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XVII. The most ancient Goddess Cybele
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2011
Extract
In the year 204, exactly two centuries before the date generally accepted as that of the birth of Christ, the Roman State had passed through an experience much like that of our great Ally across the Channel in the autumn of 1914. Hannibal, the lifelong enemy of Rome, had surmounted obstacles thought to be insurmountable, had swept into Italy like a whirlwind, and in a few pitched battles had destroyed six consular armies. After one of these victories, his Moorish cavalry had raided right up to the walls of Rome, then only defended by old men and boys, and the Eternal City seemed to be at his mercy. Yet at the last moment he turned aside, as did von Kluck in our day, and pushed into the rich province which was afterwards Naples, whence it took all the nibbling strategy of Fabius to dislodge him. When Capua at last fell, he still kept his grip on the Calabrian coast, where he waited for reinforcements which never reached him, to again attack Rome. So long as he was on Italian soil, there could be no rest nor peace of mind for those Romans who, like the elder Cato, had seen the fierce African spearmen galloping through the Campagna, firing the thatched huts and driving off the cattle which formed all the wealth of the peasant farmers, then the backbone of the Republic. During all this time, too, the Roman populace behaved beautifully. Even after Cannæ they had not despaired of the Republic; they had suspended their long quarrel with the patricians; and, after a few very unsuccessful experiments with mobappointed generals, had left the conduct of the war in the more capable hands of the Senate. But when a shower of stones—probably lapilli from some volcano on the coast—fell upon the city, they were seized with one of the superstitious panics to which they were prone. They cried out that the gods were angry with them, and, as the unknown is sometimes more terrible than the known, there was more fear of their weakening before this menace than before Hannibal.
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References
page 697 note 1 Fasti, iv, 76.Google Scholar
page 697 note 2 Probably the transfer of the war to Africa, in which policy the Scipionic party was opposed by Fabius.
page 698 note 1 Demosthenes, , de Corona, 259 sqq.Google Scholar
page 698 note 2 The pains taken to build a ship on purpose for its transport (see Ovid, , ubi cit.)Google Scholar shows that the statue and not only the stone, probably a very small affair, was sent. Pergamum had a school of art of its own, and it is probable that its statue gave the type that we find on coins (see Graillot, , Le Culte de Cybèle, Paris, 1912), pl. x.Google Scholar The still more beautiful one carved by Phidias for the Athens Metrôon probably lacked the crown of towers and other specially Phrygian attributes. See Farnell, , Cults of the Greek States, iii, p. 298.Google Scholar
page 698 note 3 Sometimes called Curetes. The noise was said to have been made by the orders of Rhea (another form of Cybele) to prevent Kronos from hearing the cries of the infant Zeus.
page 700 note 1 A pollutio nocturna of Zeus.
page 701 note 1 Pausanias, , vii, c. 17Google Scholar; Arnobius, , adv. Gentes, v, cc. 5 sqq.Google Scholar Diodorus Siculus gives a third version and Ovid a fourth, but without essential variation.
page 704 note 1 Graillot, 's theory (Culte, p. 232)Google Scholar that it was sometimes substituted for the ritual mutilation is enticing, but has, I am afraid, little evidence to support it.
page 705 note 1 It forms vol. cvii of the Bibliothèque des Écoles Françaises d'Athènes et de Rome. Full references to the original authorities for all the statements in the earlier part of this paper are there given.
page 705 note 2 Cults of the Greek States, iii, 301.Google Scholar On the analogy of the Eleusinian Mysteries, however, it was the hierophant who was married, and it was certainly the archigallus and not the initiate who was called Attis (Graillot, , Culte, p. 235).Google Scholar
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page 706 note 1 Schneidewin's reconstruction of the poem is slightly different. All the epithets here attributed to “the Phrygians” can be referred to episodes in the Attis legend, and are dealt with in detail by the: “Naassene” or Ophite author whom Hippolytus quotes. For the “reaped ear” see Philosophumena, vi, 1, 8, p. 171Google Scholar, Cruice, where it is said to have been copied from the Phrygians by the Eleusinian Mysteries, in which it forms “the great and wonderful and most perfect visible (or epoptic) mystery” shown to the epopts.
page 706 note 2 So Isis in Apuleius’ romance tells her votary immediately before his initiation that she is the goddess adored in various places as Hera, Athena, Cybele, Artemis, Nemesis, and so on.
page 707 note 1 One fairly strong argument in favour of their antiquity is that they nowhere identify Attis with any sun-god, which they would certainly have done if written after (say) the reign of Trajan.
page 709 note 1 Metamorph. xi, 6.Google Scholar
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page 712 note 1 PSBA. xxxvi, 1914, p. 196Google Scholar, n. 23. This is what I understood Mr. Langdon to mean, but I do not think his published words bear out the contention. For the bisexual nature of the earliest beings, according to the traditions of the Greeks, Jews, Samaritans, Ophites, and Manichæans, see my Forerunners and Rivals of Christianity, i, pp. 182, 189, 195Google Scholar; ii, pp. 37, 40, 298, 329.
page 712 note 2 Philoct. 391.Google Scholar Cf. Farnell, , op. cit., iii, p. 379.Google Scholar
page 712 note 3 Maspero, , Hist. Ancienne, i, p. 86.Google Scholar Many instances were given in the discussion which followed the reading of this paper of the worship in India of the Earth as an androgyne being like the Orphic Phanes. The observed fact that the Earth appears to bring forth without male assistance, and therefore must contain both sexes within herself, may have been the idea underlying such stories. That the division of this androgyne deity into two sexes brings about the castration of the male person of the godhead is suggested by the Greek myths of Uranos and Gê, Kronos, and Rhea, (Hesiod, Theogon., 1, 159Google Scholar, and Porphyry, , de antro Nymph., p. 118).Google ScholarDrBudge, Wallis (Book of the Dead, c. 69, vol. ii, p. 235)Google Scholar thinks that the same fate attended the Egyptian earth god Seb.
page 713 note 1 Philosophumena, v, 1, 9, p. 177Google Scholar, Cruice. The first chapter of the fifth book is indeed little but a commentary on the “song of the great mysteries” given above.
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page 714 note 1 Cf. Merejkowsky, Dmitry J., Pierre le Grand, Paris, pp. 243Google Scholar sqq. Tsakni, , La Russie SectaireGoogle Scholar, seems to be the authority for all these stories.