Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Susan A. Stephens
List of Illustrations ix
Preface xi
List of Abbreviations xv
Introduction 1
1. Conceptualizing Egypt 20
2. Callimachean Theogonies 74
3. Theocritean Regencies 122
4. Apollonian Cosmologies 171
5. The Two Lands 238
Index 277
Illustrations
ix
Preface
xi
xii Preface
Stanford University
July 2001
Abbreviations
AP Palatine Anthology.
AR Alexander Romance.
CA J. U. Powell, ed. Collectanea Alexandrina. Oxford,
1925.
DIO J. Gwyn Griffiths, ed. Plutarch: De Iside et Osiride,
Edited with an Introduction, Translation and Com-
mentary. Cardiff, 1970.
D-K H. Diels and W. Kranz, eds. Die Fragmente der Vor-
sokratiker. 3 vols. 6th ed. Berlin, 1951–52.
EGF M. Davies, ed. Epicorum Graecorum fragmenta.
Göttingen, 1988.
FGrH F. Jacoby, ed. Die Fragmente der griechischen His-
toriker. Berlin and Leiden, 1923–58.
Gow A. S. F. Gow, ed. Theocritus. 2 vols. 2d ed. Cam-
bridge, 1952.
G-P A. S. F. Gow and D. L. Page, eds. The Greek Anthol-
ogy: Hellenistic Epigrams. 2 vols. Cambridge,
1965.
LÄ W. Helck, E. Otto, and W. Westendorf, eds. Lexikon
für Ägyptologie. 7 vols. Wiesbaden, 1975–92.
xv
xvi Abbreviations
1. In the lower left and right corners, Jomard placed the traditional Egyptian motifs
of a vulture and an atef crown to flank a cartouche enclosing a star ( = divine) and a bee
( = king).
1
2 Introduction
The enigma of the two cartouches [the star and the bee] is therefore
solved, and the correct interpretation of their inscriptions is ‘divus rex’ or
‘divine king’. It was therefore very wise, probably, only to intimate the
meaning vaguely in the commentary [to the Déscription]. The rather ful-
some flattery probably pleased the emperor, who never outgrew a legiti-
macy-complex, and it may have amused the Imperial augurs; but as a re-
lapse into the terminology of the ‘Roy-Soleil’ it would probably have
jarred on Jacobine ears. For the same reason the true meaning of the new
heraldic emblem was never publicly disclosed, but it was obvious that
Napoleon was fully aware of its significance and introduced it deliber-
ately as a venerable monarchical symbol.4
told that it is “because the bee is the symbol of industry that Napoleon
I adopted it for his emblem.”5
Napoleon was not the first French monarch to use the bee hiero-
glyphic to symbolize kingship, though in his case we can be sure that
contact with Egypt and its monuments provided the direct stimulus. In
the Renaissance, Louis XII was said to have worn a gold-spangled robe
adorned with a king bee surrounded by ordinary bees, combined with
the motto “The king does not use the sting.”6 Louis XII found justifica-
tion for his version of this monarchic emblem not in Ammianus, but in
the Greek Horapollo, who explains the bee hieroglyph as
illustrating a people obedient to their king. For alone of all other crea-
tures the bee has a king whom the rest of the bees follow, just as men
obey a king. They allegorize from the pleasure of honey and from the
power of the creature’s sting that the king is both kindly and forceful in
rendering judgment and in governance.7
XII’s cloak, like fifth- and fourth-century Greek writers, exhibits con-
sciousness of the Egyptian origins of the material it appropriates, but
that appropriation remains at some distance; Napoleon, like the Hel-
lenistic poets, reflects an immediate experience of a contemporary
Egypt, though without overt acknowledgment of the context of appro-
priation. In each case, what survives and is considered significant is re-
fracted through western sensibilities, but each layer also refracts at
some moment a real encounter with Egyptian behaviors and cultural
artifacts.
The following anecdote offers a much more complicated dynamic,
however. In 1653 the tomb of Childéric, a Merovingian king who died
in 481, was opened in Tournai. The burial deposit included a bull’s
head adorned with a solar disk and more than three hundred gold bees
that had been used to decorate his equipage.9 Subsequent excavation re-
vealed a statuette of Isis in the same villa,10 confirming what the original
publishers of the find had already surmised: Childéric was among the
last devotees of Isis in early medieval Europe, and his burial objects
must be understood in light of her cult, though an Isis cult that had as-
similated western ideas. The bull’s head with the solar disk is Apis. But
the bees are a different matter. In this context they are not obviously
markers of kingship, but symbols of rebirth linked to the Apis bull
through an etymology of Apis/apis. The bees reflect a belief in the spon-
taneous creation of bees from the carcass of a dead bull, the so-called
bougonia. Whether or not bougonia stems from an authentically Egypt-
ian tradition, it is not elsewhere attested for Isis worship, though it is
very prominent in Latin sources and treated at length in Vergil’s Geor-
gics.11 Thus it may be specific to the Roman development of Isis wor-
ship. When they were found, however, Childéric’s bees were also in-
vested with dynastic significance: Jean-Jacques Chiflet, who published
the Childéric treasure in 1655, included an illustrated account of how
the royal emblem of France, the fleur-de-lis, was originally derived from
the bee.12 Hence Napoleon’s bee could enjoy a double reception. The re-
placement of the fleur-de-lis with the bee in the early nineteenth century
could be understood not as an innovation but as a restoration of the
true origins of the royal insignia,13 and could be read, in terms of a
western, and primarily Vergilian, tradition of bees as signifiers of indus-
triousness and rejuvenation, as well as an Egyptian symbol of kingship.
Childéric’s worship of Isis and the resulting funerary deposit indicate a
thoroughly assimilated stratum of Egyptian ideas as well as ideas that
may only appear Egyptian, so intricately joined it is difficult if not im-
possible to separate the constituent parts.
Taken together, these anecdotes illustrate (1) the context-dependent
nature of interpretation, (2) the intricate dynamics of cultural borrow-
ing, (3) the significance of the visual and monumental in cultural ex-
change, and (4) the peculiar fascination that Egypt and its symbolic
realm hold in the western imagination. Childéric, Louis XII, and
Napoleon use the same signifier at different historical periods though
for markedly different purposes. To the observer unfamiliar with the
complicated set of historical and political circumstances behind each
French monarch’s symbolic deployment of the bee, it no doubt seems
whimsical or idiosyncratic. But when the context is presented, the de-
vice not only becomes explicable but assumes a broader significance
within the continuum of French imperial history. To educated members
of the court the emblem would have conveyed a subtle signal of monar-
chic ambitions or of imperial desires; to the rest the bee was no more
than an artistic experiment. Without its symbolic baggage, it could not
function as a dangerous reminder of the “Roy-Soleil” or as a behavioral
template for the proper disposition of the monarch to his subjects.
Rather it became the signifier of an anodyne “industriousness.”
14. See, for example, Weber (1993, 371–88, esp. 381) for criticisms of the work of
Merkelbach, Koenen, and Bing. Zanker voices slightly different criticisms. He is con-
cerned with the evidentiary habits of these scholars, who read behaviors of the later
Ptolemies onto the earlier (1989, 91–99). Zanker’s own reading of the world of Alexan-
dria, particularly the “culture shock” for immigrating Greeks (p. 91), seems to me to be
largely correct. Where I differ from him is in assessing the degree of separation of Greeks
from Egyptians. Recent work, particularly that of Thompson, Clarysse, and Quaegebeur,
undermines much of the evidence on which the case for such a separation has been built.
To identify an Egyptian stratum within Alexandrian poetry is not to argue for wholesale
interpretatio graeca, as Zanker seems to think.
8 Introduction
already part of the same discursive field, so that a narrative about the
one was predisposed to converge with the other. The evidence I present
in the next chapter demonstrates the persistence with which writers like
Herodotus insist on these identifications, even when (to us) they might
seem forced. Greek names dominate or displace the native so thor-
oughly that at times it is difficult to identify authentic Egyptian patterns
that lie beneath. Thus what we may regard as necessary clues for our-
selves will not have been the same for an Alexandrian Greek audience
in the third century b.c.e.
This habit of renaming is symptomatic of a wider phenomenon for
those who were immigrating to Egypt. As the extreme case of the bar-
barian, or the total inversion of all that is Greek (articulated as a binary
opposition in Herodotus), Egypt presented a peculiar challenge. Its alien
physical, and even more importantly its alien mental, landscape needed
to be rendered explicable by and for its new occupants—in some sense
to be made Greek. The Alexander Romance provides an illuminating
example of the process of ideological repositioning—the author of this
disingenuous text explains the ethnic mixture of the city of Alexandria
as the inevitable result of its foundation by Alexander, but an Alexander
who is provided with a new paternity; he is no longer the son of Philip,
but of Nectanebo, the last native pharaoh, and Olympias—hence in her-
itage both Egyptian and Greek.15 On a more sophisticated level, the
Alexandrian poets engage in similarly creative gestures that serve to do-
mesticate or rather Hellenize Egypt. Callimachus, Theocritus, and
Apollonius experiment with templates to incorporate Egyptian myths
and pharaonic behavior into Greek. What begins as alien or outré, by
being matched with Greek myths of a similar contour, can become fa-
miliar, acceptable, even normative. Just as Egyptian gods are renamed
and syncretistic cults try to absorb the native into the religion of the new
natives, these Greek poets absorb Egyptian culture in such a way as to
make it barely visible and then invisible, a process that simultaneously
familiarizes the viewer with the unfamiliar and makes it look Greek.
An example: at the opening of Callimachus’s poem on the victory of
Berenice at the Nemean games, Callimachus identifies Argos as the land
of “cow-born Danaus,”16 alluding to the Greek myth of Io, who mi-
grated to Egypt in the form of a cow and gave birth to Epaphus ( =
Egyptian Apis). One of her descendants, Danaus, then returned to
Greece and gave his name to the whole people—Danaans. This unex-
ceptionably Greek epithet is by no means value neutral—it links Greeks
to Egyptians in hereditary terms. A few lines later, Callimachus de-
scribes Egyptian women as “knowing how to mourn the bull with the
white marking.”17 Now the reference is to the thoroughly Egyptian cult
of the Apis bull, but since we have just been reminded of the descen-
dants of Io, Apis too begins to lose his otherness and to be incorporated
into the allusive matrix of what has become an extended Greco-Egypt-
ian mythological family. The habit of syncretism and allusion to an
Egypt already embedded in Greek texts are two means by which poets
create a discursive field that can serve to accommodate two different
cultural logics. Within this framework a poem that nowhere explicitly
names Egypt or an Egyptian idea nonetheless frequently presents a set
of incidents that are entirely legible within the framework of Egyptian
myth. Further, a narrative that in its selection of Greek mythological de-
tail may appear whimsical or obscure, when read in the context of
Egyptian ideas often yields not simply a coherent pattern, but a pattern
complicit in the ideological construction of pharaonic kingship.18 The
degree of recognition, resistance, or acceptance of these patterns that a
contemporary reader would have experienced, to be sure, will have var-
ied. Nor do these three poets themselves exhibit the same degree of in-
terest in Egypt or construct their discursive matrices to represent Egypt
or Ptolemaic kingship in the same way. Still, the cumulative effect of
this poetry would have been to allow the reader to discern Egyptian
cultural formations, but contained within or domesticated by its frame-
work of Greekness. The effect is one of an optical illusion—looked at
from one angle discrete elements in the narrative are Greek, from an-
other Egyptian; both are complete and distinct without the other, yet in-
terdependent in their final patterning.
These remarks are not intended to gloss over the difficulties inherent
in discussing what amounts to a series of cross-cultural readings in
which one set of cultural references does not operate as a traditional lit-
erary field and, in addition to text-based lore, will necessarily include a
19. See the next chapter for a discussion of how the Alexandrian poets and their au-
dience would have had access to Egyptian ideas.
20. This a significant feature of their so-called realism. See Zanker 1987, 55–112.
21. The precise location of the temple is not known. Strabo may be describing the
ruins at Heliopolis, but he is more likely to be describing the generic plan of the Egyptian
temple. See Fraser 1972, 2: 414–15 n. 582.
