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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 of literary pigeon-holing; it is at the center of the text’s interpretation. Lucian sets up his literary persona as a provocateur, a foe of fraud and pretension; mythological burlesque and literary parody are two of his staples. If the text were his, it would be yet more demonstration of the versatility, verve, and wit we know were his – but would be a blow for those who wish to use the text in any sense as a historical source. Now, I believe that the text is genuinely Lucian’s (Lightfoot 2003: 184–208). It is quite easy to show that it lies within the range of his literary interests, and I detect affinities with his particular way of realizing the author and dialect that is being imitated here (below). The days of naïve and uncritical reading, when DDS (or Philo of Byblos) could be quarried without methodological angst as a religious-historical source, are long gone; on the other hand, it is also possible to err in the opposite direction, to be determined to find laughter where a more subtle effect is intended. The uncertainty of exactly where DDS is located in between these poles is why it remains a controversial and deeply interesting text.

It is essentially a work of ethnography, and conforms to a classical scheme which goes back at least to Herodotus, in whom it is first attested. Where Herodotus tackled Egypt and Scythia in terms of history, land, and customs, he perhaps established and certainly helped perpetuate a pattern which could later be deployed in specialist monographs on particular countries (Trüdinger 1918).¹ Lucian has adapted this pattern to suit the foundation-myths (1.12–16 recall Hdt. 4.5–15 on the colonization of Scythia), layout, and nomoi associated with the temple. Even the artful disarray of the final section on nomoi is much more planned than it appears at first sight: a well-established alternative to the ordering of such material under headings was associative listing (Trüdinger 1918: 25–26), and Lucian shows himself master of the artful segue (§§45–46/47: the lake and ritual “descents to the lake”; §48 ff.: other major festivals in Hierapolis’s sacred calendar; §§49–51: the Spring Festival and autocastration; §§52–53: burial customs for the galli and for Hierapolitans generally). A penchant for the wondrous and exotic in the selection of nomoi is of course thoroughly Herodotean; the notices on tattooing and hair-cutting with which the treatise ends carefully give the impression of miscellaneous after-thoughts while in fact conveying profound suggestions about national and personal identity (“all Assyrians wear tattoos”; “to this day there remain in the temple my lock and my name”).

All this is combined with the narratorial voice, dialect, and mannerisms of Herodotus – the Herodotus of ethnography and travelogue, especially of the Egyptian logos. First of all, the text is written in Herodotus’s dialect, literary Ionic. It is one of a number of texts which revive the elderly dialect in the imperial period (Lightfoot 2003: 91–97); they do so to show off, to recapture some of the literary prestige of the authors who wrote in it. Aretaeus, for example, a medical writer, revives the dialect of the Hippocratic corpus; Arrian also revives Ionic for the purposes of a specialist ethnographic monograph on India. What these texts show is that – although the twin processes of normalization and hypercorrection in the manuscript tradition have done their best to bewilder the scholar who would seek to determine what any given author originally wrote – there were numerous ways of breathing life back into Ionic, and one argument in favor of Lucian’s authorship is that the Ionic of DDS is closest to the Ionic forms in other certainly Lucianic texts and to that of another text, the Astrologia, which is also assigned to him, though again controversially.

Another aspect of the Herodotean imitation is the assumption of his “historiographical” persona, that is, of a gatherer and critic of information. The narrator travels in the interests of research (§9); elicits evidence by questioning (§11); records and evaluates variants (§§11–16; §28); prefers eye-witness (§48) and personal testimony, one aspect of which is the frequent use of the topos of “of all those whom/which I know” (§§2, 10, 49); suggests alternative motivations (§27); and falls silent over cultic secrets (§28). Nor is the imitation of Herodotus played straight: the text seems to inhabit a territory somewhere between pastiche (being a close imitation of the Herodotean idiolect) and parody. Although it does not seem to want to mock its subject-matter, it does – though with varying degrees of intensity – guy the narrative voice, which is intrusive, fussy, and credulous. Tall stories are told in a deadpan voice (e.g. §§36–37, the oracle of Apollo which not only moves of its own volition, but which was also seen to rise spontaneously into the air; §48, the sacred cock) or supplied with naïve commentary (§29, the scorpion which keeps the phallobates awake – or is it the fear of falling?; §46, a floating altar, like Herodotus’s Chemmis – or is it supported by a pillar?). Her doves and sacred fish are staples of the ethnography of the Syrian Goddess and of the Holy City; only Lucian, however, represents the fish as individually named and responding to summons (§45).

