly ancient, if it was a Greek invention. There's a lot of questions, and if I had a month to research this and not a week, I'm
24:40 Liv Albert? certain I could have found the answers. But here we are. Next year, we won't do this themed month on a whim, and we will have much clearer answers. Still, Pausanias tells us that the tradition of Kabele's origins was this. The Phrygian sky god, who he names Zeus, though we can assume that, you know, a Phrygian sky god would have had a Phrygian sky god name and likely wouldn't equate with Zeus in the Greek at all. This sky god, we call Zeus. And, well, basically, it seems like, um, he had a wet dream while sleeping on the ground and ended up kind of like impregnating the earth?
25:16 Liv Albert? This sounds like Greek myth, doesn't it? In time, a new god sprung from the ground and showed themselves to be a Phrygian god. But this god was special, they were born intersex, and they were called Agdistus. The other gods, it seemed like, feared this new god and their status as both male and female, because maybe that would mean they would have too much power, too much freedom. And so in their fear, they castrated Agdistus.
25:43 Liv Albert? From that castration, grew an almond tree. And again. Sound familiar? Very Greek indeed. Anyway, this almond tree was born and the daughter of a river god took an almond from it and pressed it to her chest. And then she was impregnated. Everyone's getting pregnant. Everything is getting pregnant. I should say that. Again, gods, does this scream Greek mythology? And this child was named Attis. And when this next child was born, he was exposed. Surprise, surprise. Again, I think this is a Greek invention. It's all coming from Pausanias at the least.
26:23 Liv Albert? But instead of dying, as the intention with the exposure was, the child was kept alive by a goat. I love these. And when he grew up, he was beautiful as all hell. I mean, I think nature versus nurture. Like nurture's really taken hold there. You know, that goat made him beautiful. And in his beauty, he caught the eye of Agdistus, who was now Cabele, and who fell in love with him. But Attis, it seems, became engaged to marry a princess of the region. And when Agdistus slash Cabele found out, they lost their mind and, well, cut off Attis's genitals. There's
27:07 Liv Albert? a lot of that happening here. But Agdistus Cabele felt bad after and then convinced Zeus to make Attis un-aging. He would never decay. And again, that's just what Pausanias says, which is also why it's not great storytelling, because he's just like making this an anecdote. I managed to make that like twice as long as what is actually surviving. Ovid has a story too, with some similar vibes, but much more Roman, and we will get to that one. But leave it to me to find a way to still keep talking about Greece. Fine, let's move over to Rome, shall we?
27:50 Liv Albert? In Virgil's Aeneid, when Aeneas talks about bringing the household gods from Troy to Rome, Cabele is one of those gods that he's talking about. Except, not the literal bringing, yet, I guess? Basically, Cabele, because of her region, would be associated with Troy. But unsurprisingly, it wasn't quite so cut and dry. Actually, Rome adopting Cabele as their Magna Mater, their great mother goddess, is far more interesting than anything the Aeneid had to say. Don't tell the Romanists. First, Cabele isn't just a mother goddess. In both the Greek and the Roman traditions, she's inextricably tied with her homeland
28:34 Liv Albert? of Phrygia, of Anatolia, and specifically, Mount Ida. You might recall that there is more than one Mount Ida, but one famously features in the Iliad. And thus, of course, this Trojan mother goddess made it her home. She was the great mother goddess of Ida. And when the Romans officially adopted her as their great mother goddess, they took her, literally, they kept her association with Ida, but took her, literally, or as literally as is possible, you know, with a goddess, from Anatolia to Rome.
29:11 Liv Albert? Because gods, the portents made it clear to the Romans that they had no other choice. During the Second Punic War with Hannibal in 204 BCE, and yes, I've learned all of this in this moment, things were not going particularly well for the Roman Republic. They'd been experiencing endlessly bad portents, like meteor showers, bad harvests, famine. And well, one thing that you should know about the Romans is that they took portents very, very seriously. Understatement of a lifetime. So in an effort to figure out what they could do to progress in the war, they consulted
29:55 Liv Albert? the Sibylline books. Now, these were recorded words said to have been spoken by the Sibylline oracle? So prophecies or portents, like instructions essentially, very similar to the oracle of Delphi. But if I understand them correctly, they were already written down when they were being consulted, and these Sibylline books said that the problem... With Rome was essentially that the mother was missing. The mother goddess wasn't with them and they must get her and bring her back to Rome.
