A Companion to the Hellenistic and Roman Near East. Группа авторов. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

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1.131; Lightfoot 2003: 449–455). Much the same applies to the criticism of Greek practice in the following chapter, on the bearded statue of Apollo (§35). What is at stake here is not satire. Lucian is not having fun at anyone’s expense. But he has imported a stance and mode of explanation from Ionian ethnography into an entirely different context, Roman Syria over half a millennium later, leaving us just as far as ever from what (if anything) the Hierapolitans really thought.

      Where fun does enter into it, at last, is with the narrator’s fixation with phalli and phallicism. The two columns in the temple propylaea are phalli, inscribed as such by Dionysus (§16); later we learn that they are 300 fathoms high, and that a man climbs up one of them every year and remains sleepless on the top for seven days for fear a scorpion will bite him (§28). Both the live human climber and a phallic bronze statue inside the temple (§16) are compared (apparently) to carved wooden marionettes mounted on a phallus pole. This is a romp through the phallicism of Herodotus’s Egypt, specifically through his account of the cult of “Dionysus” (Osiris), which also features phallic processions and jointed wooden marionettes (2.48–49). But the anchor there (Osiris ~ Dionysus) is missing here; what in Hierapolis is “Dionysus” supposed to represent? And what in the world are we to make of the startling 1800-feet-high erections in the temple courtyard?

      The complications do not end even here, because at the beginning the narrator tells us he is himself an Assyrian, and at the end that he has been, since boyhood, a devotee of the temple. The result is that we get a double perspective, of outsider looking in, and of local possessed of “insider” knowledge. Hierapolis was not, in fact, a terribly remote or mysterious location; previously in Seleucid territory, it became part of the Roman province created by Pompey in 64 BCE; the city begins to be registered in Hellenistic texts, its goddess and religious practices begin to glimmer in the consciousness of classical writers well before that (Xanthus of Lydia, FGrH 765 F 17a; Ctesias, F 1b (4, 20, 2); Xen. Anab. 1.4.9). But both the specialist monograph and, still more, the Herodotean stance, position the goddess and her cult before us as an exotic “other,” about which we are to be informed and entertained. In practice we are never really offered a perspective other than that of the wide-eyed, credulous, phallically fixated tourist – but briefly at the beginning, and more strongly again at the end, the reversal of perspective teases us with the possibility of more intimate insights, those of a devotee whose youthful lock of hair resides in one of the caskets of precious metal affixed to the interior of the temple.

      Philo of Byblos

      Philo of Byblos was born in the time of Nero and lived at least until the reign of Hadrian (Suda f 447; Baumgarten 1981: 32–35), on whose reign he wrote a monograph. The Suda, which calls him a grammatikos, mentions also works on bibliography and on famous men and their cities, and Eusebius quotes from a monograph on the Jews. It is also Eusebius who quotes excerpts from his most important work, the Phoenician History (in what follows, citations are by chapter number in Eusebius).

      Philo’s common ground with Greek literature was always clear: his connections with Hesiod’s Theogony, his use of interpretatio graeca and syncretism, his Euhemerism, his appeal to ancient sources. All that changed in 1929, with the discovery of the tablets at Ras Shamra (Ugarit), dating from about 1400–1200 BCE, followed by the Hurrian–Hittite Succession myth, the so-called Kumarbi cycle, in Boghazköi in 1936. Interest was refocused on his “oriental” or “Semitic” elements. Many shared theonyms in the one, and mythical motifs and patterns in the other, opened up the seductive new possibility that Philo really did have access to ancient material, and for a while his stock