Gruen, "The Advent of the Magna Mater" (Studies in Greek Culture and Roman Policy, 1990)

Erich S. Gruen is a historian of the Hellenistic Mediterranean whose 1990 Studies in Greek Culture and Roman Policy opens with "The Advent of the Magna Mater," a reassessment of Rome's importation of Cybele's black stone from Pessinus in 204 BCE against the war with Hannibal. Where the tradition's own account, carried in Livy, presents the episode as the Sibylline Books' promised deliverance from a foreign enemy fulfilled, Gruen reads the same episode as inseparable from Rome's courtship of Attalus I and the Attalid kingdom of Pergamum, a diplomatic as much as a religious act. The chapter does not deny that the Senate acted on the Sibylline oracle's promise; it argues the promise and the diplomacy served each other rather than standing apart, complicating a clean reading of the episode as prophecy straightforwardly fulfilled by faith alone.