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

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new evidence emerges to disturb the consensus. Philo is far more than an exponent of Lügendichtung, and there are indeed links (albeit not as direct as his early champions would like) between him and the Ugaritic and Hurrian material. But the Greek intellectual filter is impossible to argue away.

      The first section of his work was a cosmogony – not an implausible genre in Phoenicia, given the precedent of Mochus. Its partly Semitic character shows through in the use of poetic parallelisms (not, however, a guarantee that the original was composed in a Semitic language: Baumgarten 1981: 129), but Greek affiliations are also evident in the demythologizing, godless approach.

      Of course this is no mere replay of Hesiod. But the places where Philo departs from the Theogony are unlikely to represent alternative Ancient Near Eastern tradition. The major players, Ouranos and Cronos, are both given more wives and progeny, as if they are being used as pegs on which to hang a more comprehensive genealogy than could be supplied by Ouranos’s monogamous marriage to Gaia, or Cronos’s to Rhea. Specific correspondences with the Kumarbi myth are hard to find (Barr 1974–1975: 51–52); on the contrary, there are several matches with the succession myths of Euhemerus and his follower Dionysius Scytobrachion, suggesting Philo’s de facto familiarity with Hellenistic Greek sources (Baumgarten 1981: 242–243, 263). In short, the succession myth – and indeed the whole treatise – looks like a medley of traditions from different times and places, assembled in an artificial literary composite. Different Phoenician cities drift in and out of focus (compatible with Porphyry’s presentation of Sanchuniathon’s compilatory activities); after the main structure, gods – important ones in the Hellenistic and imperial eras like Adodos/Hadad, Melcathros/Melqart, Asclepius/Eshmun – are tacked on at the end and accorded a minimalist treatment; and there are numerous pieces of reduplication, including a threefold invention of sailing. We should resist the temptation to interpret Philo’s pantheon as one specific to any time or place; and, as with Lucian, we have to ask which (if any) Phoenicians would have accepted, or even been familiar, with the ideas and structures presented here (Nautin 1949: 577).

      In sum, the much-vaunted parallels with the Hurrian and Semitic material are mostly isolated items – names, mythical motifs – which are not part of the main intellectual framework of the treatise, with the exception of the presentation of cultural advance of human genealogy (above). They include the Phoenician names of Mo̅t/Mouth; Chousor; Elioun; and story-patterns which recall certain episodes or motifs in Genesis (1.10.9, the sons of god and the daughters of men ~ Gen. 6: 1–8; 1.10.10, fraternal hostility, if not fratricide itself ~ Gen. 4). There are also jumbled elements of myths familiar from Greek sources: the first god dies in an encounter with wild beasts (1.10.15), like Adonis, and Ouranos’s castration turns the rivers red (1.10.29), a phenomenon elsewhere located at the Adonis river (DDS §8; Lightfoot 2003: 327–328). That should warn us of the un-canonicity of any given mythical narrative.

      In principle, Philo’s Euhemerism is an ineluctably Greek feature, however true it is that the Ras Shamra texts, with their anthropomorphic deities, lent themselves to a euhemerizing approach. Philo’s introduction presents us with the standard version according to which the gods originated as mortals, subsequently deified for their services to mankind (1.9.29). What is interesting, though, is that although the technogony does indeed present us with inventors and technologists, the theogony does not; the future gods do not act in a way which is at all beneficent, euergetistic, or worthy of deification. It is true that Euhemerus’s succession myth (as rendered by Ennius) also involved violence, both threatened and actual, but he seems to have wanted to downplay the culpability of both Saturn and Jupiter by assigning a large role to Saturn’s jealous and vindictive brother, Titan, and by attributing Jupiter’s final coup d’état to a reaction to a plot (to which Saturn was prompted by an oracle); the narrative builds toward a Jupiter who, once established on the throne, is a worthy, not a tainted, object of future veneration (T. 62, 64A, 66–67 Winiarczyk). Philo has not designed a scheme which climaxes in a universal “good king” whose deserts speak for themselves (might the Ugaritic Baal have provided such a model?); on the contrary, the Ouranos/Cronos conflict grinds on for 32 years before the castration which, in Hesiod, was the beginning and end of the matter (1.10.29; Th. 173–182). In this section it looks as if Euhemerism has been grafted onto a scheme with which it does not sit happily; another possible sign of tension is that the section following the consolidation of Cronos’s power (1.10.31–38) often refers to its protagonists – prematurely – as gods (Baumgarten 1981: 39, 226–227).