30:33 Liv Albert? And now, keep in mind, I'm not talking about mythology right now. This is not the oracle of Greek myth. This is much closer to the oracle of the real world, where things went a lot better than in mythology. But this is a historical event, a real human desire to move a mother goddess from her home in the east to Rome. And so, how does one go about bringing a goddess across the sea?
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33:12 Liv Albert? When Aeneas carried Troy to the Italian fields, the goddess almost followed the ships that bore the sacred things. But she felt that fate did not yet call for the intervention of her divinity in Latium. And she remained behind in her accustomed place. Afterwards, when mighty Rome had already seen five centuries and had lifted up her head above the conquered world, the priest consulted the fateful words of the Euboean song. "They say that what he found ran thus: 'The mother is absent, you Roman. I bid you seek the mother. When she shall come, she must be received by chaste hands.'"
33:55 Liv Albert? The ambiguity of the dark oracle puzzled the senators to know who the parent was and where she was to be sought. Peine was consulted and said, "Fetch the mother of the gods; she is to be found on Mount Ida."
34:12 Liv Albert? That was a quote, if it wasn't obvious. I try to put on the quote voice when I'm not clear. And once again, that was from Ovid's Fasti, just a smaller section of the passage I read at the top of the episode to remind you all, because it is Ovid telling this story.
34:27 Liv Albert? Now, the Fasti is a work of Ovid's that I've rarely ever consulted for the podcast, because while it contains bits of mythology like this, it's much more like about just Rome. It's a practical text relating to their religion more than storytelling. It's another example of how Rome differs from Greece when it comes to their mythos, their relationship to their gods and the stories of them. The Fasti is such like a really good example of all of this. It's a book written in verse, of course, that details not only Roman customs and deities, but also the origins of their holidays and celebrations. And so, of course, it features the story of bringing Cabele to Rome, something that would have happened about 200 years before Ovid's time.
35:11 Liv Albert? Because again, I'm talking about them literally bringing a goddess from essentially Turkey to Rome.
35:21 Liv Albert? Then, back then, the Romans had learned that in order to succeed in their war, they would need to bring their mother goddess to Rome officially. Again, how is something like this even possible? How would they go about, you know, physically bringing a goddess to Rome? Well, you see, there was this black stone that was considered to be the very embodiment of Cabele. This stone was Cabele, in whatever way an object can be a goddess. Regardless, what it was was a physical way for the Romans to bring a goddess to Italy. And fortunately, it was in the possession of a Roman ally, Pergamum. Orwell, Ovid says it was on Mount Ida.
36:05 Liv Albert? Doesn't really matter where the physical rock, stone was, or who had it, though there are stories of, you know, the king of the region, Adalus, hearing from the divine that he should give the stone to Rome, that that was a good home for the goddess. Essentially, it just means they took it without a fight. What matters in the end is that Rome did get a hold of this stone, this goddess. But if they thought it would be a simple task, one that would go smoothly, just bringing a goddess across the Mediterranean, they were wrong. While most of the journey went smoothly, the ship holding the stone got stuck in the Tiber River.
36:46 Liv Albert? And once it got stuck, like it was well and truly stuck. No one could free the ship, not through logic or engineering, and not through divine relationships to the gods. Everyone tried, all the way down to priests and vestal virgins. And side note, one of these days, I'm gonna have someone on the show to talk about the vestal virgins because, whew, fascinating. No one could free this ship until one woman stepped up to try. Her name was Claudia Quinta, and she had, haha, reputation. Here's how Ovid describes Claudia's reputation, though of course, he's writing 200 years
37:29 Liv Albert? later, when she's well and famous. Claudia, Ovid says, was chaste. Quote, "Though not reputed so, rumor unkind had wronged her, and a false charge had been trumped up against her. It told against her that she dressed sprucely, that she walked abroad with her hair dressed in varied fashion, that she had a ready tongue for gruffled men. Conscious of innocence, she laughed at fame's untruths, but we of the multitude are prone to think the worst." You see, she had a bad reputation because she dressed how she wanted, and she said what she thought, even to the men. The horror.
