and with it the key to stable and universal kingship.
FURTHER READING
The most important editions of Berossos are Schnabel 1923 (with introduction), Jacoby 1958, and De Breucker 2010, 2012 (with introduction and commentary). Burstein 1978 and Verbrugghe and Wickersham 1996 offer useful translations with commentary. Haubold et al. 2013 is a collection of articles on many aspects of Berossos’s life and work. For social and cultural context see also Oelsner 1992; Van der Spek 2000; De Breucker 2003b; Boiy 2004; Clancier 2012b. Bach 2013 considers the issue of dating. For Berossos as a Seleucid author, see Kuhrt 1987; De Breucker 2003a; Dillery 2013, 2014; Haubold 2013a: 127–177 ; Kosmin 2013; Stevens 2019: 94–120; Visscher 2020: 110–118. There have been many studies of Berossos’s Babylonian sources. Dalley 2013b considers mythological texts: Enūma eliš (for which see also Frahm 2010; Haubold 2013b), Gilgamesh, and Atrahasis. For Berossos and Babylonian chronicle literature, see Drews 1975; Beaulieu 2007; Van der Spek 2008. For the astronomical fragments, see Steele 2013. Schironi 2013 and Madreiter 2013 discuss the early reception of the Babyloniaca. For the forgeries of Annius of Viterbo, see Grafton 1990; Stephens 2004, 2013. Ruffing 2013 traces the history of modern scholarship on Berossos. For a full bibliography, see Gufler and Madreiter 2013.
NOTES
1 1 On purely linguistic grounds, Bēl-rē’ûšu (“Bel is his shepherd”) seems the likelier candidate (Stevens 2019: 117–119), but Bēl-rē’ûšunu (“Bel is their shepherd”), which is actually attested, cannot be ruled out. For a suggestion that Berossos was a prominent Babylonian temple official called Bēl-rē’ûšunu, see Van der Spek 2000: 439.
2 2 Eusebius puts him at the time of “Alexander, son of Philip,” by which he must mean Alexander the Great; for an alternative interpretation (“Alexander” = Alexander IV), see below, n.3.
3 3 Some scholars prefer Antiochus II (261–246 BCE), on the grounds that Tatian calls “Antiochus” the third king after “Alexander” (BNJ 680 T 2), and that the Alexander in question must have been the child king Alexander IV. However, it seems inherently implausible that a work dedicated to a Seleucid monarch would have claimed a connection with the insignificant and potentially problematic Alexander IV. Nor is Antiochus II an obvious dedicatee: it was Antiochus I who took a special interest in Babylon since his time as crown prince and regent of the eastern provinces (294–281 BCE).
4 4 E.g. Tiamat = Thalassa at BNJ 680 F 1b (6) and BNJ 685 F 1b; Bel = Zeus at BNJ 680 F 1b (8); Ea = Kronos: BNJ 680 F 4 (14) and BNJ 685 F 3b (2); Aššur-bān-apli = Sardanapallos: BNJ 685 F 5 (8). See also γόγγαι ~ κριθαί at BNJ 680 F 1b (2); and Sarachero ~ ἡ κοσμητρία τῆς Ἥρας at BNJ 680 F 13.
5 5 See especially AD 2 -187A obv. 11ʹ, where Antiochus III is offered the cloak of Nebuchadnezzar upon his return from the west. The Seleucids generally avoided invoking Achaemenid precedent for their actions. Reviving Neo-Babylonian traditions of kingship seems to have been part of this wider strategy; see Haubold 2013a: 130–132.
6 6 To these we might add κοσμήσας ἱεροπρεπῶς, προσχαρίσασθαι and (προσ-)κατασκευάζειν. For parallels see, e.g., Ma 1999: 309, First Teian Decree for Antiochos III and Laodike III, lines 16 (χαρίζεσθαι) and 45–46 (ἱεροπρεπέστατα).
7 7 For similar formulations see, e.g., Ma 1999: 369–370, Decree of the Citizens of Apollonia under Salbake for Pamphilos, lines 1–2 and 9, 19, and 23 (διοικεῖν); Polybius 4.48.9–10 (τὴν βασιλείαν τηρεῖν).
CHAPTER 5 Lucian, Philo of Byblos, and Ps.-Meliton
J.L. Lightfoot
Classical literary texts are mainly very blinkered sources for the religions of the Hellenistic and Roman Near East. They tend to notice the gods of the cities and religious centers which had long fallen within the purview of Greek culture, especially the commercial cities of the Phoenician coast. Sidon and Tyre were put on the map by Homer and Herodotus, respectively; Herodotus had visited the temple of “Heracles” in the course of his chronological researches (2.44), and he also gave an interesting account of the temple complex of “Zeus Belos” in Babylon (1.181–3), “Belos” being an eponym and genealogical construct endlessly recycled in classical sources on Phoenicia, Arabia, and Babylonia since his first appearance in the Catalog of Women (Hes. fr. 137.2 M.-W.). But problems are immediately apparent. Authors use established equations for non-classical deities which ipso facto import a bias; so, too, the literary genres in which the religions of the Near East find mention also tend to impose their own way of looking. Of course, an indigenous source might confirm only the extent to which classical culture had indeed penetrated a given cult or locale; nevertheless, the paucity of material from Hellenistic and Roman Syria means that alternative perspectives are in very short supply.
This chapter deals with three literary texts which seem to offer more than familiar topoi and routine ethnographic sound bites. One is written in Greek; another claims to be a Greek translation of a Phoenician original; the last is in Syriac, which a Greek original may or may not underlie. None escapes classical influence, but all offer the tantalizing possibility that an insider perspective might somehow be preserved alongside the intellectual structures of the Greek or Greco-Roman literary genre in question.
Lucian: On the Syrian Goddess
The first text is Lucian’s On the Syrian Goddess (De Dea Syria, or DDS from now on), and it is a hybrid in various senses. It is a short treatise which offers itself as a detailed eye-witness account of the temple of Hierapolis (modern Membij) not far from the Euphrates in northern Syria, and its cult of the Syrian Goddess. The Syrian Goddess is Atargatis, a deity with a long and complex history whose antecedents, if we believe that diachronic surveys can shed light on a god’s character in the here and now, can be found in the female consort of the north Syrian thunder-god in the second millennium BCE (Lightfoot 2003: 1–85). By the time we encounter her here, she seems to be a multi-purpose “great goddess” figure, not, as far as we can see, as strongly linked with eroticism as her Semitic counterparts Astarte and Ishtar, but certainly of a nurturing disposition, delighting in her doves and sacred fish – but also, perhaps, with an appetite for the shedding of blood which recalls (as does her iconography) her Anatolian cousin whom the Greeks called Cybele, Rhea, and the Great Mother. DDS manages to be highly informative about the temple and its practices yet elusive and indirect about the goddess herself. Its opening chapters advertise the temple and offset it against various Phoenician temples, none of which match it for holiness. A couple of set-piece sequences follow, the first concerning myths of its divine founder, in which other variants are set aside in favor of the one that connects it with Dionysus; the second discusses the present temple’s connections with Stratonice, wife of Seleucus I and later of his son, Antiochus. Then we learn of its topography and layout, working inwards from its position in the city to the innermost Holy of Holies with the cult statue; and the last section is a tumble of miscellanea on priests and cult personnel, festivals, rituals, and bits and pieces of devotional practice.
The text is ascribed to the second-century satirist Lucian of Samosata in all the manuscripts that carry it, but the ascription has been challenged for most of the last four hundred years of the text’s history. The authorship question is more than a matter