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.
What we have, I suggest, is a version of the very Lucianic device of metalepsis. Metalepsis is the calculated violation of the “sacred frontier” between the real world and the world of a piece of fiction. (A well-known modern example is the Martin Amis character in Martin Amis’s novel Money.) But it was already well within the competence of antiquity’s most sophisticated satirist, who has many stand-ins for himself in his other works. Where those works tend to replace his name with a perspicuous substitute such as “the Syrian,” Lycinus, or Parrhesiades (“son of the free-speaker”), this work, while it teases us with the “Assyrian” identity of its author, withholds his name altogether (ounoma hangs, without further specification, as the last word). As a guide to interpretation, the procedure is almost exactly the reverse of the True Histories, which opens with an express statement that everything that follows is lies. The travelogue itself goes on to use every gambit to encourage belief in its truth – which has been definitively undermined in advance. DDS, on the contrary, has no introductory statement, no frame, only a Herodotean ethnographic voice to which we listen with amused reservation of judgment until we get to the final sentence, with its seductions of “insiderhood.” But, after all that has come before, are we really seduced?
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 presented his work as a “translation” into Greek of the ancient Phoenician writings of Sanchouniathon (1.9.20),2 and it was as a translator that he was cited by Porphyry, who pressed him into service in his attack on the Christians (1.9.21, 30). We hear of other Greek translations of Phoenician arcana (FGrH 784, Mochos/Laitos), but it is less reassuring to reflect on the numerous classical writers who appeal to ancient documents, especially priestly records, for self-promotional reasons (Baumgarten 1981: 80; Fehling 1989: 172–173); such writers include Leon of Pella, Hecataeus of Abdera, and Euhemerus, all of whom rationalize the gods’ origin in the same way as Philo. We are also dealing with an attempt by a non-Greek people to explicate their own traditions, in Greek, to a Greek readership (compare Berossos, on whom see Chapter 4, or the Egyptian priest Manetho) – save that Philo went beyond self-assertion and positively attacked the Greeks for having obfuscated the original, “true” doctrines of the Phoenicians.3 As a native exegete of indigenous traditions in the Greek idiom to Greeks, Philo also forms a loose counterpart to the narrator of DDS. But whereas the one hijacks the voice of a Greek literary celebrity, the other appeals to a native source supposedly predating the Trojan War (1.9.21). Philo trades on the Phoenicians’ reputation as one of the Near Eastern peoples whose archival records went back to remote antiquity (Joseph. Ap. 1.8).
Philo supports Eusebius’s argument that pagan polytheism is not a natural or an original state of affairs, but a human invention, originating with Egyptians and Phoenicians, which took the place of the less pernicious, but still misguided, worship of the luminaries and elements, when only certain Hebrews were instructed in the notion of a divine artificer of the universe (1.9.1–18). That the gods of the earliest peoples were the heavenly bodies and the elements is a view that can be traced back to the sophist Prodicus, is reflected in Plato, and became the classic position of the so-called Euhemerists who distinguished the natural, celestial gods from those who originated as human beings and were subsequently deified for their good services to humanity (Henrichs 1975: 109–115; Euhemerus Test. 25 Winiarczyk; Diod. Sic. 1.11–13). But Eusebius quotes Philo from two sources, both directly and via Porphyry, and Porphyry’s Philo seems rather different from Philo himself (Nautin 1949). Philo claimed to have translated Sanchuniathon, who had his material directly from the writings of a god, Taautos (Egyptian Thoth), which he had found hidden away apparently in a temple of Ammon (1.9.24, 26; Baumgarten 1981: 77–80). Porphyry’s Sanchuniathon, on the other hand, used civic traditions and priestly writings, apparently including one dedicated to a king and verified by his advisers (1.9.22; Baumgarten 1981: 56–57). In both cases, Philo is equipped with a venerable source. But Philo’s own version stresses that Sanchuniathon had uncovered ancient material free of the contaminating intellectual structures later imposed on it: Philo himself can thus overleap the intervening years of theological mystification and distortion – though the risk (for us) is that his work is untypical of mainstream Phoenician religious ideas.4 Porphyry’s Philo, on the other hand, uses civil traditions, rather than arcane and possibly idiosyncratic ones. Of course, we might still want to ask what is meant in this context by notions like mainstream and deviant; whether there was such a thing as a standard. But we might also want to distinguish between a city’s account of its religious life and the views of an individual with a particular ideological bias.
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