Rhéā in Later Traditions
Rhéā's ancient fate was to be absorbed. The Greeks early identified her with the Phrygian Mother of the Gods — Pausanias (7.17) tells the Mother's myth as Rhea's — and by the classical period the identification was so complete that her name and Cybele's could be interchanged in poetry and cult; the lion, the tympanon, and the mural crown of the Phrygian goddess became Rhea's attributes in Hellenistic and Roman art. The Romans received her as Ops, old Italian goddess of abundance and the stored harvest, consort of Saturn: the Saturnalia's licensed feasting and the Opalia's grain-rites both belong to the complex. Later Neoplatonists read her as the prolific 'source of sources', the middle principle between the hidden father and the manifest gods. Her diffusion is so thorough that 'Rhea' rarely names a distinct theology — which is, in a way, her triumph: the mother of the gods became every mother.