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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 went up. Inevitable reaction set in, and we are now in a state of equilibrium which will presumably last until 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.

This section was followed by what James Barr called a “technogony,” or account of the emergence of the arts of civilization, each ascribed to a particular human innovator. Both Semitic and Greek backgrounds can be found here, too. While Mesopotamian myths of origins ascribe cultural advance to divine patrons, Genesis 4: 17–24 – like Greek tradition – ascribes a series of developments to human primi inventores (Castellino 1957: 135); with his men who become gods, and possibly in previous tradition were gods (Baumgarten 1981: 140 et passim), Philo seems poised in between. Yet the distribution of cultural advance over a generational scheme, with family members – including several pairs of brothers – responsible for different advances, brings Philo in this respect, at least, closest to Genesis – hardly surprising, given the physical proximity of the Phoenician and Hebrew cultural spheres.⁵

Although there are cosmogonies where divine beings precede (or accompany) the emergence of the physical structure of the universe, and cosmogonies which culminate in the emergence of man, it is a consequence of the Euhemerism of the present treatise that humans must precede gods. The argument depends on the mortal origins of the gods, and so the technogony is followed, rather than preceded, by a theogony. Despite its placement, this section in fact has much in common with Hesiod and with other succession myths telling of the origin of the present divine order. Its very structuredness gives pause for thought. What it offers is a series of divine generations whose best parallels are not, in fact, the Ugaritic myths (which concentrate on just the two generations of El and of Baal), but the Kumarbi story and, still more, the Hesiodic version, in which the succession is from father to son, and in which female deities have a role in every generation. In fact the father-to-son succession is not easy to parallel outside Hesiod himself, so that when we find it again in Philo, we wonder how faithfully he represents Phoenician mythology, and how much he owes specifically to Hesiod – whom he mentions by name (ironically, as one of the others blamed for travestying the original truths of religion, 1.10.40). Philo concentrates on the three generations of Elioun-Hypsistos, Ouranos, and Cronos, after whom the scheme peters out in a succession of minor figures. Hesiod has three major figures as well, though he begins with Ouranos and ends with Zeus, who in Philo features passim in various local forms, but not as the culmination of the scheme. But Philo’s and Hesiod’s Ouranos are very alike (both hostile to their children, among whom Cronos leads an uprising), and so are their portraits of Cronos (dethrones his father, marries his sister Rhea, is hostile to his children, castrates his father in an ambush – although in Philo it takes place in an attempted uprising by his father some time after Ouranos’s deposition).

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).

Names are no less Janus-faced than the rest of the treatise. Some are Greek only; some Semitic only; others receive Greek glosses (Barr 1974–1975: 41–44; Mras 1952: 180–182). A few have alternatives, as if Philo was striving to find and to fine-tune a Greek approximation to an underlying Semitic form (Agrou Heros or Agrotes, Epigeios or Autochthon, Titanides or Artemides, Dioscuri or Cabeiri or Corybants or Samothracians, Titanides or Artemides). On the other hand, Hermes Trismegistos (1.10.17) must equate to Taautos (Thoth), but Philo has chosen to represent him in Hellenistic Greek guise (cf. the appointment of Hermes as a counsellor by Osiris in the Euhemerist narrative ap. Diod. Sic. 1.16.2, 1.17.3).

In sum, Philo of Byblos is a peculiar hybrid; but if we must make comparisons, I would draw attention to the section of Diodorus Siculus’s first book which is usually taken to draw extensively on Hecataeus of Abdera’s On the Egyptians (Murray 1970).⁶ Diodorus’s account begins with an account of how life first arose in Egypt, and then continues with an account of the promotion to godhead of beneficent individuals; unlike Philo, he continues into the historical period with a long account of Egypt’s historical kings. He, too, repeatedly claims to be drawing on original native sources (priestly anagraphai); he, too, is motivated by the desire to demonstrate the primacy and superiority of Egyptian culture over Greek, claiming, like Philo, that the Greeks added a layer of mystification and travesty to the original native myths (1.23.6–7, 1.23.8, 1.24.8). That Hecataeus was Diodorus’s main source has recently been challenged (Winiarczyk 2002: 69–71), and if the challenge is upheld, a new identity must be found for the voice who uses Greek methods to challenge the dominion of Greek culture. Nevertheless, it is a voice that bears reasonable comparison to Philo, and testifies to the currency in the late Hellenistic period of the broad cultural tradition to which he belongs.