Bringing Their Mother Home examines the worship of the Greco-Phrygian goddess Cybele, known as the Magna Mater in Rome, to understand the ways that the mid- to late-Roman Republic constructed and performed a multicultural, multiethnic identity. The goddess, originally worshiped in ancient Turkey, was brought by the Romans to their city in 204 BCE and renamed the Magna Mater (the Great Mother). Previous scholarship contended that the Romans feared and hated the goddess and her followers because they were foreign and gender nonconforming, but author Krishni Burns argues that the Romans embraced the Magna Mater and her genderfluid followers as they created a space for multiculturalism at a time when Rome was expanding rapidly across the Mediterranean. By importing the cult and ritually performing the Magna Mater's blended Phrygian and Roman identity, the Roman state was able to ease the process of incorporating the eastern Mediterranean kingdoms into its hegemony. 

Drawing on historical, literary, and archaeological evidence, Bringing Their Mother Home reevaluates the semiotics and practices of the Magna Mater cult as a way to perform the multicultural Roman identity and explores the political and military climate of the Mediterranean leading up to the cult's adoption in 204 BCE.

Krishni Burns is Senior Lecturer of Latin at the University of Illinois Chicago. 

List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: Phrygian Matar
Chapter 2: Greek Meter
Chapter 3: The Geopolitics of Rome’s New Mother
Chapter 4: The Magna Mater Arrives
Chapter 5: Attis and the Galli: Myth and Reality
Chapter 6: Ancient Acculturation vs. Modern Orientalism
Chapter 7: The Magna Mater’s Roman Myth
Chapter 8: Worshippers of the Magna Mater
Chapter 9: The Megalensia
Chapter 10: Changing with the Times in the Late Republic and Early Empire
Conclusion
Appendix A: Literary References to the Magna Mater, 204 B.C.E.–54 C.E..
Appendix B: Phrygian Epithets of Matar
Appendix C: Roman Epithets of the Magna Mater
Bibliography
Index Locorum
General Index