22. See Hinds 1998, 34–47, for a helpful discussion of the reading of topoi.
Introduction 11
23. For example, Fontenrose (1980) contextualizes the myth of Apollo and Python in
terms of similar Near Eastern tales that include Typhon in Hesiod and the Egyptian Seth.
His study demonstrates their common folkloric dimensions not their allusive interde-
pendence.
24. Bilde 1994, 11.
12 Introduction
26. Information in the Satrap decree indicates that the move was either in 320/19
b.c.e. or, based on the standard reading of the formulae, in 312/11. See Fraser 1972, 2:
11–12 n. 28. Egyptologists usually prefer the later date.
27. Reymond and Barns 1977, 1–33 (particularly 28 n. 24).
28. Thompson (1994, 67–87) sketches the trajectory of linguistic change from Egypt-
ian to Greek in Ptolemaic administration.
29. The decree was found in Cairo. Bevan (1968, 28–32) provides the only transla-
tion available in English, though it is not very accurate. For the original German edition,
see Sethe 1904–16, 2: 11–23. There is an excellent photograph of the stele in G. Grimm,
“Verbrannte Pharaonen? Die Feuerbestattung Ptolemaios’ IV Philopator und ein gescheit-
erter Staatsstreich in Alexandria,” Antike Welt 28 (1997) 238.
30. Claiming to restore the temples was standard operating procedure for the new
pharaoh: e.g., the claims made for Amasis and Nectanebo I (Lichtheim 1980, 35, 89). In
turn, the Persians and Alexander made similar claims. For a discussion of the reality be-
hind these claims, see Winnicki 1994.
31. I am indebted to my colleague Joe Manning for this observation.
14 Introduction
lar claims of returning the gods to Egypt were made for Ptolemy II in
the Pithom stele (again only in hieroglyphics) of 264, though by the
time of this later text, Ptolemy’s political interests in Syria will have
dovetailed nicely with pharaonic ideology.32
Whether or not Soter and his immediate successors were actually
crowned as pharaoh in Memphis,33 they certainly allowed themselves to
appear as pharaoh in Egyptian inscriptions and temple reliefs and to be
seen behaving no differently than their Egyptian predecessors. Soter
may even initially have taken an Egyptian wife.34 Playing prominent
roles during the formative period of Soter’s reign were native Egyptians
like the general, Nectanebo, a member of the royal house of the last na-
tive pharaoh (Nectanebo II), the royal scribe, Wennefer, and, most im-
portant, Manetho, the Sebennytic priest, who was the first Egyptian to
write a history of Egypt in Greek and for Greeks.35 Additionally, Soter
availed himself of Greeks like Hecataeus of Abdera to provide him with
information about Egypt. Hecataeus would have been a better inform-
ant about the country than Herodotus—his description of the Rames-
seum in Thebes is notable for its accuracy36—and may well have read
hieroglyphics.37 By all accounts Hecataeus’s views on Egypt were not
only positive, but utopian: he seems to have projected his idealized vi-
sion of the proper education and practice of kingship onto the Egyptian
pharaohs, no doubt in order to provide a paradigm for the rule of the
Ptolemies themselves.38 Indeed, there is some evidence that Alexander
32. Sethe 1904–16, 2: 81–105. See Hölbl 1994, 73–83, with illustrations of the
Pithom and Mendes stelae.
33. This is much debated. For the arguments against, see Burstein 1991. For argu-
ments in favor of coronation, see Koenen 1993, 49–81. The real issue in these discussions
is the degree to which Macedonian Greek rulers assimilated to native practices and how
pervasive such practices would have been for their rule. Whether or not the earlier
Ptolemies were crowned in the Egyptian manner, Epiphanes was crowned by Egyptian
priests in Memphis and identified on the Rosetta stone (196 b.c.e.) as playing the role of
Horus in the New Year’s festival.
34. On the basis of the survival of a presumably legitimate daughter named “Ptole-
mais, daughter of Ptolemy Kheper-ka-Re,” Tarn (“Queen Ptolemais and Apama,” CQ 23
[1929] 138–41) argues that Soter may have consolidated power at the beginning of his
rule by marrying into the line of Nectanebo, the last Egyptian monarch. Given the evi-
dence of the Alexander Romance, which seeks to position Alexander as the son of
Nectanebo II, such a marriage would have made excellent political sense as part of a con-
solidation of power.
35. Thompson 1992b, 324. For the stele of Wennefer, see Lichtheim 1980, 54–58; for
Manetho, see Dillery 1999.
36. Burstein 1992, 45–50; Peremans 1987, 327–43.
37. Fraser 1972, 1: 497.
38. Murray 1970, 157–66.
Introduction 15
39. See also Arrian’s anecdote (7.11) on the inclusion of Persians in Alexander’s army,
and Tarn 1933. For a different evaluation, see E. Badian, “Alexander the Great and the
Unity of Mankind,” Historia 7.4 (1958) 425–44.
40. Fraser 1972, 1: 255; Thompson 1988, 116. The most recent and thorough dis-
cussion is Borgeaud and Volukhine 2000, 37–76.
41. For a discussion of the spread of the Isis cult under the early Ptolemies, see
Dunand 1973, 1: 109–61.
42. Fraser 1972, 1: 263–65.
43. Quaegebeur 1988, 41–53. Yves Empereur’s discoveries from the underwater site
of the Alexandrian harbor have revealed colossal statues in the pharaonic style. In his tel-
evision documentary (though not in the written publication) Empereur suggested that the
statues belong to the reign of Philadelphus and are of Philadelphus as pharaoh and and
his queen as Isis.
16 Introduction
44. Sethe 1904–16, 2: 28–54. This too was written only in hieroglyphics; see Hölbl
1994, 77, for an illustration, and 94–95 for its cultic significance.
45. See, for example, Murray 1970, 142; Bing 1988, 134–35 n. 82.
46. On early Ptolemaic temple construction, see Arnold 1999.
Introduction 17
The primary focus of this book is poetry, and specifically poetry that, I
will argue, operates to imagine a new form of kingship, operating in
two worlds, Greek and Egyptian. In order to see it in its contemporary
context, I have begun with a chapter that sets out earlier Greek writings
on Egypt and what we can learn about the various Egypts that Greeks
constructed for themselves. In particular I consider the fourth-century
writers in prose who were near contemporaries of the Alexandrian
poets, Hecataeus of Abdera, Euhemerus, and (somewhat later) Diony-
sus Scytobrachion, all of whom were familiar with Egypt. Although
their writings have not survived intact, the epitomes to be found in
Diodorus Siculus and other sources provide enough detail that it is pos-
sible to draw useful conclusions about the general intellectual trends of
such works. The second part of the chapter provides a summary of the
ideological underpinnings of pharaonic theocracy and the central
myths that encode it. The final section offers a reading of the Alexander
Romance as an example of the way in which one of the principal legiti-
mating myths of pharaonic kingship, that of divine paternity, was re-
fashioned in Alexandrian Greek writing.
The next three chapters treat Callimachus, Theocritus, and Apollo-
nius, respectively. In treating Callimachus and Theocritus, I have se-
lected four poems—Callimachus’s Hymn to Zeus and the Hymn to
Delos and Theocritus’s Heracliscus (Idyll 24) and the Encomium on
Ptolemy (Idyll 17)—because of the interconnectedness of their themes
and the likelihood of their being written within the first decades of
Ptolemy II’s reign and within a few years of each other. The Zeus hymn
and the Heracliscus date in all probability from the opening of his
reign, the Delos hymn and the Encomium from the 270s. The first two
poems experiment with finding appropriate models for Ptolemaic king-
ship by focusing on childhood: Callimachus on the divine birth of Zeus,
Theocritus on an early incident in the mythology of Heracles. The sec-
ond pair of poems continues to play out ideas of kingship in divine
(Apollo) or human terms (Ptolemy), the birth of Apollo on Delos in
Callimachus seeming to find its logical fulfillment in Ptolemy’s birth on
Cos. Regardless of their compositional order, these latter poems main-
tain the fiction of order and both operate within the same discursive
field. The cosmic disorder that is transformed at the birth of Apollo
into harmony in Callimachus is continued in the Encomium, as if the
promise of Ptolemy in the one is fulfilled in the other. While Calli-
machus remains within the framework of archaic Greek poetry to con-
struct (or imagine) an ideal of kingship, Theocritus moves to the con-
18 Introduction
Conceptualizing Egypt
1. Contact between Greece and Egypt certainly took place from the Mycenean pe-
riod, but what residue it left in archaic and classical Greece is disputed and unimportant
for this argument. I am concerned only with material that could have directly shaped the
Hellenistic experience.
20
Conceptualizing Egypt 21
Egypt, the fact that many Egyptian divinities could already be imagined
as virtually equivalent to Greek gods would have served to make the
pantheon and other aspects of Egyptian religion progressively more fa-
miliar than they in fact were by authorizing a thought process that fo-
cused on similarities rather than differences. Although this will neces-
sarily have led to misunderstandings of purely native Egyptian religious
beliefs, it will also have functioned as a very potent tool that aided in
mapping an otherwise unfamiliar mental landscape. Although Greek
writing about Egypt frequently had very little to do with actual Egypt-
ian beliefs and practices, belonging rather to the construction of a
Greek intellectual and political reality, within this general construct ele-
ments of genuine Egyptian culture are often visible. Consideration of
the various available materials and how they were appropriated, then,
will allow us to reconstruct the outlines of the Egypt imagined by
Greeks before and during the early Ptolemaic period, as well as the cat-
egories of discourse in which Egypt will have figured.
What follows is not a systematic review of all previous Greek writ-
ers’ views of Egypt. Christian Froidefond’s 1971 study, Le mirage égyp-
tien dans la littérature grecque d’ Homère à Aristote, already provides
this. Rather, I wish to focus on specific themes found in earlier writing
on Egypt that are central, through frequently ignored, in reconstructing
the intellectual milieu of Alexandria. I omit Homer and Hesiod because
Egypt receives no sustained treatment in their poetry and is embedded
in the myths of certain families, which I do discuss. Or one finds noth-
ing more than a residue of story patterns—not even identified as Egypt-
ian—doubtless filtered through other Near Eastern cultures, like the
contest of Zeus and Typhon in Hesiod’s Theogony.2 The portrait of
Egyptians found in two surviving Greek tragedies, Aeschylus’s Suppli-
ants and Euripides’ Helen, has been recently examined by Phiroze Va-
sunia in The Gift of the Nile, a sustained study of how Greek writers of
the fifth and fourth centuries imagined Egypt. Rather than repeat his
arguments here, I have included references to his study, where relevant,
in footnotes. I do, however, expand on his formulation of Helen. Vasu-
nia also has substantial chapters on Herodotus, Plato, and Isocrates. I
treat Herodotus here in several ways: as part of the discussion of Ten-
denz, as a litmus with which to test how Greek immigrants to Egypt
would have encountered Egyptian ideas, and through occasional analy-
2. E.g., Fontenrose 1980, 249–51, 391–93; West 1966, 379–83, esp. notes on lines
820–80. This incident will be discussed in more detail in chapter 2.
22 Conceptualizing Egypt
sis of specific passages. I discuss Plato and Isocrates more briefly, and in
a restricted context.3 What emerges from all of these studies is that
there is not one simple model of Egypt that all Greek writers adhered
to, but that Egypt served as a catalyst for the expression of often con-
flicting ideas about what it meant to be Greek. This is a useful frame of
reference for what follows, but it is also limited, since as Greeks took
up residence in Egypt itself, what could be contained as separate social
and cultural spaces began to collapse. Vasunia’s insight that Alexan-
der’s views of Egypt must have been determined by this earlier Greek
reception of Egypt is surely correct, but my arguments necessarily begin
from the point where reception cushioned by temporal and spatial re-
moteness ends and interaction begins. Therefore, the trajectory of this
chapter is to move from fourth- and third-century Greek constructs of
Egypt through native ideologies to end with a consideration of how
these two worlds intersect in the Alexander Romance.
