The Oxford Handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean
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By contrast with rather outdated titles in the Hellenistic tradition (e.g., “sacred and inviolable,” “autonomous”), the acquisition of the metropolitan label and the permission to found new games also played a crucial role in the competition among the Phoenician cities. Again, Berytus and even more Tyre were the two cities that had benefited most from the new deal. The title of metropolis was linked to the celebration of rituals and games in honor of the emperors, either at a municipal scale—for instance, in Berytus and Sidon—or in a regional framework, within the district of Phoenicia (ἐπαρχία Φοινίκης), whose cities sent envoys to a provincial assembly presided at Tyre by the Phoenicarch (Φοινικάρχης). In a context of agonistic explosion across the Orient, old and new contests were held with imperial consent at Berytus, Sidon, Tyre, Heliopolis, and Paneas. Elsewhere, the apparent lack of games testifies less to a deficit of Hellenism (as in Palmyra) than to a secondary position in the search for honors, privileges, and patronages that stirred up civic life.
A Phoenician Renaissance
Hellenism continued to flourish in Roman Phoenicia. Latin appeared in the early empire, whereas the Phoenician language gradually ceased to exist in its written form, except a few letters on coins. The last dated Phoenician inscription in the East is a bilingual dedication to Heracles-Melqart from Arados written in 25/24 bce (Rey-Coquais 1970: 25–27). As a result, Greek and (to a lesser extent) Latin became exclusive vehicles for the dominant culture, as well as for the multiple Phoenician traditions. In this field as in others, Tyre stayed far ahead of its neighbors (Aliquot 2011: 76–79). The city still hosted foreign men of letters, as may be assumed regarding the Stoic philosopher Mestrius Euphrates, the Athenian sophist Philostratus, and the Christian theologian Origen. Its own scholars especially excelled in law (Domitius Ulpianus—i.e., the famous Ulpian, Gaianus), rhetoric (Aspasius, Hadrian, Paul, another less famous Ulpianus), philosophy (L. Calvinus Taurus, Cassius Maximus, Musonius, Porphyry), history (Callicrates, Nicomachus), and geography (Marinus). They often held multiple citizenships and wove friendships with the elites of the empire, from whom they gained international fame and privileges for them and their homeland. Most had built their career abroad, as in the Hellenistic period, but now they went up to Rome, where they sometimes reached the highest circles of imperial power. Ulpian (ca. 170–223 ce), who started in public life as an assessor for the jurist Papinian and probably as a leader of the imperial judiciary office under Septimius Severus, finally held the prestigious office of praetorian prefect under Severus Alexander. For this, Tyre was still grateful to him in late antiquity, according to a Latin dedication found in situ.
Without reaching Ulpian’s level, three other Tyrians were among the very first scholars of their generation. The philosopher L. Calvinus Taurus, citizen of both Tyre and Berytus, was appointed as the head of the Platonic school at Athens, where he taught Herodes Atticus and Aulus Gellius. Close to Plutarch, he was received with full honors at Delphi in the middle of the second century ce. Around the same period, Hadrian of Tyre trained in rhetoric at Athens, attended Galen’s anatomy courses at Rome, and traveled to Antioch, Alexandria, and Olympia. He was in the entourage of Flavius Boethus, a Roman senator native of Ptolemais in Phoenicia; of Cn. Claudius Severus, senator and son-in-law of the emperor Marcus Aurelius; and of Caninius Celer, master of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus. Hadrian held the chairs of rhetoric at Ephesus, Athens, and Rome. According to Philostratus (V S 2.10), this man “devoted to the Muses” (Μούσαισι μέλων) presented himself as a new Cadmus in his inaugural conference at Athens, where he proudly claimed: “once again letters have come from Phoenicia” (πάλιν ἐκ Φοινίκης γράμματα). He died in Rome, at the very moment he received his letter of appointment as private secretary (ab epistulis Graecis) of the emperor Commodus. In the following century, Porphyry, alias Malchus, studied in Athens with Longinus and joined the school of Plotinus at Rome, before moving to Lilybaeum in Sicily, from where he traveled to promote Neoplatonic doctrines throughout the Roman world.