That is not true of everything. What the text is describing is not arrant fantasy, and it would change and simplify the nature of the text if this were the kind of see-through spoof we encounter in Lucian’s True History. Coins and reliefs and sculpture in the round do substantiate what we are told about the goddess’s iconography. One impressive correspondence is the cultic standard or semeion (§33) (though it is the survival of plastic representations that allow us to identify what Lucian is talking about, rather than Lucian who allows us to identify surviving plastic representations). Lucian does not in the least clarify what the object was, though its role in a water-carrying festival, in connection with “Apollo” or Nebo (§§33, 36), is confirmed by a parallel account with a totally different perspective in Ps.-Meliton (below). Other details, such as the empty throne (§34) and the piloi of the priests (§42), are rendered at least plausible by iconographical or archaeological evidence from other cults. Or there are intriguing literary and epigraphic parallels with other cults – the galli of Cybele and the spring festival with its “day of blood” celebrated in imperial Rome – none of which, however, suffices to establish a bedrock from which we could ever hope to extract “solid” data from DDS.

Throughout we are confronted, not only by the systematic biases and distortions that the ethnographical genre ipso facto brings with it, but also by the extent of Herodotean ventriloquism and imposition of Herodotean explanatory frameworks, and by the sheer fun which Lucian is having with his Herodotean imitation. Let us consider an example of each.

With all ethnography Lucian shares the practice of interpretatio graeca, whereby non-classical deities are equated with classical ones and given Greek names. But where Herodotus had used both Greek and indigenous names (sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes both), DDS only ever gives us the Greek, even where it tells us expressly that the Greek is not in local use (§§31–32 assures us that Zeus is an absolutely compelling identification – but is not what the Hierapolitans call him). The goddess is Assyrian Hera, or simply Hera, throughout, although as far as we can see this is a rare and exclusively literary identification (Lightfoot 2003: 81). No more than in any other work of ethnography is the principle on which it rests discussed, though it is only partly iconographical; §32 tells us that although the goddess is Hera “in the main,” she also has “something of” a slew of other Greek goddesses (Athena, Aphrodite, Selene, Rhea, Artemis, Nemesis, the Moirae), so many that they succeed only in obfuscating rather than clarifying her appearance. When we move outside the temple (past the statues of “Zeus,” “Apollo,” “Atlas,” “Hermes,” and “Eileithyia”) things only get worse, since the courtyard contains a whole rogues’ gallery of sculptures identified with figures from the Trojan Cycle as well as Philomela, Procne, Tereus, and others (§40). The untheorized nature of the connections between classical and non-classical deities is always a problem, wherever we find it; in a place like Roman Syria it also seriously obscures the extent to which classical culture had penetrated the region. Were any of these identifications accepted locally, and if so how do we know which ones – and by whom?

As for the second category, the use of Herodotean explanatory frameworks, the aniconic thrones of the sun and moon are an excellent example (§34). From extant examples of empty thrones in Phoenician cult centers it is practically certain what these objects were. What we cannot be certain of is Lucian’s attribution of the thrones to the sun and moon and of their aniconism to the visibility of the luminaries in the heavens. He is obviously echoing Herodotus’s Persian ethnography, where the Persians are made to articulate a criticism of traditional Greek practice (also à propos of anthropomorphic deities) which in fact arose in intellectual circles among the Greeks themselves (Hdt. 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?