Second Punic War

Roman public religion was a contract. The pax deorum, the settled peace with the gods, was maintained by exact performance of rite, and a run of disasters was read as evidence that the performance had gone wrong somewhere and that the fault must be found and expiated. The first three years of Hannibal's war produced disasters on a scale nothing in Roman memory matched: the Trebia in 218, Lake Trasimene in 217, and at Cannae in 216 the destruction of the largest army Rome had ever fielded.

The response was liturgical as much as military. The senate ordered the decemviri to consult the Sibylline Books, the collection of Greek oracles kept on the Capitol and opened only by decree; a sacred spring was vowed, dedicating the next year's produce to the gods; and lectisternia, banquets at which images of the gods were laid on couches, were held for days. Two Vestal Virgins, Opimia and Floronia, were found to have broken their vows, one being buried alive and the other killing herself, and the pontifex maximus scourged the pontifical secretary who had been involved. Livy then records the rite the Romans themselves called least Roman: a Gaulish man and woman and a Greek man and woman were buried alive in the Forum Boarium.

Livy calls this a sacrifice wholly foreign to Roman practice, and Roman writers afterwards treated it as a measure of how far the terror of that year had gone. An embassy was also sent to consult the oracle at Delphi.

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.