Aubrey HarrisWhen faced with a crisis, the ancient Romans sometimes turned to plagiarism.

Take, for instance, the Second Punic War: Hannibal had managed to cross the Alps with his famous elephants and had promptly descended into the neighborhood of Cannae, where he slaughtered some tens of thousands of Roman men in one of the most brilliantly orchestrated battles in history. There was, practically speaking, nothing much stopping him from approaching Rome.

Since offering sacrifices to their own pantheon wasn’t quite doing the trick, the Romans (per Livy) turned to a little known goddess from somewhere else named Cybele. As one might imagine, her specialty was war. …

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