The war's most lasting religious act came near its end. In 205 BCE, with Hannibal still in southern Italy and a season of stone showers reported, the Sibylline Books were consulted again and returned a prophecy that a foreign enemy could be driven from Italy if the Idaean Mother were brought to Rome. Delphi confirmed it. An embassy went to Attalus I of Pergamum and obtained from Pessinus in Phrygia the sacred black stone of Cybele, and in 204 the stone came up the Tiber.
The reception was staged with care. The senate ruled that the goddess must be received by the best man in Rome, and chose Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica, a young man of no great record, whose selection was itself an announcement; the matrons of Rome carried the stone from the harbour, and the story of Claudia Quinta, a woman of doubtful reputation who freed the stranded ship and proved her chastity by doing so, attached itself to the day. The goddess was housed on the Palatine, the Megalesia games were founded in her honour, and her temple was dedicated in 191 BCE. Hannibal left Italy in 203 and was beaten at Zama in 202.
Rome had imported a goddess it did not entirely want. As Lynn Roller's study of the Anatolian cult sets out, the Magna Mater arrived with her own castrated priests, the Galli, whose ecstatic processions Roman writers found alien, and Roman citizens were forbidden to serve in that priesthood for centuries afterwards.