3. Plato’s construction of Egypt, especially in terms of writing and the stability of its
institutions, has been treated recently by a number of scholars: see, for example, M. Deti-
enne, L’écriture d’ Orphée (Paris, 1989) 167–86; D. Steiner, The Tyrant’s Writ: Myths and
Images of Writing in Ancient Greece (Princeton, 1994); Vasunia 2001, 136–76.
4. Lloyd (1976, 13–60) provides an extensive discussion of the categories of ex-
change. For travelers, see Y. Volokhine, “Les déplacements pieux en Égypte pharonique,”
in Frankfurter 1998, 83.
5. Braun (1982) provides a very useful survey with a number of illustrations. See also
J. Boardman, The Greeks Overseas (London, 1980) 111–45, with illustrations.
6. On the site of Naucratis, see W. D. E. Coulson and A. Leonard, Jr., eds., Ancient
Naukratis: Excavations at a Greek Emporium in Egypt, vols. 1–2.1, American Schools of
Oriental Research (Cambridge, Mass., 1997).
Conceptualizing Egypt 23
the question of priority or who came first, the Egyptians or the Greeks,
and matters of polity or good government, where Egyptian state orga-
nization and particularly its forms of kingship are contrasted, either
positively or negatively, with a Greek, usually democratic, practice.
Greek writing on origins in general tended to organize the various cul-
tures of the Mediterranean world into tidy lines of descent from the he-
roes of Greek saga. That is to say, the family trees of various figures of
Greek mythology—the Inachids, the Argonauts, Heracles—were
pressed into the service of constructing the history of prehistoric Hel-
lenic and non-Hellenic peoples.12 With respect to Egypt, Hecataeus of
Miletus may have begun the process: for him Egyptian cultural attain-
ments were the result of an infusion of Greek talent via the descendants
of Argive Io. He also may have begun the process of identifying Greek
divinities with Egyptian. In contrast, Herodotus asserted the temporal
priority of Egyptian over Greek culture, particularly in matters of reli-
gion, claiming that Greeks derived certain religious practices, like the
worship of Dionysus, from Egypt. Even so, Herodotus’s Egypt appears
as a readily detachable ethnographic study eccentric to the historical
trajectory of his work as a whole.13 Plato, too, connects the two cultures
in hereditary terms, but reverses the direction of the influence14—it is
the Saite priest in the Timaeus who informs Greeks about their ances-
tors—and he firmly maintained that it was the Athenian Greeks them-
selves in their now unremembered past who established the Egyptian
city of Sais. In other words, the ostensibly older Egyptian culture was
always already Greek. Whatever we may think of these claims, and al-
lowing for the ever-present irony of the Platonic text, it is significant
that virtually all of the Greek writers whom we know to have dealt with
Egypt in some detail found it necessary to express their own cultural
achievements as having a familial and generational relationship with
Egypt, either as originary or dependent. At the very least this signals the
importance of Egypt in Greek minds and allows the possibility (though
it does not guarantee) that Greeks knew more about the specific details
of Egyptian culture than they are normally credited with. At any rate,
12. E. Bickerman, “Origines Gentium,” CP 47 (1952) 65–82; see also the summary in
Lloyd 1975, 120–40. Hall (1996, 40–41) notes that one of the most common character-
istics of ethnic groups is a “common myth of descent.”
13. Burstein 1996, 591–97; Vasunia 2001, 112–21.
14. Herodotus’s chronology was reversed also in Eudoxus of Cnidus, who was a con-
temporary of Plato. For the extent to which Plato may have been influenced by Eudoxus’s
work, see Froidefond 1971, 316, 318–22.
Conceptualizing Egypt 25
the habit of mind that connects Greece and Egypt does not disappear in
Alexandrian writing; rather, as we should expect, it is intensified.
And not only in the prose writers. Among our extant sources, the
generational relationship of the two cultures lies at the heart of the
Greek myth of the family of Danaus, which is best known from Aeschy-
lus’s extant plays, The Suppliants and Prometheus Bound, but seems to
have figured earlier in Hesiod’s now fragmentary Catalogue of Women.
The kernel of the tale is a double migration: the Greek Io wanders to
Egypt where she becomes the ancestor of Libya, Danaus, Aegyptus, and
Phoenix. In a later generation Danaus, with his daughters, returns to
Argos. To this a third migration could sometimes be attached: Danaus’s
great granddaughter was Danae, who, like her ancester Io, attracted
Zeus’s attention and, impregnated by a shower of gold, bore Perseus,
who eventually returned to Egypt and Ethiopia. The Danaid family tree
is conveniently multivalent; it may function as an organizational tem-
plate for the origins of various Mediterranean peoples—Io’s descen-
dants are the eponymous ancestors of Libya, Greece, Egypt, and
Phoenicia. Greek Io may be figured as the ancestor of Egypt, and in
turn, her descendant Danaus may be figured as Egyptian as he returns
to Greece with his daughters. However it plays out, the family geneal-
ogy was inextricably intertwined with Egypt.15
Io herself, who is both woman and cow, bears a sufficiently strong
resemblance to Hathor and Isis that she was easily identified with both
as early as Herodotus, if not before.16 For Hesiod Danaus or his daugh-
ters are the bringers of water to a thirsty Argos (dAcion 6rgo%).17 There
is more than one version of how the water is discovered, but the fact
that immigrants from Egypt are responsible for alleviating the aridity of
a dry land looks like a pointed attempt to link Argive irrigation with
the behavior of the Nile. Somewhat further along in the family tree,
Herodotus claims that one of Danaus’s descendants, Perseus, was wor-
18. See below for the contending between Horus and Seth, and pages 166–67 on
footprints of the gods.
19. So Lloyd 1969, 84–89; 1976, 367–69.
20. Both Vasunia (2001, 40–58) and F. I. Zeitlin (“The Politics of Eros in the Danaid
Trilogy of Aeschylus,” in Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Liter-
ature [Chicago, 1996] 123–71) focus on the ways in which Egypt is figured within codes
of sexuality and gender. A number of scholars have also identified persistent associations
of Egypt with death in these plays; see Vasunia, pp. 64–69 and notes.
Conceptualizing Egypt 27
was reputed to have sacrificed all foreigners who came into his territory
to Zeus and, according to some versions, even ate his victims.21 By the
later fifth century, Busiris seems both in vase painting and in Athenian
comedy to have occupied a secure place as the stereotypical barbarian
tyrant, a king who behaves as an autocrat and whose modus vivendi is
antithetical to the benign rule of democratic Athens.22 Herodotus ex-
presses doubt about this construction of Busiris, claiming that it is un-
likely that Egyptians sacrificed humans when they had prohibitions
against most types of animal sacrifice (2.45), and Isocrates continues
this recuperative trend. But the tragedians, whose writings are more
self-consciously democratic than the philosophers’, continue to imagine
Egypt as a land of despotism. Not surprisingly, these portrayals disap-
pear along with the democracy.
Both Herodotus and Euripides include portraits of Egyptian kings in
their treatment of Helen. The figure of Helen herself, like the Danaid
line, provided an early mythological link between Greece and Egypt. In
the Iliad she was constructed entirely within Greek terms, as the un-
faithful wife of Menelaus who is seduced by Paris and carried off to
Troy, thus precipitating the war. From later testimony we learn that
Stesichorus wrote another version of Helen’s story.23 It was not Helen
herself, but her image that the gods dispatched to Troy, while the “real”
Helen remained in Egypt, at the court of the Egyptian king, Proteus, to
be later recovered by her husband on his return from the Trojan War.24
Herodotus devotes several chapters (2.112–20) of analysis to her story.
In his version Thonis is a pious Egyptian priest of the Delta who refuses
to allow Alexander (Paris), when blown off course for Troy, to continue
his voyage with another man’s wife. He insists on bringing Alexander
to Proteus for judgment. Proteus immediately proclaims that (however
tempting) it is impious to kill strangers, so he dispatches Alexander un-
harmed to Troy but retains Helen until her husband can claim her. Pro-
teus’s behavior is the reverse of contemporary portraits of barbarian
kings like Busiris. Proteus’s virtue is underscored by the act assigned to
Menelaus: after he has reclaimed Helen, finding himself unable to leave
Egypt and sail home because of contrary winds, it is Menelaus who be-
haves like the barbarian by sacrificing two native children. Elsewhere,
21. Lloyd 1976, 212–13; Vasunia 2001, 185–93; see also the discussion below.
22. Vasunia 2001, 207–15.
23. PMG frr. 192–93.
24. Herodotus 2.116. He detects evidence of Egyptian Helen in Homer’s Iliad
(6.289–92) and in the Odyssey (4.227–30 and 4.351–92).
28 Conceptualizing Egypt
Herodotus does not find unalloyed virtue in Egyptian kings but in his
narrative of their succession rather evenly distributes praise and blame.
That he should figure Proteus and Menelaus as opposites conforms to
his overall strategy of presenting the two cultures as diametrically op-
posed, while the pious actions of Thonis and Proteus suit his notions
about the deeply religious nature of Egyptian society. Helen’s sojourn in
Egypt at the time of the (for Greeks) historically significant Trojan War
reinforces the marginality of Egypt to the broader course of Greek his-
tory. Proteus seemingly cannot affect the war’s outcome by, for ex-
ample, simply sending informants to the Greeks at Troy; he remains the
passive guardian of the woman until another unplanned action can
bring Menelaus to reclaim her.
In contrast to Herodotus, Euripides’ late fifth-century tragedy on
Helen dramatized Egyptian kingship in quite negative terms: the two
Egyptian characters in the play, Theonoe and Theoclymenos, are chil-
dren of Proteus. The prophetess, Theonoe, acts out an excess of reli-
gious devotion, while her brother, Theoclymenos, is a typical barbarian
despot, who refuses to honor Helen’s faithfulness to her marriage vows
and would kill any strangers who were luckless enough to happen upon
his shore. Egypt is constructed as a world of darkness and death, a
Hades-like place of mythological stasis for Helen, who cannot effect or
participate in events until once again the Greeks are blown off course
and her husband arrives. Egypt is an accidental encounter, a location
that Greeks do not plan to visit, and one filled with the unpredictable or
the paradoxical—a Helen who did not go to Troy. Within Euripides’
play, Helen exemplifies the kind of mythological bi- or ambi-valence
that often seems to occur in Hellenistic poetry. Her story is legible in
two entirely different ways: she is a good wife (in Egypt) or a bad wife
(in Troy); she is a figure whose self-indulgence was “a scourge to ships,
men, and cities” (as in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon 689–90) or a con-
cerned mother and daughter and wife who would sacrifice herself for
the good of her kin (in Euripides). Staging his play at the moment when
Menelaus returns from Troy to find the wife over whom he fought a
war for ten years resident in Egypt, Euripides’ Helen necessarily sets up
a context where truths compete. At the heart of the play is the question,
Which Helen is real—the Egyptian or the Greek?
In the fourth century, both Isocrates and Plato turn to Egypt in their
discussions of good government. In his Busiris Isocrates apparently in-
verts what had become the popular view of Busiris and sets out deliber-
ately to refashion or sanitize his reputation. Isocrates specifically makes
Conceptualizing Egypt 29
To sum up then: those in charge of the city must cling to this idea and
stay above all alert to keep corruption from creeping in and to prevent in-
novation in gymnastics and in poetry, contrary to the established
order. . . . Ways of song are nowhere disturbed without disturbing the
most fundamental ways of the state.
25. Busiris 13–23. See Froidefond 1971, 259–63. In this regard, Sparta and the Spar-
tan form of government is often viewed as utopian and linked with Egypt. See, for ex-
ample, Isocrates Busiris 18. On the Egyptian ancestry of the Dorians via Perseus, see
Herodotus 6.53–55.
30 Conceptualizing Egypt
26. The Busiris, which is usually dated to the early fourth century b.c.e., was likely to
have been written before the Republic, and the philosophers to whom Isocrates refers are
a matter of speculation. See Froidefond 1971, 237–48; N. Livingstone, A Commentary
on Isocrates’ Busiris (Leiden, 2001) 44–56; and Vasunia 2001, 226–36. A. Cameron
points out that Plato’s views might have circulated well before the Republic appeared,
however (“Crantor and Posidonius on Atlantis,” CQ 33 [1983] 83 n. 10).
