In February I was in Rome for a conference and I took the opportunity to visit a couple of ancient sites of interest to trans folks. I was planning on doing and LGBTQ+ History Month post, but I ran out of time, so I am doing one for Trans Day of Visibility instead. There’s a lot of photos in this one. Bear with me.
We start with a visit to the archaeological park at Ostia. This Roman settlement is less than an hour away from the city by train, and while it is not as well preserved as Pompeii it is certainly impressive. Ostia was the port of ancient Rome, so much of the wealth of the Empire would have flowed through its docks. The photo above shows a row of shopfronts on the main road into the town.
This is the Temple of Zeus, which is very imposing. But I was there for a very different religious shrine.
I was in Ostia to visit this place: the Field of the Great Mother. It is an area sacred to the goddess Magna Mater, or Cybele. No one quite knows why the goddess needed this big open area in addition to a temple, but clearly there were ceremonies of some sort taking place here. The guidebook suggests that they were orgies, because of course it does. The field was almost certainly used for the Megalesia festival, though exactly went on in it is the subject of much debate.
In one corner of the field you can find this shrine, dedicated to the god Attis. She (and I’m using female pronouns deliberately here) is said to have been the first person to become voluntarily castrated in the service of the goddess. Again why this happened is unclear, there being many different explanations for it in ancient writings, but there is no doubt that many people followed Attis’s example on joining the Cybele cult. These people were known as Galli.
Here is the statue of Attis in the shine. The sculptor carefully arranged her clothing so that you could see her smooth crotch. Whether many of the actual Galli opted for full castration is another matter. Removal of the testicles was a well-known and frequently practiced medical operation in Roman times and was compartively safe. It also had all of the hormonal effects that an ancient trans woman might have desired. Removal of the penis was more dangerous, but by no means necessarily fatal.
The bearded head on which Attis reclines is probably a representation of the god of the River Gallus, after which some sources say the Galli are named. The statue in the photo is a replica. The original is in the Vatican Museum. Goodness only knows what they have done to the poor girl there.
At the foot of the gates closing the shrine I noticed a pine cone. It looked far too carefully placed to have been an accident, and I assumed that someone, probably another trans woman, had placed it there as an offering. We know from the Iliad that pine trees were common on Mount Ida, the mountain near Troy where Cybele is said to have lived.
As I started to walk away, I felt something move under my foot. I figured that I had stepped on a pebble, but looking down what I saw in the grass was another pinecone. I can take a hint. There are now two offerings at the shrine.
Nearby is a strange and rare religious site. In the later Roman Empire the practice of castration, particularly of boy slaves, became frowned upon. But the day on which initiates to the Cybele cult received their surgery was known as the Day of Blood. (It was March 24th, should you want to celebrate it next year.) Clearly something needed to be done. We understand from the sources that a new rite was developed that involved the initiate standing in a pit underneath a metal grating. An animal (supposedly a bull though that would have been expensive) was sacrificed and the blood allowed to flow down through the grating onto the initiate. Romans, horribly gruesome at times. Anyway, the next photo shows what is believed to be an actual blood pit.
Across the field from the Attis shrine is the temple to Cybele herself.
The steps leading up to it are good quality stone, which tells us a lot about the wealth of the temple.
And here is the sanctuary at the top of the stairs where the statue of the goddess would have stood. In Roman times there would have been walls, a roof and an entrance with columns.
The Park’s museum contains a statue of the goddess. Her head is missing, but we can see the two lions flanking her throne which allows us to identify her.
Also in the museum is this statue which is described as either Ares or a Corybant. The Corybantes were young men who were part of the cult of Cybele. They are believed to have taken part in the Megalesia celebration by dancing in armour, waving their weapons about.
Ostia was of particular importance to the cult of Cybele because, back in 204 BCE, a ‘black stone’ representing the goddess was brought from Phrygia (modern Turkey) to Rome, ostensibly to help protect the Republic from Hannibal. Black stones, probably meteorites, were commonly used to represent gods in the ancient Near East. Cybele arrived by ship, and would have sailed up the Tiber to the city from Ostia.
The Emperor Claudius is said to have made some important changes to the cult, including making the Day of Blood a public holiday, and instituting the post of Archigallus, the Chief Gallus. This was probably a way by which a wealthy Roman could have a well-paid job at the head of the cult, presumably without being castrated because that would lose him his citizenship. Ostia has a number of representations of archigalli. Here are a couple of plaques:
And here is a tombstone:
A couple of days later I took myself off to the main Archaeolgical Park in the centre of Rome. You can see the Colosseum, the Cirus Maximus, the Forum and various other famous spots, but I wanted to see something on the Palatine Hill. This is where Augustus built his palace when he founded the Empire. Augustus was a big fan of using Roman history to bolster his claim to a throne, and he built on the Palatine precisely because this is where Romulus, the fabled founder of the city, is said to have lived.
The Palatine is also host to a number of temples, including the one built for Cybele when she arrived in Rome back in 204 BCE. It is right next door to Augutus’s imperial palace. Here it is.
Italian archaeologists have done a lot of excavation work on this site. They have found the remains of an Iron Age settlement on the hill, and, while there was nothing to identify it as the home of Romulus, it shows that someone was living there at the right time. Unfortunately for Augustus, he could not build his palace on top of Romulus’s home, because the Temple of Cybele was already there. So he did the next best thing and built next door.
This final photo doesn’t look like much, but it shows another trans connection to Rome. These stone walls are all that remains of the Temple of Elagabal, the Syrian god who, like Cybele, was brought to Rome in the form of a black stone. This was done on the orders of the teenage Emperor Elagabalus, who was from the city of Emesa in Syria and was already High Priest of Elagabal when they became Emperor. While the story of Elagabalus asking for surgeon to give them a vagina is almost certainly an invention intended to discredit them, they were certainly a very genderqueer person and non-binary pronouns seem entirely appropriate for them.