38:14 Liv Albert? Anyway, she seems, uh, pretty cool, if you ask me. Fortunately, Claudia's reputation was about to be rehabilitated, thanks to Cabelle herself.
38:26 Liv Albert? Claudia stepped up. She wanted to do her part to free this ship and to allow Cabele to pass through the Tiber and to take her place in Rome. So Claudia scooped up some of the water from the Tiber. She let it drip three times on her head, lifted her hands to the heavens three times, and then, looking all disheveled and facing a crowd who thought she was out of her mind, Claudia stared at the image of Cabele and she spoke to the goddess. Ovid says these were her words: "You fruitful mother of the gods graciously accept your suppliant prayers on one condition: They say I'm not chaste. If you do condemn me, I will confess my guilt, convicted by
39:09 Liv Albert? the verdict of the goddess. I will pay the penalty with my life. But if I am free of crime, give through your act a proof of my innocence, and, chaste as you are, yield to my chaste hands." Having spoken, she grabbed hold of the rope fixed onto the ship, a rope that countless people had already tried to yank, to free this ship, but when Claudia grabbed it and pulled the ship easily, smoothly, pulled free from where it was grounded on the Tiber, and it was able to simply just continue on through the river where it finally reached Rome.
39:50 Liv Albert? And so thanks to this obviously fascinating woman, Claudia Quinta, Rome was able to install Cabele into their city officially, consecrating her temple on the Palatine Hill, and every year they would honor her there with processions and celebration and dances and plays, all for the Magna Mater.
40:31 Liv Albert? So much of Rome's mythology and religion, like their culture even, seems to have been just so much more deliberate than Greek. They were deliberately a unified country, for you know, for lack of a better word, compared to Greece's many disparate city-states. They deliberately adopted and transformed deities from many other cultures to their own desires and needs, even in the case of Cabele, you know, literally bringing a goddess from the east and officially installing her as the great mother of Rome. But even with this very deliberate and official move, Cabele remained connected to her eastern roots in equally fascinating ways. Though there were some exceptions for her celebration,
41:14 Liv Albert? she seemed to be pretty limited to just priests who served her temple. And though I can't find confirmation, it seems like the first priests at least, if not all of them, might have come over, you know, with the stone from the east, or some other way. But the priests, it seems, were eastern in origin. They weren't Romans themselves, and they might have been similar to the priests who presided over Cabele in Greece, in that they were, you know, ritually castrated men in honor of the stories of her and Attis, which were also brought over with Cabele herself. Now, again, these stories do seem to be specific to Greece, based on what we have, but given
41:55 Liv Albert? there were about 300 to 400 years of worship in Hellenized Cabele in Greece before she was officially brought to Rome, it, you know, makes sense that a more Greek side of her came along to Rome too. It isn't easy to fit Cabele into one episode, so I imagine I will revisit her in the future. But she's so interesting in that she is really lacking in any, like, actual stories to be told. Instead, like so many characters, and specifically Roman, it's more about her as a goddess, as a religious icon, a cult of worship. Like goddesses like Hestia, it seems to be more about her importance with real-life people of the ancient world, rather than stories of adventure and escapades.
42:39 Liv Albert? But before we leave off with one of the few stories of her that does remain and does come from Rome, I do have to say that she shares some things with Dionysus too. There are references to his association with her during his travels in the east, like that maybe an association with her is even linked to his later journeys, bringing his cult through the north and into Greece. It makes sense too, given she's often depicted with lions pulling her chariot and, you know, he's always got leopards and other big cats in his entourage. Just makes her more interesting, if you ask me. But when it comes to actual detailed stories, her relationship with Attis is most of what we have, outside of some Dionysian things that, you know, we'll have to leave for another day.
