179 Let the sky pass, three times it might turn on its eternal axis! Titan three times harnesses and three times releases his horses.
181 Let’s keep going: a Berecyntian flute made of curving horn will be played, and the Festival of the Idaean Mother will start. The castrated priests process and they beat hollow drums, their clashing copper cymbals make the air ring: the Mistress herself will be carried, sitting, on the effeminate necks of her attendants. She is invoked with howls through the middle streets of the City.
187 The stage resounds, and the games are calling you, go watch, Romans! Let the garrulous Forum be deserted by Mars himself. It pleases the multitude to seek these pastimes, but the noise of the high-pitched air terrifies me, and the sound from the curved lotus-wood flutes must be dreaded.
191 “Give to me, Goddess, those whom I might consult.”
191 The Cybeleian Goddess considers her learnèd granddaughters, and commands them to address my questions: “Explain, you who have been entrusted with remembering, pupils of Mount Helicon, why the Great Goddess might rejoice to hear such incessant noise.” Thus I asked, so Erato answered (she returned to that Cythereian month, which has the name of tender love): “This fortune was given to Saturn: ‘Best of tyrants, you will have been driven from your kingdom by your son.’ That fearful one devoured his own children, when she had just given birth, plunging them into his guts and holding them hostage. Rhea often lamented, so often pregnant yet never a mother, and she grieves her own fertility. Then Jupiter was born (antiquity is believed instead of a great eyewitness; stop changing the accepted truth.) The rock hiding in swaddling clothes settled in the gut of the Celestial: and so the father must be ensnared in his fate.
207 “Immediately steep Mt. Ida echoed with ringing and noise, so that the guarded child could cry with his infant mouth. Part of his caretakers struck bronze shields with sticks, and the other part hammered empty helmets: here the Caretakers, here the Corybantes carry on the same work. The act escaped notice, and the imitations of the prior deed remain to this day: the attendants of the goddess clash castanets and beat booming leather drums, striking cymbals instead of helmets, drums instead of shields. The flute performs Phrygian tunes, as it has performed before.” She had finished.
215 I have begun: “Why do they give the brave species of lions to her, they who hold out their unaccustomed manes to the curved yoke?” I had stopped.
217 She has begun: “It is believed that wildness has been tamed through her; it is a testimony of her own chariot.”
219 “But why is her head overloaded with a crown made of towers? Or did she give towers to the first cities?”
221 Erato nods: “It has come from her.”
221 I have asked: “Where does the impulse that they must cut off their own cocks come from?”
222 When I was silent, the Muse began to speak: “There was a Phrygian boy in the forest, remarkable in appearance. Attis was bound to the goddess crowned with towers by a holy love. She wished him to be saved for herself, to protect her temples, and she said: ‘Do it! Boy-virgin, you should always want to be.’ He gives a guarantee to her commands and says: ‘If I will lie, let Venus, with whom I will betray her, be my last lover.’
229 “He failed her, and lost himself in the nymph Sagaritis. It was what it was: for this reason the anger of the Goddess demanded punishment. She mowed down that Naiad in her tree-form and from those inflicted wounds, she died: the tree-form of the Naiad was doomed.
233 “Attis goes mad, and believing the ceiling of his rooms to be falling down, he flees, seeking the summit of Mt. Dindymon by running. And just now he shouts: ‘Raise the torches!’ then: ‘Stop the flogging!’ Often he swears that the Palestinian goddess is present.
237 “He even mangled his own body with sharp rocks, and his long hair has been dragged in the unclean dirt, and he has the words: ‘I deserved this! I surrender to my deserved punishment with my blood! Ah! Let these parts, which have harmed me, be lost! Oh, let them perish.’ He spoke till now, then sliced off the burden of his dick, and suddenly, there was no sign left of a man.
243 “This madness comes as an imitation, and so the emasculated attendants cut off their worthless cocks while tossing their hair.” With such a tale, and with the eloquent speech of a Aonian Muse, the cause of their madness, which I have sought, has been given.
247 “Might you instruct me, my literary guide, I beg you, on this, too: from where might the objects of my search have come? Surely she has not always been in our city?”
249 “Mother always loved Mt. Dindymon, and Mt. Cybele and Mt. Ida, with her source waters. She always loved Trojan strength: after Troy, Aeneas would have carried her into Italian lands. The goddess has almost followed on the boats carrying his holy things. But she had not yet felt the need to demand her Divine Will by oracles to Latium, and so she had remained in her customary place.
255 “Then, when Rome, potent with wealth, and by now she has seen five centuries, has lifted her head over her conquered world, the priest inspected the fateful words of Euboican prophesy; such oracles brought this news:
259 “‘Mother is away: I command that you should seek Mother, Roman. When she will come, she should be received by holy hands.’
261 “The Senators wavered in their uncertainty of the obscure Prophesy; either: what parent could be away? Or: in what place should they seek her? Apollo is consulted, and the god says to them: ‘Go fetch Mother, she should be found on the summit of Mt. Ida.’
265 “Aristocrat-diplomats are sent. At that time, King Attalus held the king’s scepter of Phrygia. He rejected the quest of the Italian men, but, I will rhapsodize about a miracle: the earth trembled with long rumbling and immediately after the Goddess spoke from her own sanctuaries: ‘I myself want to be sought. Let there be no delay, send what I desire. Rome is a worthy place, to which the god of all might go.’
271 “The King quaking in fear at the noise said: ‘You all can proceed. You will be ours: Rome is brought back into Phrygian ancestry.’