27. For more detailed discussions, see Vasunia 2001, 216–47; A. Nightingale,
“Plato’s Law Code in Context: Rule by Written Laws in Athens and Magnesia,” CQ 49
(1999) 100–23.
28. The fragments are collected by Lasserre 1966 with extensive commentary. See
also F. Gisinger, Die Erdbeschreibung des Eudoxos von Knidos (Berlin, 1920), particu-
larly 35–58, for discussion of the Egyptian material.
29. For his influence on Plato and Aristotle, see Froidefond 1971, 316, 318–22. Eu-
doxus’s work on astronomy was used by Aratus in his Phaenomena, and two papyrus
treatises based on his work and written in the early Ptolemaic period have been found in
Egypt. Eudoxus is also cited by Callimachus in the grammatical fragments (frr. 407, 410
Pf.).
Conceptualizing Egypt 31
Hecataeus, see Burstein 1992, 45–49; 1996, 597–600. J. Dillery (“Hecataeus of Abdera:
Hyperboreans, Egypt, and the Interpretatio Graeca,” Historia 47.3 [1998] 255–75) ar-
gues that even Hecataeus’s work “On the Hyperboreans” was modeled on Egypt.
37. Diodorus Siculus 1.28.2–4 ( = FGrH 264 F 25). See Vasunia 2001, 229–36.
38. Burstein 1996, 599. Vasunia (2001, 230–32) points out that Hecataeus reversed
Plato’s chronology, making Athens a colony of Egypt (Diodorus Siculus 1.28 = FGrH 264
T25).
34 Conceptualizing Egypt
cided for himself. At dawn, for example, it was necessary for him upon
waking to take up first of all the letters that had been sent from every di-
rection, so that he might be able to execute and accomplish everything
properly, knowing exactly each thing that was accomplished in the king-
dom. . . . It was not possible [for Egyptian kings] to make a legal decision
or transact any business randomly, nor to punish anyone hubristically or
in anger or for some other unjust reason, but only in accordance with the
laws prescribed for each offence. . . . Because the kings employed such
just behavior with their subjects, . . . during most of the time for which
kings are recorded in memory, they maintained a functioning polity, and
spent their lives most happily, as long as the system of laws that was pre-
viously described remained in force, and in addition they conquered
more countries and acquired the greatest wealth and adorned their lands
with unsurpassed works and monuments and their cities with costly ded-
ications of every sort.39
This insistence that the ruler govern in accordance with strict laws to
which he himself was held accountable, as well as the connection be-
tween just royal behavior and the prosperity of Egypt, is not presented
as a Platonic ideal, but a historicized reality. This link commences with
Osiris, the divine first king, who with his wife, Isis, introduces civilized
behavior, the arts and learning, as well as agriculture. Hecataeus also
presents his readers with a historical model of the ideal king—Sesoösis.
Herodotus treats this same king at considerable length in book 2,
where he appears as a world conqueror whose deeds rival the Persian
dynasts, Darius and Cyrus. Sesoösis (or Sesostris, as Herodotus calls
him) was not one pharaoh but a composite of several.40 The name is
probably a Hellenized form of the Egyptian Senwosret, a throne-name
born by several pharaohs of the Twelfth Dynasty, but there are obvious
accretions from the empire-building style of Ramesses II as well.41
Scholars tend to date the initial synthesis of the Sesostris legend to the
time of the Persian conquest of Egypt, although it continued to be em-
39. Diodorus Siculus 1.70.1–4, 1.71.1 and 4–5 = FGrH 264 F25.70.1–4, 71.1,
71.4–5.
40. See the discussion in Burton 1972, 163–82; and A. B. Lloyd, “Nationalist Propa-
ganda in Ptolemaic Egypt,” Historia 31 (1982) 37–40. Sesostris (as Sesonchosis) also
finds his way into Greek romance; see Martin Braun, History and Romance in Graeco-
Oriental Literature (Oxford, 1938) 13–25; and Stephens and Winkler 1995, 246–66.
Two Demotic fragments may indicate the presence of this pharaoh or at least an Egyptian
narrative context from which the Sesostris legend grew: M. Chauvaeu, “Montouhotep et
les Babyloniens,” BIFAO 91 (1991) 147–53, and an unpublished text in Copenhagen
about Amenemhet and his son Sesostris leading a campaign against Arabia. (I am in-
debted to R. Jasnow for these references.)
41. J. Baines, “Kingship, Definition of Culture, and Legitimation,” in O’Connor and
Silverman 1995, 22.
Conceptualizing Egypt 35
bellished well into the Hellenistic period. Like so much else about Egypt
that comes to us through a Greek filter, the figure of a world conqueror
was probably the production of the native Egyptian priesthoods, who
sought deliberately to promote stories about several historical king-
ships in order to create native rivals to the Persian Darius (in the fifth
century) and the Greek Alexander (in the fourth), both of whom con-
quered and hence humiliated Egypt. Certainly such a figure would have
been congenial to Greek writers and in the process of moving into a
Greek narrative would have taken on attributes that brought him even
closer to models already familiar in Greek minds. Sesoösis, therefore,
already had the profile of a world-conquering dynast, which Hecataeus
both strengthened by conforming his activities to those of Alexander42
and modified by providing him with an idealized princely education:
When Sesoösis was born his father did something befitting a great man
and a king. To the boys born on the same day from the whole of Egypt he
assigned nurses and custodians and prescribed the same training and ed-
ucation for them all, thinking that those who had been reared most
closely and had experienced the same common freedoms would be the
most loyal and the best comrades in war. Providing for their every need
he trained the boys in continual exercises and hardships. No one of them
was allowed to eat before he first ran 180 stades. Therefore upon reach-
ing manhood they were all athletes with robust bodies and in character
suited for leadership and endurance by virtue of their training in the most
excellent pursuits.43
47. Koenen 1993, 66–69; and W. Clarysse, “The Ptolemaic Apomoira,” Studia Hel-
lenistica 34 (1995) 5–37, for a discussion of revenues for Egyptian temples.
48. So, for example, Fraser 1972, 1: 497: “As seems very likely, he intended these
various elements to serve a further purpose, the glorification of Ptolemy and his king-
dom.” See also F. Walbank, CAH, 2d ed., 7.1: 77–78.
49. Murray 1972, 159.
50. Murray 1972, 168; and see below, especially chapter 3.
Conceptualizing Egypt 37
the myths dealing with the origins of the Olympian deities. Indeed,
M. L. West describes his work as “the last true Greek theogony, though
it is without gods.”51 Euhemerus wrote the Sacred Register (Hiera Ana-
graphe) in which he recorded a series of journeys undertaken, so he
claims, in the service of the Macedonian king Cassander, who died in
298 b.c.e. Since this reference to Cassander would have had a decidedly
limited value as a fiction after his lifetime, it very likely reflects Euhe-
merus’s historical situation, and thus allows him to be located within
the last quarter of the fourth century b.c.e. Like Hecataeus’s, his work,
in the main, has survived in epitome in Diodorus (5. 41–47, 6.1–5) and
in Lactantius’s quotations and paraphrases of Ennius, who translated
the Sacred Register into Latin.52 A consistent picture of Euhemerus’s
work emerges from their summaries. In the Sacred Register Euhemerus
claims to have traveled to Panchaea, a myrrh-producing island in the In-
dian Ocean, which is modeled to some extent on Plato’s imaginary
state, but also on contemporary Egypt. The physical layout of temples,
in particular, is strikingly Egyptian, as is its central waterway, the
“Water of the Sun,” with its magnificent stone quays. The class struc-
ture—priests, farmers, military (and herdsmen)—could be intended to
recall Egypt, and more or less the same breakdown can be found in
Plato as well as Isocrates’ Busiris. The denizens of Panchaea worshipped
Zeus as the founder of their culture, but this Zeus was a human being
who came from Crete and acceded to divine honors only after his death.
In Panchaea he erected a golden stele in the temple, on which he
recorded the deeds of his grandfather, Uranus, himself, Apollo, Artemis,
and Hermes, which were said to have been written in a Cretan language
but using Egyptian hieroglyphics. In Euhemerus, the gods were divided
into ouranioi, the primal or elemental gods, and epigeioi, originally
human beings who were subsequently divinized for their distinguished
services to mankind. This division into elemental deities and divinized
human rulers is certainly Egyptian and can be found also in Hecataeus
of Abdera, but it is by no means unfamilar in earlier Greek thought,53
though Euhemerus carries his model to extremes by counting the
Olympian gods in the ranks of the epigeioi. His Zeus behaves as typical
59. Jeffrey Rusten has reedited the fragments, which come, in the main, from
Diodorus, the scholia to Apollonius of Rhodes, and three papyri. See Rusten 1982,
65–76, for a discussion of Dionysius’s ethnic, and pp. 85–92 for the dating. For the estab-
lishment of the cult, see Koenen 1993, 51 n. 61.
60. Scytobrachion has been generally regarded as an Alexandrian on the basis of Sue-
tonius De grammaticis 7 ( = T3 Rusten); however, Rusten questions the reliability of this
remark on other grounds. See also L. Lehnus (“I due Dionisii [PSI 1219 fr. 1, 3–4],” ZPE
97 [1993] 25–28), who would identify one of the two Dionysii whom the Florentine
scholiast on the Aetia claims are Telchines with Scytobrachion.
61. Rusten (1982, 76–84) argues for two—an Argonautica and a separate work that
included the Amazons and Dionysus. Jacoby (see commentary on FGrH 32 F4) thought
that there was only one work and regarded the Dionysus and Amazons material as di-
gressions within the framework of the Argonautica.
62. Diodorus Siculus 4.40–55; and Rusten 1982, 144–68, F14–F38.
40 Conceptualizing Egypt
earlier Greek visitor named Krios ( = Ram) who is flayed and subse-
quently gilded.63 Medea is not a witch but a practicing herbalist who
comes to be deeply troubled by her father Aeetes’ barbarian ways and
helps the Argonauts because she finds them kindred spirits in their un-
failingly civilized behavior. A pervasive theme of Dionysius’s story is
that of the civilized Greeks confronting barbarian cruelty: for example,
Diodorus describes the area around Colchis as follows: “The Pontus,
because at that time it was settled by barbarian and wholly uncivilized
(dgrAvn) tribes, was called Axenos (6zenon), because the natives were
used to killing strangers who sailed to their shores” (Diodorus Siculus
4.40.4 = F14 Rusten). In contrast, the Argonauts are led by Heracles,
with Jason apparently playing a supporting role, and Heracles’ behav-
ior, particularly at the end of the expedition, is quite obviously meant to
recall the world-conquering exploits of Alexander: “Admired for his
courage and military skills he gathered a very powerful army and vis-
ited the whole world (ppsan . . . tbn oDkoymAnhn) acting as benefactor
(eDergetoPnta) to the race of men” (Diodorus Siculus 4.53.7 = F37
Rusten). The Argonauts apparently return to Iolcus by their original
route (that is, without the detour to Libya, as in Apollonius), and the
story continues to include the subsequent death of Pelias at Medea’s
hands, though she participates in the plan with some reluctance and
achieves Pelias’s destruction not through magic but by playing upon his
gullibility and that of his daughters. The exact relationship of Diony-
sius’s tale to that of Apollonius is uncertain, but it is difficult to imagine
that two completely independent renderings of this story were written
within (probably) the first half of the third century.64 Whatever the ac-
tual date of Dionysius’s work, the overt Greek versus barbarian cast of
his tale matches well with Apollonius’s narrative, and the fact that
Dionysius conformed much of the behavior of the Argonauts to
Alexander should serve notice to us that such elements were part of the
Greek mental landscape and, even vestigially, are likely to have been
present also in Apollonius.65
63. See Rusten 1982, 94, and addendum, p. 182, where he remarks that “the fate of
Krios was perhaps influenced by the story of Pherecydes (Plut. Pelop. 21)—or Epimenides
according to Diog. Laert. 1.115 = FGrHist 595 (Sosibius) F15—whose skin was pre-
served by the Spartans.” This is not unlikely, since Epimenides’ peculiar brand of Orphic
writings seems to have been popular in Alexandria. Epimenides is “quoted” in Calli-
machus Hymn to Zeus 7–8.
64. D. Nelis (“Iphias: Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 1.311–16,” CQ 41 [1991]
96–105) argues the priority of Dionysius for this scene in Apollonius (p. 104).
65. See Green 1997, 59–62, for a discussion of Scytobrachion and Apollonius.
Conceptualizing Egypt 41
67. paPda tbn clikAan gnta (Diodorus Siculus 3.3.4 = F12 Rusten). The “youth” of
the Egyptian king derived from his identification with Horus-in-Chemmis; see below and
chapter 4.
68. Diodorus Siculus 3.61. 5–6 = F13 Rusten.
69. While it is possible, even likely, that Alexander served as a model in part for Eu-
hemerus’s tale, this is by no means as obvious from Diodorus’s epitome as it is for Scyto-
brachion. See Fraser 1972, 2: 455 n. 834.
70. 1982, 109; and see D. B. Thompson, Ptolemaic Oinochoai (Oxford, 1973) 65.
Conceptualizing Egypt 43
71. Herodotus also depended on previous Greek writing on various subjects, but pre-
Herodotean material by the third century had either been absorbed by later writers or
would have been marginal to an experience of the country itself.
72. A. Bernand, Les inscriptions grecques de Philae, vol. 1, Époque ptolémaïque
(Paris, 1969) plates on pp. 240–46.
73. Diodorus Siculus 1.47.1–6 = F˚GrH 264 F25.47.1–6; and Burstein 1992, 45–49.
Conceptualizing Egypt 45
74. Arnold (1999, 320–21) lists the monuments built or added to by the first three
Ptolemies. For a map showing the locations of Ptolemaic temples built in the Delta, see
p. 20.
75. Arnold 1999, 157.
76. R. B. Finnestad, Image of the World and Symbol of the Creator: On the Cosmo-
logical and Iconological Values of the Temple of Edfu (Wiesbaden, 1985).
77. Finnestad 1997, 185–237.
78. Finnestad 1997, 220–26. UPZ II, p. 85 (second century b.c.e.) mentions an an-
nual festival of Amun in Thebes.
46 Conceptualizing Egypt
events in the story of Osiris, Isis, and Horus, and dramatic texts like the
“Lamentations of Isis and Nephthys”79 give an indication of what such
performances may have been like.80 The festivals that Herodotus re-
ports seeing in Bubastis, Sais, and Papremis would have been of this lat-
ter type.81
actual practice. The most important feature of the Book of the Dead—
spell 125, the so-called negative confession—was a comprehensive de-
nial of any wrongdoing, recited at the moment of judgment before
Osiris. Elements of it, however, were employed as part of yearly temple
rituals for the living king88 and also occurred in priestly oaths, some of
which now exist in both Demotic and Greek.89 At the very least, the
passages in Diodorus indicate familiarity with these very common tomb
writings (however they may have been conveyed to our Greek sources).
It is possible to ask to what extent Greeks would have been able to read
Egyptian, but the question may not be particularly meaningful in the
ancient context. Few Egyptians read hieroglyphics, and even fewer hi-
eratic, but that did not mean that Egyptians were ignorant of their own
myths or of the ideologies of kingship. Moreover, those trained in the
reading of Egyptian texts (like Manetho) were precisely the Egyptians
that Greeks connected with the Ptolemaic court were most likely to
have encountered. Although the majority of Alexandrian Greeks would
not have been able to read Egyptian texts, it is certainly possible that
some did learn to read the stylized and formulaic hieroglyphics found
on royal monuments.90 These texts are visually arresting, and the glyphs
themselves stimulate the hermeneutic impulse, as Herodotus’s interest
in the stele supposedly erected by Sesostris in Syria demonstrates. It is
unclear what Herodotus actually saw, but he was interested enough to
learn from some source that on it Sesostris had used signs for female
genitalia to humiliate the conquered enemy.91 Whether or not female
genitalia occur on the inscription Herodotus mentions, it seems he may
have been correct about the general principle. On the Semna stele of
Sesostris III, “the phallus is mutilated . . . as a mark of dishonor char-
88. See Žabkar 1988, 125–26, on the negative confession (Spell 125). See also
Merkelbach 1993, 71–84; he makes the intriguing suggestion that Diodorus is correctly
recording events and that elements that appear in funerary books may have been staged
as part of the funeral process.
89. See J. F. Quack, “Das Buch vom Tempel und verwandte Texte—Ein Vorbericht,”
Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 2.1 (2000) 1–20. (I am grateful to L. Koenen for providing
me with a copy of this article.)
90. Both Eudoxus of Cnidus and Hecataeus offer the possibility of Greeks who read
some form of Egyptian.
91. Herodotus 2.102 and 106. C. Obsomer (Les campagnes de Sésostris dans
Hérodote [Brussels, 1989] 115–24) discusses the traditional identification of the stele
with that of Nahr el-Kelb and suggests a better candidate, a Ramessid stele from Beth-
Chan. See 68–79 on the Semna stele of Sesostris III.
Conceptualizing Egypt 49
acterizing the Nubians.”92 One final point: neither ancient Greek nor
Egyptian culture was as dependent on literacy as we are today. Even the
literate employed scribes who read aloud to them and to whom they
would dictate their words. In this milieu, the most likely scenario for
the transmission of Egyptian written texts to interested Greeks was via
a trained, bilingual scribe who would be able to read a text in Egyptian
script and translate it into Greek. Even without the ability to read texts,
the consistency of visual representation from region to region as well as
from one medium to another combined with the considerable degree of
overlap between the written and visual guaranteed that a core of Egypt-
ian symbolic material must have been familiar to anyone living in the
country, just as it is for the tourist who visits Egypt today.
92. T. Hare, ReMembering Osiris: Number, Gender, and the Word in Ancient Egypt-
ian Representational Systems (Stanford, 1999) 109–10; and Vasunia 2001, 143.
93. These include “The Contendings of Horus and Seth,” “The Memphite Theology,”
and “The Story of Tefnut,” or “The Myth of the Sun’s Eye.” Much Demotic material is
still unpublished. For the Inaros and Petubastis cycles of stories, see J. Tait’s discussion in
Greek Fiction: The Greek Novel in Context, ed. J. Morgan and R. Stoneman (London,
1994) 203–22.
94. See, for example, Leaf and Bayfield’s commentary on Iliad 9.145.
50 Conceptualizing Egypt
riage, rather than wandering off blind and in exile.95 The case with
Egyptian religious stories is similar. Disparate sources have allowed
scholars to reconstruct major themes and motifs, and there is ample ev-
idence in Egypt’s long written tradition for continuity as well as change
within these traditions, but no one source provides a clear, chronologi-
cal account of any particular tale.96 Moreover, as Egyptologists are now
beginning to realize, Egyptian thinking about the divine does not follow
the logical constraints we are familiar with from Greek systemizations
of Egyptian myths. Gods and their functions resist neat description and
containment: the process is one of pleonasm and combination, of
both . . . and rather than either . . . or. Erik Hornung decribes it thus:
The order established by the creator god is characterized by “two things”
and thus by differentiation or diversity; this idea is incorporated in the
teaching that Egypt is the “Two Lands” and in a mass of other pairs that
can form a totality only if taken together. The greatest totality conceiv-
able is “the existent and the non-existent,” and in these dualistic terms
the divine is evidently both one and many.
Oppositions such as these are real, but the pairs do not cancel each
other out; they complement each other. A given x can be both a and not-
a. . . . The Egyptian script, in which individual signs had always been
able to be both picture and letter, illustrates how ancient this principle is.
I should emphasize that they “were able to be,” because we should not
exclude the possibility that the Egyptians had special cases in which a
particular given x was always a. For the Egyptians two times two is al-
ways four, never anything else. But the sky is a number of things—cow,
baldachin, water, woman—it is the goddess Nut and the goddess Hathor,
and in syncretism a deity a is at the same time another, not-a.97
For example, the sun-god, Re, can be linked in cult and iconography
with the ram-headed patron deity of Thebes, Amon, and designated
Amon-re; simultaneously he can be linked with the crocodile god of the
Fayum, Sobek, to produce Sobk-re, or even with the lord of the under-
world, Osiris. Ptah, the patron god of Memphis, identified by the
Greeks with Hephaestus, may in turn be conflated with either Amon or
Re or both. Isis, the wife and sister of Osiris and mother of Horus, is
frequently joined with Hathor, the mother of Re, both of whom can be
95. C. Austin, Euripidis Fragmenta Nova (Berlin, 1968) 59–65 = POxy. 27.2455.
96. Manetho may have attempted to do this, since he was writing for a Greek audi-
ence; so Blum 1991, 103.
97. Hornung 1982, 240–41. Hornung’s formulation of this view of Egyptian thinking
seems to have gained wide acceptance among Egyptologists. See especially his chapter
“The Problem of Logic,” pp. 237–43.
Conceptualizing Egypt 51
represented with cow’s horns. Neith, whom the Greeks identify with
Athena, is easily assimilated to both Isis and Hathor. While at first
glance Horus and his archenemy, Seth, may appear to generate a con-
sistent set of structural oppositions—Horus-Seth, order-chaos, black
land (inundation)-red land (desert), water-destructive heat—these do
not hold in every case. Occasionally Horus and Seth, who is sometimes
his brother, more often his uncle, unite to destroy a common enemy. Or
Seth enacts a positive role in place of Horus.98 Cosmogonic writing be-
haves similarly. The originary moment of creation can be described as
an act of divine masturbation or as the product of divine thought and
speech—what the creator conceived in his mind he gave substance to by
the act of speaking.99 These are not progressive phases in the develop-
ment of Egyptian thought, as earlier Egyptologists claimed them to be,
but formulations of two discrete ways of imagining creation—as a
physical act/as an intellectual act—which may be deployed simultane-
ously in poetry and religious art.
If the mythography of the divine has generated a cluster of affective
symbols that may be combined—for western readers—in paradoxical
and often unpredictable ways, Egyptian iconography surrounding king-
ship is much more stable. Temples and stelae regularly incorporate a
consistent and repetitive series of pharaonic motifs (such as the “smit-
ing of the foe”), motifs that became so familiar that Egyptian decora-
tive artists at all periods incorporate or even parody these elements in
other media. Royal representation aimed at symbolic sameness—each
pharaoh behaving exactly like his predecessor in the performance of a
series of ritualized acts that guaranteed maintainance of the cosmic and
social order. The explanation for this phenomenon is to be found in
Egyptian thinking about the cosmos and the king’s relationship to it.
Hornung recently described the central governing principle of Egyptian
life, called maat, as follows:
Maat may be interpreted as truth, justice, authenticity, correctness, order,
and straightness. It is the norm that should govern all actions, the stan-
dard by which all deeds should be measured or judged. . . . The universal
sense of the term maat has no precise equivalent in any other lan-
guage. . . . Contemporary translations have consistently yielded length-
ier, more detailed definitions. H. Bonnet, for example, understands maat
98. Some early kings were even identifed by Seth-names rather than Horus-names.
See, for example, Kemp 1989, 51–52. For an extended discussion of the role of Seth in
Egyptian thought, see Te Velde 1967.
99. See the so-called Memphite Theology; Lichtheim 1973, 54.
52 Conceptualizing Egypt
Like Plato’s notion of justice in the Republic, maat is an activity that ex-
tends from the individual to the social: only through proper behavior
and active engagement of the individual can a harmonious cosmic
order be achieved. Although learning how to act in accordance with
maat was the responsibility of every Egyptian, whatever his or her
class, the king, at the top of the social and political hierarchy, bore the
heaviest obligation to maintain maat. Gods too participated in this or-
dering principle; the universe was constructed according to its guide-
lines. The opposite of maat or cosmic order was disorder or chaos, and
the two never achieved a harmonious balance but continually vied with
each other for dominion. Egyptian religious material—both written
and pictorial—consists of the mythological exploration of this central
theme of cosmic harmony, and fundamental to the system was the role
of the king.
The Egyptian state at the time of the Ptolemaic takeover was a
theocracy, highly elaborated over two millennia, in which the king as
intermediary between the divine and human realms was essential to
create, maintain, and advance the elements of order over chaos and as
an instantiation of one or more of the gods themselves. Moreover, the
role of kingship had come to be reified; it was the office itself not the
person who occupied it that art and ceremony commemorated. Thus,
while any particular pharaoh was certainly recognized as mortal and
the product of human procreation by his attendant court and religious
advisors, nevertheless in ceremony and civic ideology he would be por-
trayed as the equal of the gods, a product of divine conception, or,
more accurately, as one in a line of human instantiations of a specific
Hatshepsut’s mother is shown being led into the presence of the god
Amun-Re. He delicately extends to her the ankh or symbol of life so
that she conceives Hatshepsut, who is thus divinely sanctioned to rule.
Subsequently from the temple wall at Luxor comes a narrative of the
encounter of Amun-Re and Mutemwia, when she conceives Amen-
hotep III, expressed both pictorially and with attendant text. As the god
entered her sleeping chamber,
she woke on account of the divine fragrance and turned towards His
Majesty. He went straightway to her, he was aroused by her. He allowed
her to see him in his divine form, after he had come before her, so that she
rejoiced at seeing his perfection. His love, it entered her body. [After this
Amun declares] Amenhetep, prince of Thebes, is the name of this child
which I have placed in your womb.103
misi. Friezes depicting the marriage of the goddess and the birth of the
divine child/pharaoh adorned the temple’s walls, and mystery plays
were staged that enacted these events of cosmogonic as well as political
significance.111 Birth shrines proliferated in the Ptolemaic period as the
focus of a royal cult in which the pharoah (as a young child) was asso-
ciated with the divine son of a variety of local divinities, though the Isis-
Osiris-Horus myth was the most prominent. These shrines were built
well into the Roman period, during which the emperors asssociated
themselves with the divine child. The Ptolemies built mammisi at Den-
dera, Edfu, and Philae; others were built in the Delta, though they have
not survived.112 One such shrine is known to have been erected in the
precincts of the Serapeum in Memphis at least by the time of the fourth
Ptolemy, if not earlier.113 From the number of private inscriptions dedi-
cated in the mammisi at Philae, it is possible that these temples were
open to the general public.114 Even if access was restricted, they re-
mained a prominent feature of the Ptolemaic religious landscape and a
central location for the enactment of the rituals of divine kingship.
The birth story of Horus was so well-known that both Hecataeus of
Miletus and Herodotus record a version of it. A fragment of Hecataeus
mentions that “in Buto by the shrine of Leto is an island, Chembis by
name, sacred to Apollo, and the island is afloat and sails around and
moves upon the water.”115 Herodotus provides more detail: he tells us
that Chemmis was a floating island located in a lake near an oracular
temple dedicated to Leto. On the island was a temple to Apollo.
Herodotus did not himself actually see the island float, but provides
what he claims is the native explanation:
The Egyptians give this account of how the island came to float: before it
began to float Leto, one of the eight primal gods, lived in the city of Buto,
111. See Goyon 1988, 34–36, with a series of illustrations of the divine birth and the
nursing of the child by a series of goddesses. The basic studies are Daumas 1958; E. Chas-
sinat, Les mammisi des temples égyptiens (Paris, 1958); and J. Junker and E. Winter, Das
Geburtshaus des Tempels der Isis in Phila (Vienna, 1961). See also A. Badawy, “The Ar-
chitectural Symbolism of the Mammisi-Chapels in Egypt,” C d’E 38 (1963) 78–90.
112. Arnold 1999; see pp. 6–19 for his plans of temple layouts and for the positions
of mammisi in relation to the central complex, and p. 20 for a map of Ptolemaic temples
built in the Delta.
113. Arnold 1999, 163.
114. See Rutherford 1998, 250–53.
115. FGrH 1.305: Dn BoAtoi% perB tb Cerbn tp% LhtoP% Gsti npso% XAmbi% gnoma,
Arb toP \Apallvno%, Gsti dB a npso% metarsAh kaB peripleP kaB kinAetai DpD toP Edato%.
Chembis is a more accurate rendering of the Egyptian than Herodotus’s Chemmis, but
the spelling Chemmis is used in virtually all the scholarly literature, so I have retained it.
58 Conceptualizing Egypt
where her oracle now is, and having received Apollo, the son of Osiris, as
a sacred trust from Isis, she kept him safe by hiding him on the island that
at this point was said to float (Dn tu nPn plvtu legomAnu nasi), when
Typhon came there searching everywhere for the son of Osiris. Apollo
and Artemis, they say, are the children of Isis and Dionysus, and Leto was
their nurse and savior. In Egyptian, Apollo is Horus, Demeter is Isis,
Artemis is Bubastis. (2.156)
116. Gwyn Griffiths (1960, 93–96) is dependent on W. A. Heidel (Hecataeus and the
Egyptian Priests in Herodotus, Book II, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Mem-
oirs 18.2 [Boston, 1935] 100); and Lloyd (1988, 139–46) on them both. S. West
(“Herodotus’ Portrait of Hecataeus,” JHS 111 [1991] 158 n. 2) expresses doubt at this
explanation, though she gives no reasons.
Conceptualizing Egypt 59
tion. Every temple was supposedly erected upon a primeval hill,117 and
to that end an artificial lake was often included in the precinct to repli-
cate the primeval waters (this is what Herodotus saw in Chemmis). The
pyramid was intended to reproduce not only the shape of the primeval
hill, but also its ability to rejuvenate.118 The hill was early fetishized as a
conical stone, called bn-bn. It was housed in a precinct known as the
“Mansion of the Bn-bn” in one of the oldest cities in Egypt, which the
Greeks named Heliopolis (“Sun City”) because it was sacred to the
sun-god. Via a series of verbal and iconic similarities the bn-bn could be
associated with the sun-god: wbn means “to shine,” and the stone
emerging from the waters resembled the sun rising on the eastern hori-
zon.119 The sun-god, too, could be portrayed as emerging from an egg
that sat upon this hill, or as the bnw-bird (probably a heron) perched
upon the bn-bn.
It is this bnw-bird that stands behind the Greek story of the phoenix
as related by Herodotus.120 He tells us that in rare intervals of five hun-
dred years or so, upon the death of its parent, the phoenix carries its fa-
ther in a hollowed-out ball of myrrh shaped like an egg to the temple of
the Sun in Heliopolis (= the Mansion of the Bn-bn). Again this is reve-
latory of the process of reception: the bird, the egg, and Heliopolis (or
elements from the creation myth) have been combined with the tradi-
tional act that precedes succession—the son (the new pharaoh) presid-
ing over the mummification of his father (the dead pharaoh). The birth-
place of Horus, the first king of Egypt and the prototype for the
pharaoh, was also imagined as the primeval hill, hence Horus too was a
type of the creator, and his birth the “first time.” This event could be
conveyed by the image of Horus as a child or again by the Horus-falcon
within a papyrus swamp, and both of these images are deployed in the
birth shrines of the Late Period. In Herodotus the two are merged as
bird and son. Just as Horus presides over the burial of his father, Osiris,
whom he succeeds, so the Horus-falcon is represented with the ball of
myrrh in which his dead father/predecessor has been immured. More-
over, he conveys the dead parent to Heliopolis where the original bn-bn
or primeval hill is located. The hill substitutes for both the tomb and
the primeval hill on which rebirth takes place. The powers of resurrec-
tion that are often attributed to the phoenix—to rise from his own
ashes—stem from this rejuvenative quality of the primeval hill and by
association the tomb.121 As we have seen with other sets of representa-
tions, for Egyptians the tomb, the bn-bn, and the primeval hill on the
one hand and the Horus child, the falcon, and the bnw-bird on the
other are not only symbols of but identical with each other. To enter
into the symbolic realm of any one part of the set activates all possible
meanings. For a Greek, however, the story of the phoenix demonstrates
the need to impose a linear narrative to which distinct and separable
meanings may be attached.
Just as they were linked with creation myths, Re and Horus are also
central in another significant cluster of representations—the theme of
order versus chaos. In Egyptian iconography the struggle between the
two is linked with both the daily cycle of the sun and the original mo-
ment of creation. The sun-god, Re, is often represented as sailing
through the night world in a celestial boat, where now, the enemy,
imagined as a giant serpent, threatens Re’s destruction, and with the
loss of the sun, the end of creation or nonexistence would ensue. Vari-
ous gods sail with the sun to ward off destruction, and solar hymns
from the New Kingdom and the Books of the Dead from the Late Pe-
riod contain ritual spells to be recited to aid Re in defeating his enemy.
Daily the sun repeats his struggles, and daily his enemy is defeated by
spells, represented iconographically by the serpent bound with ropes or
cut into pieces with knives. But,
the victory over Apophis [the serpent] is less a manifestation of strength
than of law and order, i.e., Maat. . . . The struggle takes on the nature of
a judgement that has been enforced, the confrontation between the sun
god and the enemy is like an act of jurisdiction. Re travels through the
sky “justified.” Apophis therefore not only embodies cosmic opposition
to light and movement, but also the principle of evil.122
121. For the identification of the deceased with the bnw-bird, see Book of the Dead,
Spells 8 and 84; and Žabkar 1988, 94, for the identification of the phoenix with Osiris
and the pharaoh.
122. Assman 1995, 53.
Conceptualizing Egypt 61
strides forth with his faithful hunting dogs against a chaotic band of os-
triches, who subsequently end up as feathers in the fan.124
Greeks were certainly familiar with these standard representations of
the pharaoh. In the sixth century a black-figure vase depicting Heracles
and Busiris, the Egyptian king who was notorious for sacrificing for-
eigners on his altars, took advantage of this stock motif and inverted it.
On this vase, Heracles attacks the king and his followers in precisely
the manner of royal Egyptian depictions of the pharaoh routing the
foe.125 To replace the pharaoh with Heracles on this vase appears to be
not so much parody, but a desire on the part of the vase painter to ap-
propriate for Heracles the properties of the pharaoh as the bearer of
order and civilized community.126 Diodorus, in a passage that is very
likely from Hecataeus of Abdera, decodes the Busiris story in the fol-
lowing way: in ancient times red-haired men were sacrificed at the tomb
of Osiris, because red was the color associated with Seth/Typhon, who
was the enemy of Osiris. Since very few Egyptians are red-haired, most
of those sacrificed were foreigners. Greeks misunderstood the circum-
stances and imagined that Busiris was the king who did the sacrificing,
when in fact Busiris was not a person but a place-name meaning “tomb
of Osiris.”127 Thus Diodorus (Hecataeus?) understands an event that to
Greeks marks barbarian behavior (namely, sacrificing foreigners) as a
ritual of conflict between Osiris and Seth, that is, the forces of order
and chaos. In this scheme, killing Seth/Typhon surrogates is to be
equated with conquering the enemy and restoring order.
An earlier passage in Diodorus that has not been regarded as
Hecataean also seems to describe the foe-smiting scene:
Moreover, the Egyptians tell the tale that in the time of Isis there had
been certain multibodied creatures (polysvmatoy%), who were named
“Giants” by the Greeks, but . . . by themselves,128 who were displayed in
124. For an illustration, see, for instance, The Treasures of Tutankhamun (New York,
1976) no. 18.
125. See LIMC 3.1, s.v. Bousiris; and 3.2, pls. 10, 11, 19, 23, and esp. 28. See also J.-
L. Durand and F. Lissarague, “Mourir à l’autel: Remarques sur l’ imagerie du sacrifice hu-
main dans la céramique antique,” Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 1 (1999) 33–106.
126. Heracles may have been depicted in Egyptian-inspired scenes elsewhere; see
Jourdain-Annequin 1992, 74, pl. XIVa. In both Herodotus and Hecataeus (Diodorus) he
had Egyptian affiliations or analogues. See also the discussion below, chapter 3.
127. Diodorus Siculus 1.88.5 ( = FGrH 264 F25.88.5). Much of this information is
also in Manetho (fr. 86 Waddell).
128. F. Vogel conjectured a lacuna in the text where he assumed the Egyptian name
for the multiform creatures would have been written. Burton (1972, 110–11) rejects this,
arguing that diakosmoymAnoy% teratvdb% corresponds with dnomazomAnoy%. The mean-
Conceptualizing Egypt 63
ing would then be “named giants by the Greeks, represented as monsters by the Egyp-
tians.” The textual problem does not affect my argument. The point is that for Diodorus
or his Greek source there is an equivalence between the Egyptian polysamatoi and
Greek “Giants.” See LIMC 4.1.191–93, s.v. Gigantes. Note that the giants are described
as “bicorpores” by Naevius (W. Strzelecki, Belli Punici carminis quae supersunt [Leipzig,
1964] fr. 4).
129. Diodorus Siculus 1.26.6.
130. Noted in Gwyn Griffiths 1960, 102. His own suggestion that these might be
Sethian creatures in animal form is implausible, since the verb would need to mean
“spear” or “trample.” But tAptv does not mean “spear” and rarely means “trample”
without further qualification.
131. It is described in Euripides Ion 206–7.
64 Conceptualizing Egypt
132. See Euripides Hecuba 465–74; the scholiast claims ad loc. that the scene was of
either Titans or Giants. See E. Pfuhl, De Atheniensium pompis sacris (Berlin, 1900) 6–14.
133. See Merkelbach 1977 for a discussion of the various components of the AR; see
pp. 77–83 for a detailed discussion of the Nectanebo episode, including the Egyptian par-
allels (esp. pp. 79–81). More recently see Fraser (1996, 205 n. 1), who remarks that
Merkelbach and Trumpf “expound a comprehensive, though to my mind only partially
successful, explanation of the origin of the whole work.”
134. The AR was extremely popular and survives in a number of other languages as
well. For a discussion of the stemma, see D. J. A. Ross, Alexander Historiatus (Warburg,
1968).
Conceptualizing Egypt 65
serious argument, but it does have one virtue that all scholars acknowl-
edge: it provides us with the earliest surviving literary material about
the foundation of the city of Alexandria, material that must come from
the generation after Alexander himself.135 For our purposes, it is imma-
terial whether this Alexandrian story can be attached with any degree
of confidence to the work of a particular Alexander historian, like
Cleitarchus, or whether it was cobbled together from a variety of
Alexandrian sources. What is significant is the curious nature of
Alexander’s paternity, found in both A and B versions of the story, or
perhaps it would be more accurate to say Alexander’s competing pater-
nities.
The Alexander Romance opens with Nectanebo II, the last native
king of Egypt. When he learns from his magic arts that there is no hope
for further Egyptian resistance to the Persians, he considers discretion
(not to mention survival) to be the better part of valor and flees from
Egypt via Pelusium to find himself at the court of Philip II of Macedon.
There he sets up shop as a magician and astrologer and quickly enjoys
the patronage of no less a person than Olympias, Philip’s wife. While
Philip is away on campaign, Olympias consults the astrologer about her
fears that Philip may be intending to divorce her. Nectanebo, who has
taken a fancy to the queen, flatters her by telling her that she is destined
to be joined to the great god Ammon who will impregnate her with a
son. Nectanebo continues his seduction by telling her that she will
dream of having intercourse with the god that very night, and he takes
measures to insure that indeed she does so. Then when his prediction is
fulfilled, Nectanebo advises her that the god wishes to embrace her in
the flesh, as it were, not simply via a dream. Placing himself in a nearby
chamber in the palace, he assists the queen in her preparations for the
god’s epiphany. (These details come now from the B recension). She
should expect, he tells her, to see a snake gliding towards her in her
chamber. This is the sign for her to dismiss her servants, climb into her
135. See Fraser 1996, 205–26, particularly pp. 211–13, for the latest analysis of the
various components of the AR and their relative dates. For what follows I am using only
the oldest material, the Nectanebo story (1–17), the visit to the Siwah oasis (30), and
Alexander in Memphis (34). Fraser would date the details of the description of Alexan-
dria to the imperial period (212–14 b.c.e.), but I am interested in the foundation story
only in its broadest outlines, and this will have been part of the oldest stratum of the text.
See also R. Stoneman’s introduction in The Greek Alexander Romance (London, 1991).
He concludes that “the main outlines of the narrative could have been fully formed as
early as 50–100 years after Alexander’s death” (p. 14).
66 Conceptualizing Egypt
bed, and cover her face, so as not to look directly at the god. On the
night, Nectanebo, garbed in a ram’s fleece and horns and carrying an
ebony scepter, enters the chamber and has intercourse with the queen.
She, of course, steals a look at the “god” as he enters the chamber, but
does not find his form particularly alarming because he looks as he did
in her dream. As Nectanebo rises from their bed after the lovemaking
he announces that she is pregnant with a male child. On the morrow,
when he—as Nectanebo—enters the queen’s chamber, ostensibly to dis-
cover what happened, she expresses her delight and asks: “Will the god
be returning to me again, seeing as I had such pleasure from him?” In
this manner, Nectanebo and Olympias continue a clandestine liaison
until Philip’s return. Nectanebo, meanwhile, thoughtfully sends a fal-
con as a dream messenger to apprise Philip of Olympias’s impending
motherhood and of the divinity of the father.136 Philip, at first, is not
unnaturally annoyed, but after a few more magic tricks by
Nectanebo—during a palace gathering, he turns himself into a large
serpent137 that curls up at Olympias’s feet and then flies off as an eagle—
Philip is convinced that a god is truly the father of Olympias’s child, or
at least that he would be wise to accept the status quo.
The narrative includes further incidents from Alexander’s youth, in-
cluding his education at the hands of distinguished philosophers and
scientists138 and his military training under Philip. After this he succeeds
to his father’s kingdom and quickly subdues the known world.139
Alexander then proceeds to the Siwah oasis in order to learn the truth
of his paternity. At Siwah was located an oracular temple to the Egypt-
ian god Amun-Re, regarded by Greeks as among the most prestigious
oracles in the ancient world. Here, Ammon acknowledges Alexander as
his son and instructs him in a prophecy to establish the city of Alexan-
dria. Obediently, Alexander hastens to lay out the perimeters of the new
city, before marching on to Memphis where he is proclaimed pharaoh.
In Memphis he sees a statue of Nectanebo with an inscription pro-
136. The falcon is not a randomly selected messenger: Nectanebo was worshipped in
Ptolemaic Memphis as a falcon-god, possibly connected with Horus. See H. de Meule-
naere, “Les monuments du culte des rois Nectanébo,” C d’E 35 (1960) 92–107.
137. The snake too is probably a manifestation of Amun. His aspect as a creator god
was “Hiddenness,” which could be represented by the serpent; see LÄ 1: 237–48.
138. 1.13: Leucippus (music), Melemnus (geometry), Anaximenes of Lampsacus
(rhetoric), and Aristotle (philosophy).
139. 1.27–29 B. The speed with which these events are narrated and the relative lack
of detail tend to confirm the Alexandrian bias of the piece.
Conceptualizing Egypt 67
claiming: “This king who has fled will come again to Egypt | not in age
but in youth, and our enemy the Persians | He will subject to us” (1.34
A and B). Alexander embraces the statue, proclaims his lineage publicly
to the gathered crowd, and offers this explanation of these events:
Egypt and the peoples not blest with its natural economic advantages
were destined to be united, and the money the Egyptians were used to
paying to the Persians in tribute they could now give to Alexander, “not
that I may collect it for my own treasury, but rather so that I may spend
it on your city, the Egyptian Alexandria, capital of the world.” Thus
Alexandria is deliberately cast as both Greek and Egyptian, though a
cynic might doubt that parity between those contributing the money
(Egyptians) and those spending it (Greeks) was ever intended.
In this incident, the description of the encounter of Nectanebo with
Olympias disguised as the ram-god matches rather closely Egyptian de-
scriptions of the sacred encounter of the wife of a pharaoh with the god
Amun-Re, discussed above. The Alexander Romance follows in detail
the myth of the divine birth of the pharaoh, with one element trans-
posed or reversed—the god normally assumes the form of the queen’s
human husband, while here the human lover assumes the form of the
god. We have what looks like an inversion of a tale that would have
been serious in its purpose and quite familiar to Egyptians. The trans-
mission of the Alexander Romance is so complex that it is impossible—
and probably irrelevant—to determine whether the story in its current
form was the work of a native Greek writer or whether it betrays an
Egyptian origin.140 The satirical element certainly fits an Egyptian mi-
lieu—Egyptian literature is full of tales like the “Contendings of Horus
and Seth” or “Cheops and the Magicians” that seem to mock or under-
mine the high seriousness of official ritual and state-oriented myths.141
140. R. Jasnow (“The Greek Alexander Romance and Demotic Egyptian Literature,”
Journal of Near Eastern Studies 56.2 [1997] 101) suggests that the verb synklonasaß is
a mistranslation of Demotic phr, which can mean “enchant” (the correct meaning for the
passage) as well as “jumble up”; Jasnow observes: “It was presumably a Greek or a Hel-
lenized Egyptian who translated the text, since it is improbable, in my opinion, that an
educated Demotic scribe well versed in this tradition would have committed such an
error.” Interestingly Jasnow’s argument assumes that a Greek might read Demotic Egypt-
ian, and that the transmission was written not oral.
141. There are a number of surviving satirical sketches of animals whose activities
ape humans’, the most famous of which is in Turin. A portion of this papyrus also con-
tains sexually explicit scenes. See J. A. Omlin (Der Papyrus 55001 und seine satirisch-ero-
tischen Zeichnungen und Inschriften [Turin, 1973]), who draws a number of parallels be-
tween these scenes and religious rituals.
68 Conceptualizing Egypt
On the other hand, satire is not unknown in Greek literature. This story
has usually been viewed as propaganda deliberately circulated by the
Egyptian priesthood to legitimate Alexander’s claim to the throne of
Egypt for Egyptians.142 But this is to misunderstand the birth story, the
purpose of which is to locate Alexander within the continuum of Egypt-
ian kingship.
The connection of Alexander with Nectanebo could only have been
made during the formative stages of Macedonian-Greek rule in Egypt,
when there was a desire—if not a need—to stress the continuity of the
new rule and its integral connection with the past, not several centuries
later when memories of Nectanebo (apart from his cult as falcon-god)
will necessarily have been dim among both Egyptians and Greeks.143
The story itself functions not in the mythical realm of the divine birth,
nor in that of apocalyptic visions, but in the world of possibility, of po-
litical reality. Nectanebo apparently did disappear from Egypt at the
time of the second Persian conquest.144 Presumably he could have fled to
Macedon, and he could have fathered Alexander. Which is not to say
that he did. The story we now have appears not in Egyptian, but in
Greek. While some Egyptians in the early Hellenistic period would have
been bilingual, the sheer quantity of Demotic writing that survives from
this period suggests that Egyptians were still partaking of a rich tradi-
tional literary culture and would not have needed or depended on
Greek versions of their own tales. Moreover, Egyptian literary proto-
cols, even in the more recently discovered Demotic material, differ con-
siderably from the arrangement of detail in a story for a Greek audi-
ence. No versions of this story in Demotic Egyptian have been found.
The fact that the story circulated so widely in Greek makes it reason-
able to assume that a Greek audience found some value in a doubly de-
termined fathering of Alexander. That audience would have consisted,
in the main, of Greek natives and their descendants but could have in-
cluded Egyptian readers of Greek, who were to be found among the
142. See, for example, Fraser 1972, 1: 680–81; and Huss 1994, 129–33, with bibli-
ography, n. 366.
143. There is other evidence for early exchange of stories about Nectanebo between
Greeks and Egyptians. The so-called Dream of Nectanebo, from the Sarapaeum in Mem-
phis and dated to the early second century b.c.e., is a Greek version of an obviously
Egyptian tale. See now K. Ryholt’s edition of a Demotic fragment of the story in ZPE 122
(1998) 197–200. For a full-scale treatment of the Greek text, see L. Koenen, BASP 22
(1985) 171–94. See also Huss 1994, 133–37 and n. 397 for bibliography.
144. See N. Grimal, A History of Ancient Egypt (Oxford, 1992) 375–81.
Conceptualizing Egypt 69
145. The most obvious group would have been the priesthoods, which formed an im-
portant economic class. The priests were also the most likely to have become bilingual.
See Thompson 1990; Clarysse 1979.
146. Plutarch Alexander 2.6.
147. Plutarch Alexander 3.1–2.
148. Arrian Anabasis of Alexander 3.3.2. See A. B. Bosworth, Commentary on Ar-
rian’s History of Alexander (Oxford, 1980) 1: 269–73, for Alexander’s divine and heroic
ancestors.
70 Conceptualizing Egypt
begs the question. If Alexander is the son of Ammon, he does not need
another human father; Plutarch, after all, delicately suggests that the
agency was a snake. But if he has a human father, his claim to divinity
is somewhat weakened: the two competing claims, both connecting his
paternity with Egypt, would seem to cancel each other out. But in
Egyptian terms they fit into the traditional claims for the paternity of
the pharaoh. In fact, two separate elements appear to have been delib-
erately stitched together, in such a way as to leave their seams quite vis-
ible.149 One element is the myth of the divine birth of the pharaoh,
which must be Egyptian in origin and intended not so much to justify
but to signal the transition from one invader’s reign (the Persians’)
to another’s (Alexander’s); the other is Nectanebo’s fathering of
Alexander, an event no doubt suggested by an Egyptian prophecy of
Nectanebo’s return. Within the framework of Egyptian thought the
doubling makes excellent sense. Egyptians were quite aware that their
pharaohs were mortal and had human fathers, but the two fathers serve
different purposes—the one conveys legitimacy to Alexander’s conquest
in political terms, while the other inserts the foreign pharaoh into the
native theology.
While for Egyptians the account of Alexander’s birth from Ammon
links him to his pharaonic predecessors as yet another manifestation of
the god on earth, the living Horus, the account of Alexander’s divine
birth functions separately but similarly for the Greek audience, to make
him no longer mere mortal, but akin to the heroes of their mythic past.
By replacing his human father with the Egyptian god Ammon, Alexan-
der is elevated—in a way he cannot have been though the agency of
Greek myth—to the stature of Heracles and Perseus, the two heroes
from whom he claimed descent, and to an equal footing with Dionysus,
whose course through the East Alexander traced in his conquests. The
employment of the Egyptian tale provides a neat complement to
Alexander’s Greek lineage. Like Perseus and Heracles, Alexander now
has a mortal father (Philip) on the books, with a mother who has cap-
tured the fancy of a god. This divine parentage accounts, in mythic
terms, for Alexander’s uniqueness and for the astonishing nature of his
accomplishments.150 In Perseus and Heracles he also has ancestors who
had been previously linked to Egypt via Greek myth. The A recension of
149. Merkelbach (1977, 81) accounts for this in terms of ritual performance and
masking.
150. See pages 155–56 for the Egyptian idea of the divine image.
Conceptualizing Egypt 71
the Alexander Romance takes this double origin to its logical extremes,
informing us that on the night in question Nectanebo tells Olympias:
“This god, when he comes to you, will first become a serpent, crawling
along the ground and hissing, then he will change into horned Ammon,
then into peerless Heracles, then into thyrsos-bearing Dionysus, then
when he has intercourse with you in human form, the god will reveal
himself in my image.”151
Inevitably the question is asked whether stories like this were circu-
lated with the serious intent of convincing the denizens of Hellenistic
Egypt about Alexander’s ancestry. Recognizing their inherent improba-
bility, scholars have been inclined to regard such tales as serious or as
propaganda only for naive Egyptians, while relegating them to the
realm of fantastical or romantic fiction for Greeks. But to pose the
question in terms of believability or seriousness of intent may overlook
a more significant point. It is not important whether Greeks would have
believed the Nectanebo tale, if by belief we mean that it was accepted as
veridically true. What is important is the fact that was told. The act of
producing this narrative of Alexander’s double descent carries its own
implicit significance beyond the message of Greco-Egyptian cultural in-
teraction that it makes explicit. The style and tone of the Alexander Ro-
mance may predispose us to regard it as satire or parody, and therefore
of little consequence, but even this feature of the story is legible within
the two different cultures. There is a salacious quality to the seduction
of Olympias that is reminiscent of a Milesian tale, and there are unmis-
takably Greek chauvinistic tendencies at work in the portrayal of
Nectanebo as a magician. However, the tale also possesses a satirical el-
ement not unfamiliar in Egyptian literature and art, where status rever-
sal and what appears to be outrageous irreverence abound.152 It is very
possible that the story in its current form accurately reflects the origi-
nal; that it deliberately sets out to undercut the pretentiousness of its
own message. In other words, that its mocking quality served to miti-
gate the extravagance of the claim either of divine birth or of Alexan-
der’s Egyptian paternity, while nevertheless reinforcing this very mes-
sage. The serious intent comes from the story’s novelty of vision, the
151. eRta synelubn dnurvpoeidb% ueb% DmfanAzetai toB% DmoB% tApoy% Gxvn (A
1.6.3).
152. O’Connor and Silverman (1995, 57) discuss a sexually explicit graffito from the
Eighteenth Dynasty that depicts Queen Hatshepsut in less than complimentary circum-
stances. See their chapter as a whole, pp. 49–87, for various attitudes towards kingship;
and see above, note 141.
72 Conceptualizing Egypt
Callimachean Theogonies
Callimachus wrote for and about the Ptolemies on more than one occa-
sion, yet our modern anti-imperial bias diminishes our ability to appre-
ciate the dynamics of this poetry. Either we reject it as sycophantic or
rescue it by reading it as subversive or not really about its chosen sub-
ject—the Ptolemies or the gods—but fundamentally about poetry. The
extreme view is that Callimachus is a poet who is engaged in “art for
art’s sake” and who has retreated into formalism and a preoccupation
with style over substance either as a reaction against the necessity of
writing for an uncongenial imperial court or because of his belatedness
within the Greek poetic tradition.1 To maintain this position for ancient
poetry verges on the reductionist. All poetry is about poetry in some
sense—or at least about the poet’s ability to create realms of the imagi-
nation—but it is also about something else, and it is that something
else—the poet’s chosen topic—in and through which an individual po-
etics comes to be expressed. We acknowledge that Pindar wrote praise
poetry for pay, and have come to understand the complexities of his
technique, with its sober reminders for the victor and his community of
the dangers of hubris, as the means by which he articulated his views of
art. However, Pindar’s style differs significantly from that of Calli-
machus, for whom humor and “realism” are important components.
74
Callimachean Theogonies 75
4. G. B. Conte (Rhetoric of Imitation [Ithaca, N.Y., 1986] 27) cautions against the
“common philological trap of seeing all textual resemblances as produced by the inten-
tionality of a literary subject.” But conscious allusion to one’s predecessors does happen;
not all referentiality is genre-driven “white noise,” for Alexandrian poets in particular,
whose relationship with traditional genres and what they encode is problematic and a
focus of poetic attention. The fact that they spend a great deal of time telling the same
seemingly obscure stories or borrowing rare words from each other or from Homer sug-
gests a greater degree of intentionality at work than we might wish to impute to echoes of
Vergil to be found in Silver Latin epic. That said, I think it likely that much of what seems
intentional precisely because of its rarity might, if we had the bulk of fourth-century and
early Hellenistic writing, look much more generically driven. For discussions of intertex-
tuality in classics, see the 1997 issue of Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi clas-
sici, which is devoted to this subject, and Hinds 1998.
5. See Haslam’s remarks (1993, 111).
Callimachean Theogonies 77
8. 1871, 1–4.
9. 1986, 155–70.
10. Koenen 1977, 4–7, 29–32, 47–49; and see the discussion below, chapter 5.
11. Koenen 1977, 62–63; 1993, 78–79.
12. Koenen 1977, 58–62; 1993, 73 n. 114.
13. Clauss (1986, 156–57 nn. 3–5) summarizes previous scholarly positions on this
subject. See G.-B. D’Alessio (Callimaco: Inni, Epigrammi, Ecale, vol. 1 [Milan, 1996]
72–73 n. 18), who expresses doubts about the identification of Zeus and Ptolemy, though
without further argument.
14. 1972, 1: 665–66.
15. A. Rostagni, Poeti alessandrini (Turin, 1963) 59; B. Gentili, Poetry and Its Public
in Ancient Greece: From Homer to the Fifth Century, trans. T. Cole (Baltimore and Lon-
don, 1988) 171.
Callimachean Theogonies 79
“ My Heart Is in Doubt”
Callimachus continues:
pp% kaA nin, DiktaPon deAsomen dB LykaPon
5 Dn doiu mala uyma%, DpeB gAno% dmfariston.
ZeP, sB mBn \IdaAoisin Dn oGresA fasi genAsuai,
ZeP, sB d' Dn 0rkadAi· pateroi, pater, DceAsanto;
“Krpte% deB cePstai”·
How shall we hymn him—as Dictaean or Lycaean? My heart is in doubt,
for your birth is debated. Zeus, on the one hand, they say that you were
born in the hills of Ida; Zeus, on the other, that you were born in Arcadia.
Which of them lied, Father? “Cretans are always liars.”
His quandary is, prima facie, a choice between two Greek myths
about the birth of Zeus, one of which (the Cretan) is very familiar or at
least seems so from what now survives, the other (the Arcadian) rather
more obscure, and first attested in this poem. The main differences in
the two birth stories are the following: in Arcadia Zeus is born on a
mountain, not in a cave (as in the Cretan myth), and Zeus’s birth is the
immediate cause of Arcadian rivers beginning to flow. At this point two
intertexts, both of which are now fragmentary, will be helpful in under-
standing Callimachus’s strategy—a Hymn to Eros by Antagoras of
Rhodes and the first Homeric Hymn to Dionysus.
Seven lines survive from the opening of Antagoras’s hymn:19
Dn doiu moi uyma%, e toi gAno% dmfAbohton,
g se uepn tbn prpton deigenAvn, fiErv%, eGpv,
tpn essoy% ÈEreba% te palai basAleia te paPda%
geAnato NBj pelagessin Cp' eDrAo% \VkeanoPo¢
5 h sA ge KAprido% yQa perAfrono%, dA se GaAh%,
h \AnAmvn¢ toPo% sB kakb fronAvn dlalhsai
dnurapoi% dd' Dsula¢ tb kaB sAo spma dAfyion.
My heart is in doubt, in that your birth is celebrated everywhere.20 Am I
to say that you are the first of the eternal gods, Eros, many of which chil-
dren Erebos and Queen Night once bred under the waves of broad
Ocean? Or that you are the son of nimble-witted Cypris or of Earth or of
the Winds? You are such as to wander about devising ill or good for men.
Even your body is double in nature.
19. For Antagoras, see P. von der Mühll, “Zu den Gedichten des Antagoras von Rho-
dos,” Mus. Helv. 19 (1962) 28–32. Antagoras’s poem is taken to be prior; see, for in-
stance, Wilamowitz, Antigonos von Karystos (Berlin, 1881) 69. The text of Antagoras is
that of CA, incorporating the corrections of R. Renehan, “The Collectanea Alexandrina:
Selected Passages,” HSCP 69 (1964) 379–81.
20. Although parallels confirm “widely celebrated” as the usual meaning of dmfAbo-
hton, given its constituent parts, it is also possible to take it as a virtual synonym for Cal-
limachus’s dmfariston (see von der Mühll, Mus. Helv. 19 [1962] 31 n. 11).
Callimachean Theogonies 81
21. See, for example, Menander Rhetor 343.17–20 Russell and Wilson; