#phyrgia

“...Kybele was a woman who wandered the earth teaching rites of purification and attracting an enthusiastic following through the inspiration of her music. These are exactly the attributes of Kybele as depicted by Euripides in his Bacchae. There Kybele is also called Rhea, and the story of her mortal origin and subsequent deification is left out of the account. (Euripides focuses the theme of ambiguous divinity on Dionysus.) But the idea of gods who had once been mortals was certainly known to Euripides and his contemporaries. Prodicus of Ceos advanced an account of Demeter and Dionysus as mortals who taught agriculture and viticulture, and who were accorded divine honors after their deaths in recognition of their gifts to humanity. The argument that the gods familiar to the Greeks were once mortals was a key element in the suspicion that sophists like Prodicus were atheists. [And remember that the original meaning of atheos, “atheist,” was “godless” rather than “denier of gods.”] The cosmogonic ideas of Prodicus are ridiculed by Aristophanes in his Birds, the very play in which Aristophanes also ridicules superstitious Phrygians and Lydians, but also honors the divinity of “Mistress Kybele, . . . mother of gods and men” (perhaps with comic irony). Diagoras of Melos, who is also made fun of in the Birds and who was remembered centuries later as “the Atheist,” offended against the Mysteries of Demeter at this time through his writings in a book known by the title Phrygian Stories (Fruvgioi Lovgoi). It is highly likely that the sophistic tradition, which included treatises on Phrygian lore, took up the question of the identification of the Mother of the Gods with the mother of Midas.” - Mark Munn, The Mother of the Gods, Athens, and the Tyranny of Asia: A Study of Sovereignty in Ancient Religion. University of California Press, 2006. p. 81-82.