Many other Phoenician scholars could be cited, such as the Latin philologist M. Valerius Probus, the rhetor Hermippos, the Platonist Lupercus, and the biblical exegete Pamphilus, all four from Berytus; or the Stoic thinker Diodotos, the Aristotelian philosopher Boethos, and the astrologer Dorotheos, all three native of Sidon. It seems more relevant here to focus on the intriguing case of Philo of Byblos (ca. 50–140 ce), author of a Phoenician History, chiefly known through Porphyry and Eusebius of Caesarea, and presented as a mere translation into Greek of the work elaborated by Sanchuniathon of Berytus before the Trojan War (Baumgarten 1981; Kaldellis and López-Ruiz 2009 = BNJ 790). The account combines parallel narratives mainly specific to Tyre, and secondarily to Byblos and Berytus, whereas Sidon is virtually ignored. This unifying conception of the various civic traditions supports a pan-Phoenician patriotism, in a very original way indeed, considering the fact that Philo’s contemporaries attached much more importance to the mythical origins of individual cities than to Phoenician history as a whole. The thesis put forward also has a second aspect: the Greek interpretation of the local gods would have meant stripping them of their essence. What is at stake here is that adherence to the codes and values of Hellenism had paradoxically raised the awareness among the Phoenicians of their own originality. In endorsing ideas shared by some Greeks—for example, that the Egyptians were the inventors of religions or the gods deified mortals—Philo discovered that the divinities honored in Phoenicia were not Greek but, rather, Hellenized Phoenician gods and goddesses.
All other works of Philo are lost, but the tradition preserved some titles which fortunately balance the image imposed by the preference of both pagans and Christians for his religious works—that of a writer obsessed with the defense of Phoenician identity. The Byblian mythographer turns out to be an encyclopedist and a book amateur (On the Acquisition and Selection of Books), an antiquarian (On Cities and the Famous Men Each of Them Produced), and a historian of his time (On Hadrian’s Reign). It is also well known that he belonged to a Phoenician literary coterie close to the Roman consul Herennius Severus (perhaps a friend of Pliny the Younger), whom he probably owed his gentilicium Herennius and Roman citizenship. Despite his polemic attitude, Philo was thus fully integrated into the social and literary trends of his time, which makes him a forerunner of the cultural and religious revival that affected Phoenicia in the second and third centuries ce (see also chapters 18 and 45, this volume).
Coins best show all the ambivalence of this movement that Ernest Renan (1864–1874: 153–54) already called a “Phoenician Renaissance.” From the late second century ce, Sidon and Tyre repeatedly opted for types referring to a pre-Greek or un-Greek past. A distinction must be made between the heroes of the Cadmean lineage (Cadmus, Europe, Harmonia) and other characters (the Carthaginian queen Dido, her brother Pygmalion) who were mainly known then for their links with Aeneas, Trojan hero and founder of Roman civilization; contrary to the former, which were already portrayed on Hellenistic coins, the latter only appeared from the Severi onward, when Berytus also chose to depict Aeneas. In receiving colonial status and veteran settlers, both cities had been placed on the same footing as Berytus (Aliquot 2003–2004: 201–205). For the Tyrians, coins bearing the images of Dido and Pygmalion also supplemented the available evidence on the kinship between the great Phoenician metropolis and its western colonies, such as Gades, Carthage, and above all Lepcis Magna, Septimius Severus’s native city (figures 9.1–9.2). All of this justified no less than a revision of local traditions through borrowings from Roman mythology.
Figure 9.1 Latin section of a bilingual dedication found in Tyre: It commemorates how the Roman colony of Lepcis Magna pays homage to Tyre, its metropolis, by erecting a statue in the image of this city, ca. 194–198 ce.
Source: CNRS/HiSoMA Archives.
Figure 9.2 Greek section of the same dedication, under traces of big letters that exactly match the w
ord metropolin in the last line of the Latin section. Until recently, the complementarity of the two fragments (and thus also the bilingual nature of the inscription) went unnoticed (see Aliquot 2017).
Source: CNRS/HiSoMA Archives.
