The Great Mother Rhea Became on Greek Soil

Rhea's own independent cult in Greece was comparatively limited next to that of her Olympian children, but from the fifth century BCE onward she became closely identified with an imported deity whose worship grew to be far more prominent, the Phrygian Great Mother Cybele, brought into the Greek world from Anatolia. Greek writers and worshippers folded the two goddesses together under titles such as Meter Theon, Mother of the Gods, and Meter Megale, Great Mother, treating Rhea's older, quieter status as mother of the Olympians as continuous with Cybele's much more visible cult of ecstatic music, drumming and processional worship. That merged cult was strongly associated with mountain sanctuaries, particularly sites on Mount Ida in both Crete and the Troad, locations already tied to Rhea through the myth of Zeus's Cretan infancy, which gave the identification a built in mythological logic rather than treating it as an arbitrary borrowing. Public shrines to the Mother of the Gods, the Metroon, existed in numerous Greek cities, including a prominent example at Athens that also served as the city's public records office, an unusual civic role for a temple that shows how thoroughly the Rhea Cybele Mother figure had been absorbed into ordinary Greek public life rather than remaining a foreign import kept at arm's length.