“Goddess, Cybele, great goddess, lady of Dindymus, let all thy fury

be far from where I am, O my queen.

Let it be others you drive into frenzy, others you drive into

madness.”

So says the Roman poet Catullus in his long poem “Attis,” supposedly inspired by a nightmare he had after listening to the eerie chanting of the priesthood of the Phyrgian goddess Cybele in his neighborhood in ancient Rome.

“Attis” is a masterpiece of dark poetry, invoking themes of religious fanaticism, trance states, and divine madness. Many of his other poems are a lot more humorous, a number of them are R-rated, and some of them are too filthy to even quote from.

Catullus came from a family of Celtic or Gaulish origins, but was thoroughly Roman in culture and temperament. He specialized in satirical poems mocking the decadence and sexual depravity (as a conservative Roman would have seen it) of the final years of the Roman Republic. Since Catullus fully participated in all that depravity himself, he certainly knew what he was talking about.

In the lifetime of Catullus, Rome was in the middle of the transition from Republic to Empire. Many foreign nations were being conquered and absorbed into Roman society, and many of those foreigners were flocking into Rome as immigrants. Just as in other empires, there was a lot of concern about mysterious and possibly sinister foreign religious practices being introduced to the homeland. The cult of the Phyrgian goddess Cybele was a prime example, and listening to the chanting of its castrated priests all night gave Catullus the willies. Instead of just proposing an anti-immigration law in the Roman Senate, Catullus wrote a great poem about the experience. And thus we have “Attis.”