The Phoenician Hinterland
In the second century ce, a traveler of Syrian origin came to Phoenicia with the intent to check whether the local sanctuaries were as holy as the temple of Atargatis, the goddess of Hierapolis in Syria. This man, who is often identified with the satirist Lucian of Samosata, initiated on his way an ethnographical inquiry into the local traditions to the heart of the country. He visited the main places of worship, questioned the devotees of Heracles at Tyre, of Astarte in Sidon, of Aphrodite at Byblos and on Mount Lebanon, and tried to decode the myths associated with each of these gods. His work has come down to us in the form of a Greek treatise entitled De Dea Syria—that is, On the Syrian Goddess (Lightfoot 2003). In a style that evokes Herodotus, it reflects ongoing discussions that took place in the coastal cities. Obviously, the identification of Melqart with Heracles and of Astarte with Europe was not self-evident to everybody. The account of the rituals to Adonis (6–8) especially gives a vivid insight into the ceremonies as they were celebrated at Byblos in the Roman period, with their numerous actors (priests, barbers, ritual prostitutes) and the crowd of their worshippers gathered around a cultic pillar in the sacred precinct that was probably depicted on coins struck under Macrinus (217–218 ce). On the acropolis, several temples had taken each other’s place over millennia, not without significant changes.
The cults had evolved, too. The Lady of Byblos had become Astarte, then Aphrodite. Adonis now was interpreted as Osiris, which may result from the popularity the Isiac divinities (Isis, Sarapis, Osiris, Harpocrates) enjoyed at Byblos as in Tyre since the Hellenistic period, and from the common funerary nature of the rituals to Adonis and the Egyptian god of the underworld. The passage on the Adonia is also telling of the integration of the Phoenician hinterland into the imaginary landscape of the Byblians: “They say that the affair of Adonis and the boar took place in their territory, and in memory of the sad event they beat their breasts each year and lament and perform the rites, and there is much mourning through the country” (De Dea Syria 6). The author goes on to explain how the bloody stream of the Adonis River (Nahr Ibrahim) signaled the rituals of mourning to the Byblians. This raises the thorny issues of the depth of the Phoenician country and of the relationship between the Phoenicians and their neighbors to the east.
The distribution of the inscriptions dated according to civic eras shows that the territory of the Phoenician cities under the empire sometimes extended far to the east (Aliquot 2009: 52–58). From the time of Tiberius, for example, the south of the Bekaa Valley and the western slopes of Mount Hermon belonged to Sidon. However, it would be inappropriate to consider all the Phoenician hinterland as generically Phoenician, particularly as regards the areas called Lebanon and Antilebanon in antiquity. First, whole sectors of the mountains depended directly on the emperor. Second, the Phoenicians were here in contact with populations who had nothing Phoenician originally—namely the Romans from Berytus and Heliopolis, and Arab mountain dwellers. Now, at the time our Syrian traveler visited Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos, the changes found in the coastal towns since the Hellenistic period started to be fully reflected in the mountains. An impressive set of villages and sanctuaries was about to cover the whole country (Wiegand 1921–1925; Krencker and Zschietzschmann 1938; Aliquot 2009; Van Ess and Rheidt 2014). “I also went up from Byblos into Lebanon, a day’s journey, having learnt that there was an ancient temple of Aphrodite there, which Cinyras had founded,” Lucian writes in chapter 9 of the treatise On the Syrian Goddess, which relates a trip to the famous site of Aphaca, at the source of the Adonis River.
Too often such places are presented as genuine preserves of the so-called Oriental paganism. Here we are faced with the presuppositions of a model that has had great success in both scholarly and popular literature on the societies of the ancient Near East: the model of the high places, which refers to the outdoor sanctuaries in Canaan before the Hebrew conquest. This model is based on the (real) presence of dozens of Roman sanctuaries in the Phoenician hinterland and on the (much more problematic) identification of the culture of their worshippers with those of the biblical Canaanites and the Phoenicians. It partly owes its popularity to the reputation of Lebanon and Antilebanon. Since antiquity, the mountains has been described as marginal areas consecrated to the gods, overrun with wild beasts, and inhabited by giants or by men close to the state of nature. Under Roman rule, the Phoenicians reproduced this stereotype, while interpreting the regional mythology in Greek terms. In his Phoenician History, Philo of Byblos thus regarded Lebanon and Antilebanon as deified giants, and relegated them to the fringes of primitive humanity. For others, the mountain area was a small Arabia, or a Near Eastern Arcadia—that is, a harsh country of shepherds and giants (Aliquot 2009: 28–37, 64–69). Such depictions reflected the prejudices of ancient ethnography on Arab, pastoral, and nomadic peoples. The Ituraean raids certainly contributed to revive them.
