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Updated: May 28, 2025
The national sodalitates or priesthoods such as those of the Sodales Titii, Luperci, Augustales etc. were somewhat different. AUTEM: for the form of the parenthesis cf. 7. MAGNAE MATRIS: the image of Cybele was brought to Rome in 204 B.C. from Pessinus in Phrygia. See Liv. 29, 10. The Sacra are called Idaea from Mount Ida in Phrygia, which was a great centre of the worship of Cybele.
The following, likewise from Eumenes, exhibits the king as a party in the feud between the priest of Pessinus and his brother Aiorix. On the other hand it is plain from one of the letters of his successor Attalus that the times had changed and his wishes had lowered their tone. In the same testament the king gave to his city Pergamus "freedom," that is the demokratia , urban self-government.
By these arguments he carried his point. His brother was preferred to the brother of Africanus, though supported by the whole Cornelian family, and while one of the same family presided at the election, and notwithstanding the very honourable testimony given by the senate, in his favour, when it adjudged him to be the best man in the state: and as such, appointed him to receive the Idaean Mother into the city, when she was brought from Pessinus.
Turning now to the relation of the Phrygian Lityerses to the Phrygian Attis, it may be remembered that at Pessinus the seat of a priestly kingship the high-priest appears to have been annually slain in the character of Attis, a god of vegetation, and that Attis was described by an ancient authority as "a reaped ear of corn."
In the second Punic War the Romans sent ambassadors to Pessinus, and got permission to convey to Rome the Great Mother of the Gods, who was a sacred stone. The annual celebration called Megalesia, that is, the festival of the Great Mother, was instituted at Rome in honour of the goddess, and celebrated in the spring.
One of the tetrarchs of the Celtic stock of the Tolistobogii settled round Pessinus, and summoned by Lucullus and Pompeius to render military service with the other small Roman clients, Deiotarus had in these campaigns so brilliantly proved his trustworthiness and his energy as contrasted with all the indolent Orientals that the Roman generals conferred upon him, in addition to his Galatian heritage and his possessions in the rich country between Amisus and the mouth of the Halys, the eastern half of the former Pontic empire with the maritime towns of Pharnacia and Trapezus and the Pontic Armenia as far as the frontier of Colchis and the Greater Armenia, to form the kingdom of Lesser Armenia.
The bathing of the image of the goddess in a river may well have been a rain-charm to ensure an abundant supply of moisture for the crops. XXXVI. Human Representatives of Attis FROM INSCRIPTIONS it appears that both at Pessinus and Rome the high-priest of Cybele regularly bore the name of Attis.
There was a whole community, a miniature state, devoted to the service of a goddess not unlike the Great Mother of Pessinus, but whose cult was more ecstatic, more orgiastic, than that of the Magna Mater, at least as Rome knew her. The king was the chief priest, and the citizens were priests and priestesses.
49. ¶ The Pythian god commanded the Romans to entrust to the best of the citizens the conveyance to the city of the goddess from Pessinus, and they accordingly honored Publius Scipio, a son of Gnæus who died in Spain, above all others by their first preference. He at this time, accompanied by the most prominent women, conducted the goddess to Rome and to the Palatine.
In the most dangerous time of the Cimbrian war Battaces the high-priest of Pessinus appeared in person at Rome, in order to defend the interests of the temple of his goddess there which was alleged to have been profaned, addressed the Roman people by the special orders of the Mother of the Gods, and performed also various miracles.
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