Attis

In Greek and Roman myth, Attis was the young Phrygian consort of the Mother of the Gods, Cybele. His cult began in Phrygia and Lydia in Asia Minor and later spread to Greece and Rome. The stories about him differ, but in all of them he is a beautiful youth who ends his life as a eunuch, either through madness, a boar or the jealousy of a goddess.

The Birth of Attis

Pausanias gives what he calls the current local account from Pessinus in Phrygia. While Zeus slept, his seed fell on the ground, and in time the earth sent up a being with both male and female sexual organs, whom the Phrygians called Agdistis. The gods feared Agdistis and cut off the male organ. From it grew an almond tree with ripe fruit. A daughter of the river Sangarius took some of the fruit and laid it in her bosom, where it disappeared at once, and she became pregnant. The boy she bore was exposed, but a he-goat looked after him (Pausanias 7.17.10–11).

Attis and Agdistis

As Attis grew up his beauty was more than human, and Agdistis fell in love with him. His relatives sent him to Pessinus to marry the king’s daughter. While the wedding song was being sung, Agdistis appeared. Attis went mad and cut off his genitals, as did the man who was giving him his daughter in marriage. Agdistis repented of what had happened and persuaded Zeus to grant that the body of Attis should neither rot nor decay at all (Pausanias 7.17.10–12).

Other Versions of the Myth

Pausanias admits that the local account was not the only one. The elegiac poet Hermesianax made Attis the son of the Phrygian Galaus and a eunuch from birth. When he grew up he went to Lydia and celebrated the rites of the Mother there. She honoured him so much that Zeus grew angry and sent a boar to destroy the Lydians’ fields. The boar killed some Lydians and Attis himself, and Pausanias adds that the Gauls of Pessinus therefore did not eat pork (Pausanias 7.17.9–10).

Ovid tells a story in which Attis is a Phrygian boy in the woods, remarkable for his beauty, whom the tower-crowned goddess loved chastely. She wished him to guard her temple and told him to stay a boy for ever. Attis promised, and said that if he broke his word, the love for which he broke it should be his last. He then broke his word with the nymph Sagaritis, and the angry goddess punished him by cutting down the tree with which the nymph’s life was bound up, so that she died. Attis went mad, fled to the top of Mount Dindymus, tore his body with a sharp stone and cut off his genitals, crying that he deserved his fate. Ovid says that the soft priests of Cybele followed his example (Fasti 4.223–244). Ovid also says that the pine is dear to the Mother of the Gods because Cybele’s Attis took on the form of the tree (Metamorphoses 10.103–105).

Lucian, writing on the Syrian goddess, reports a story he heard from a learned man but did not himself believe: Attis, a Lydian, was the first to teach the rites of Rhea, and after the goddess castrated him he lived as a woman and travelled from land to land performing her ceremonies, until he reached Syria and founded the sanctuary there (On the Syrian Goddess 15).

The Cult of Attis

Pausanias saw a sanctuary of the Dindymenian Mother and Attis at Dyme in Achaea, though he says that he could learn no secret about Attis (Pausanias 7.17.9). Cybele herself was brought to Rome during the Second Punic War, in 204 BC (Livy 29.14). In that war the Romans were told in an oracle that the enemy could be driven from Italy if the Idaean Mother were brought from Pessinus, and their envoys were taken there by King Attalus of Pergamum and received a sacred stone (Livy 29.10.5, 29.11.7; Livy 29.11.7). Livy also records that on the Roman march through Galatia the Galli, the priests of the Great Mother from Pessinus, met the army in their insignia and prophesied in verse that the goddess granted the Romans safety and victory (Livy 38.18.9).

Attis Sources

Pausanias 7.17.9–12; Ovid, Fasti 4.223–244 and Metamorphoses 10.103–105; Lucian, On the Syrian Goddess 15; Livy 29.10–11, 29.14 and 38.18.9.

See Also: Cybele, Zeus, Agdistis, Rhea, Sangarius