Lebanese sanctuaries differ from traditional places of worship in the rest of Phoenicia, where the combination of chapels and rooms inside enclosed courtyards still prevailed in Roman times. Their features matched a new way of designing sacred spaces which was also adopted in the Aradian Peraea on the Bargylus (e.g., at Baitokaike) or in Damascene. Religious construction tended to be planned through the use of architectural drawings, plans, and models. The altar was clearly distinguished from the temple building, standing in an axial position on a high podium, and was closed. These changes modified the outlook on the statues nestled in an innermost shrine (ἄδυτον), which only the priests were allowed to enter. Of course, all this took place in accordance with tradition, and there were exceptions. Sacred precincts or spaces without temples still existed in Sfira and Mashnaqa. High-altitude rituals were always performed on summits (the most spectacular example being that of Mount Hermon at 2814 m above sea level), or symbolically on tower-altars at Sfira, Mashnaqa, Qalaat Faqra, and Heliopolis.
Such trends accompanied the advent of a new social order (Aliquot 2009). They were due neither to the initiative of Rome, nor of cities, nor of allied rulers (except in Arca, Paneas, and Heliopolis) but, rather, of wealthy city dwellers and villagers. The rural sanctuaries were mainly funded by notables; their features reflected the search for a compromise between local traditions and Roman models that had been first adapted at Berytus and Heliopolis. This is also the reason why the temples in the Phoenician hinterland today appear as the most “Roman” temples in the Roman Near East. The notables managed the priesthoods, controlled the sacred funds, and dedicated their own resources to the gods. The choice they made to adapt Roman architecture appears as a manifestation of their influence on society and a means to perpetuate their domination.
In no way should the rural sanctuaries be considered as museums of the timeless religiosity of the Semitic East—this unlikely avatar of Orientalism. Their worshippers were as much concerned to show their attachment to ancestral traditions as to comply with the traditions of the Roman world. For instance, this is why they translated vows by imitating behaviors that had become common for decades in the neighboring towns, particularly on the coast. They transcribed votive formulas into Greek or Latin, and gave Greek or Latin names to their gods. It is true that we find in the names of the gods some Phoenician elements—for instance, with Jupiter Balmarcodes at Dayr al-Qalaa—and especially Aramaic elements, with Zeus Beelgalasos and Atargatis at Qalaat Faqra, or Hadaranes and Atargatis in the pagus Augustus of Niha. However, the adoption of Greek and Latin nomenclature came to overshadow nuances that could be made if the worshippers had their dedications written in a Semitic language. The gods were characterized by their entrenchment in villages or in broader areas, such as the mountain, the coast, the Roman East, or the whole empire. For instance, images of Venus mourning the
death of Adonis were not only discovered in Byblos but also in Arca and Yanuh (Gatier and Nordiguian 2005: 28–29). The Phoenician hinterland was definitely not a region where religious traditions would have remained archaic because they were practiced by communities without contact with cities.
In the various expressions of piety, borrowings from Greek tradition played an important role, as everywhere in Roman Syria. What distinguishes Phoenicia and its hinterland is that the Romans did not stay in the background. While colonizing the Bekaa, they restructured the local cults and gave them a public character. Their input is obvious as regards the Heliopolitan triad, comprising Jupiter (Iuppiter Optimus Maximus Heliopolitanus, usually abbreviated as IOMH), Venus, and Mercury (Hajjar 1977; Aliquot 2009: 200–29). The model was new in the area. The Romans from Berytus established it at Heliopolis following the example of the Capitoline triad, when they tried to summarize the cults of their territory. From Phoenicia, the Heliopolitan cult spread to the West through the diaspora from Berytus and Heliopolis, or via the Roman army. Its oracle drew the attention of emperors, because Jupiter was available for consultation either locally or remotely. In Heliopolis, the Romans also innovated by introducing a new mystery cult, that of Bacchus, to whom a temple was dedicated in the second century ce (Wiegand 1921–1925: 2:1–89). Outside the city, they were eventually responsible for the reorganization of other local pantheons, insofar as the Heliopolitan cult was either adopted, or imitated, in the Bekaa and in Phoenicia up to Ptolemais and the Carmel.