“Your mother is missing. Find your mother, Roman.” These words written in Ovid’s mytho-historical Fasti refer to the prophecy that the Romans bring the Phrygian goddess Cybele from Asia Minor to Rome. The significance of this prophetic utterance is in its stipulation that a foreign deity be brought into both the Roman pantheon and the city of Rome itself. Discourse on Romanization has often located its object of study at the outskirts of the Empire, focusing on syncretic practices or wholesale acculturation at the boundaries of Roman hegemony. In this manner, the focus on the centrifugal force of the Roman Empire has overshadowed its equally centripetal tendencies. In this paper I examine the hybrid ways in which the Romans negotiated the importation of a foreign cult, that of Cybele and Attis, into the city of Rome. The position of monuments within the urban fabric and public celebration of the goddess occurred in a manner different from the veneration of the other foreign deities brought into Rome. The question that must be asked of this material is: Why?

I seek to answer this question by exploring the complex ways in which the cult of Cybele was given a place in Rome—both within the urban fabric and in ritual practice. Looking at the processes of negotiation involved in bringing this foreign deity into the burgeoning imperial center reveals the complex religious and political climate of late Republican and early Imperial Rome. Further, it provides a lens through which to examine the simultaneous anxiety and fascination with the ‘other’ and how these mixed emotions were played out and materialized in spatial, ritual, and mythological terms.