43:22 Liv Albert? So I'm gonna leave you with the quoted passage that we have from Ovid, again, from the Fasti, where he tells the story of Cabele's association with Attis, and how she came to have these ritually castrated priests. We heard from Pausanias earlier, you know, with the Greek version, though a very late one, so it's best if I leave you with this: how the Romans saw it when it comes to their magna mater. Now, the context of this is the goddess mentioned is Cabele, she's just not named, and it is a character talking to a muse, asking her questions about, you know, why the priests are ritually castrated.
44:00 Liv Albert? "Whence came, said I, the impulse to cut their members. When I was silent, the Pyrian goddess began to speak. In the woods, a Phrygian boy of handsome face, Attis by name, had attached the tower-bearing goddess to himself by a chaste passion. She wished that he should be kept for herself and should guard her temple, and she said, 'Resolv'd to be a boy forever.' He promised obedience, and, 'If I lie,' he said, 'may the love for which I break faith be my last love of all.' He broke faith; for, meeting the nymph Sagoritis, he ceased to be what he had been before,
44:43 Liv Albert? for that the angry goddess wreaked vengeance. By wounds inflicted on the tree, she cut down the Niad, who perished, thus, for the fate of the Niad was bound up with the tree. Attis went mad, and, imagining that the roof of the chamber was falling in, he fled, and ran for the top of Mount Dindimas. And he kept crying." At one moment, "Take away the torches," at another, "Remove the whips," and he swore that the Stygian goddesses were visible to him. He mangled to his body with a sharp stone and trailed his long hair in the filthy dust, and his cry was, "I have deserved it.
45:26 Liv Albert? With my blood I pay the penalty that is my due. Ugh, perish the parts that were my ruin. Ugh, let them perish," still, he said. He retrenched the burden of his groin and of a sudden was bereft of every sign of manhood. His madness set an example and still his unmanly ministers cut their vile members while they toss their hair. In such words, the Ionian muse eloquently answered my question as to the cause of the madness of the votaries.
46:14 Liv Albert? Haha nerds, thank you so much for listening. Gods, Rome is difficult, uh, but it's worth it for a goddess like Cabele and a woman like Claudia Quinta. Honestly, just attempting to research for this episode was a fascinatingly eye-opening experience. Like, I don't want to suggest I didn't know just how differently Rome treated their mythology and religion, but I never actually have to, like, try to figure it all out before. It reminds me of when I covered the Orphic mysteries last year, where I just, I knew just how complicated my research would be and yet it still blew my fucking mind when I actually had to get to it. The way that I don't think I can even remotely convey Roman mythology to you all just purely because of how differently it formed and functioned compared to the Greeks and my head lives in the Greeks too much.
46:59 Liv Albert? It's fucking fascinating and for someone like me who's obsessed with the explaining the nuance and understanding it myself, like, just going as deep as possible... I mean, it just makes it so much more frustrating to try to dip my toe into the Roman world. Anyway, maybe we'll make this an annual thing. Every August, I just try to learn a tiny bit more about how different Rome's mythology and their mythological structure was compared to Greece. And we all just like slowly learn about that weird-ass place. In the meantime, though, gods, I'm glad I prefer the Greeks. But next week, because again, if I have to look at the Romans, I'm gonna do it in relation to the Greeks. We are looking at how the Romans saw my girl Medea. And I can't not wait. Let's talk about Myths Baby is written and produced by me, Liv Albert.
47:43 Liv Albert? Michaela Smith is the Hermes to my Olympians, perhaps more colloquially known as the assistant producer. The podcast is hosted and monetized by iHeart Media. Listen on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and help me continue bringing you the world of Greek mythology and the ancient Mediterranean by becoming a patron, where I'll get bonus episodes and more. Visit patreon.com/MythsBaby or click the link in this episode's description. I am Liv and I love this shit, even when it's Roman, but like only when I could still connect it to Greece, you know?
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50:56 Liv Albert? The much-awaited sequel, Game of Thieves, comes out December 8. In this sequel, Julia and Alaric must overcome centuries of conflict to work together or the turbulent riptides of rebellion and the demons of their past will tear them apart.
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