Welcomed to Rome, but Not as Roman Citizens

Rome formally imported the cult of the Magna Mater from Pessinus in Phrygia around 204 BCE, during the Second Punic War, following an oracle that promised the goddess's presence would help drive Hannibal from Italy, and the cult was given an official temple on the Palatine Hill. Rome's welcome came with a sharp limit: Roman citizens were for a long period explicitly forbidden from becoming galli themselves, so the priesthood in Rome consisted specifically of imported Phrygian priests rather than Roman converts, a restriction Roller's study of the Anatolian Cybele cult reads as evidence of genuine Roman discomfort with the practice of ritual castration even as the goddess herself was embraced as an official state cult. That restriction eased considerably under the Empire, when Roman citizens did in time join the galli, and the cult, along with its priesthood, continued in various forms until Christianisation in late antiquity brought its public practice to an end, with the empire eventually banning castration in religious contexts entirely under Christian emperors. Vermaseren's study of the Cybele and Attis cult traces this Roman ambivalence across several centuries of official policy, noting periods of tighter restriction alongside periods of comparatively greater official tolerance as the cult's standing within Roman religious life shifted.