When Hannibal was loose in Italy and could not be made to leave, the Romans did a strange thing. They consulted their books of prophecy, and the books told them to go get a mother.
Not a general. A mother. The prophecy said the invader could be driven out of Italy if the Mother of the Gods was carried from her shrine at Pessinus to Rome. So the Romans sailed east and asked for the Idaean Mother, and what came back, in 204 B.C.E., was a black stone. The people of her country said the stone had fallen from the sky. The people of her country said the stone was her. Rome bore her up the Tiber, built her a temple on the Palatine, gave her games each April, and kept her at the center of the world for six hundred years.
They had begged her off a king. An embassy to Pergamon, conducted inland to Pessinus, sailed home with the goddess in the hold. A delegation of men ferried the Mother of the Gods across the sea because a book said she would save them.