Bringing Their Mother Home
Roman Multiculturalism and the Mother of the Gods
An exploration of the Magna Mater and her genderfluid cult followers in Rome
Description
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.
Reviews
“The study of major religious changes in the Roman Republic is significantly under-published, especially in English. This book fills that gap and serves as a crossover between religious history, spatial history, and gender history, all valuable and rising subfields within the general field of Roman and Republican history. Bringing Their Mother Home materially advances the study of both one particular cult and the interactions between Rome and its provinces, and Rome’s sense of national and spiritual identity and makes a very meaningful and original contribution.”
- Anise K. Strong, Western Michigan University
“In Bringing Their Mother Home, Burns challenges and dispels numerous assumptions we all hold about the worship of the Great Mother and this book has the potential to reorient how we think about the cult as a lived experience for the Romans. One will not find a better overview of the story of the introduction of the cult into Rome, nor a clearer explanation of what the cult was like before it arrived at Rome or why it underwent changes after Claudius in 54 CE.”
- Kirk Summers, University of Alabama
“Accessible and engaging, Bringing Their Mother Home provides a clear historiographical grounding for understanding the cult of the Magna Mater and its developments over the Republican period. Burns competently handles a mix of literary and material evidence to analyse the unique features, and ultimately argues for the ways in which we should see this cult as a distinctly and endemically Roman practice.”
- Chris Mowat, University of Sheffield
“This erudite, highly focused book addresses religious multiculturalism during Republican Rome's expansion across the Mediterranean, drawing on history, literature, and material culture.”
- S. Brown, Choice
News, Reviews, Interviews
Read: Author blog post “Mother Goddesses” | October 9, 2025