273 “Right away countless axes felled those pines, which had been used by the fleeing, religious Trojan. One thousand hands work in tandem, and the hollow ship, holding the mother of the heavens, was painted with encaustic colors. She is carried safely through the same waterways as her son; she approaches the vast swamp of her Phrixean sister, and crosses both greedy Rhoeteum and the Sigean coast, both Tenedus and the old power of Eetion. They welcome the Cyclades, leaving Lesbos behind their back. And what waves shatter in Carysteis’ shallows! And she crosses the Icarian Sea, where Icarus destroyed his gliding wings, and gave his name to the desolate water. Then, at the left is Crete, at the right the homelands of Pelops lift out of the waves, and she seeks Cythera, sacred to Venus. From here they reach the Sicilian Sea, where Brontes and Steropes and Acmonides are accustomed to dip their iron, white hot from the forge. She traverses the African Sea, looking at the Sardinian kingdoms to her left; by means of oars they make for Italy.
291 “She had reached Ostia, where the Tiber dissolves itself into the sea and flows into the open ocean. Every Knight and influential Senator, with a mixed crowd of common folk, comes, looking to the the mouth of the Etruscan river. Together, mothers, daughters, and brides processes, who cherish the holy hearth by keeping their chastity. The men tire their busy arms with the tight rigging: with difficulty the foreign ship entered upstream waters. For a long time the ground had been parched, drought had burned the grasses and herbs: the ship sits, sinking into the muddy shallows.
301 “Everyone is present for the ordeal, working more than his part, helping with the celebratory voices of a sturdy company, just as the ferryboat sticks fast, sitting on that island in the middle of the river. The shocked men stand there, afraid of the portent.
305 “Claudia Quinta, her family was descended from the noble Clausus (her beauty was not unequal to her nobility), is indeed chaste, but was not believed. Unfair Rumor had hurt her, and she is a defendant in a public trial of false accusation; and her sumptuousness has hindered her, she has appeared in public with diversely embellished hair, and has a speech ready against the strict Senators. Her mind, knowing the truth, has laughed at the lies of rumor; but we, the trusting crowd, are at fault.
313“When she emerged from the procession of chaste mothers, and she has drunk the pure water of the river with her hands, spilling it three times on her head, three times raising her palms to the sky (and everyone that sees this, thinks that she is losing her mind). On humble knees she fixed her eyes on the image of the goddess and with her hair hanging loose she produces these sounds: ‘Kindly, fertile mother of the gods, of your suppliant, accept my prayers on a certain condition: I am denied innocence. If you condemn me, I will admit to having deserved it. May I, having been defeated, undergo punishment by death, by judge, by goddess. But if there is no crime, you, by your action, will give a guarantee for my life. And now, follow my clean hands, chaste goddess!’ She said this, and with little effort dragged the rigging (a miracle! But, I might say, it has been vouched for by the theater stage.) The goddess had been set in motion, and follows her leader, and shows her approval by following. The sign of joy, and a speech, is brought to the stars!
329 “They came to a bend of the river. Our forefathers have said it was the atria of the Tiber, where it turns away to the left. Night was present: so they tie up the rigging to an oak stump and they give easy sleep and food to their overworked bodies. Daylight was present: they loosen the rigging from the oak stump; however, before they did so, they set out an altar and dedicated incense. In front of this, they garland the stern of the ship and sacrifice a heifer without blemish, ignorant of work or sex.
337 “There is a place, where the slimy Almo flows into the Tiber, and the little stream loses his name in the big river. There, a white-haired priest with purple-red raiment bathes the Mistress and her holy items in the waters of the Almo. His attendants howl, and the frantic flute is blown, and effeminate hands strike bull-leather drums. Claudia, the most honored, leads the crowd with her face beaming. After such difficulty, at long last, her modesty and innocence were believed by the witness, by the goddess; who herself is sitting on a wagon, as she was brought in through the Capenan gate. Fresh flowers are strewn over the yoked cows that pull her. Nasica received her, though the name of the founder of her temple has not stood the test of time. Now it is Augustus, before it was Metellus.”
349 Here Erato stopped, and a pause arose, so I asked the rest of my questions:
350 “Tell me,” I say. “Why might she seek wealth through small donations?”
351 “The people gathered their pennies, thanks to which Metellus was able to build her temples,” she replied. “The custom of devoting donations has continued ever since.”
353 “Why might everyone attend banquets, having exchanged invitations,” I ask. “At that time more than another? Why might they frequent publicized feasts?”
355 “Because luckily the Berecyntian Priests changed her home,” she said. “Guests chase the same luck by changing homes.”
357 I press on: “Why might the first games be the Megalesia in our city?”
358 Since the goddess in fact felt my question coming, she answers: “She gave birth to the gods, they yield to their parent, and Mother has the start of that gifted honor.”
361 “Why then do we call those who raze themselves Galli, when Gallic ground might be so distant from Phrygia?”
363 “Between,” she says. “Verdant Mt. Cybele and the high Celaenan peaks flows a river from a frantic spring, by the name ‘Gallus’. Those who drink from there go insane. Stay far from here, he who is anxious about his sane mind: those who drink from there go insane.”
367 “He is not ashamed to devote,” I said. “A herbaceous salad for the mistress of the month. Perhaps her own reasons underlie this?”
369 “It is said the ancients enjoyed undiluted milk and herbs voluntarily, and on their own if the land was producing something,” she replies. “White cheese is combined with crushed herbs, so that the ancient goddess might recognize ancient foods.”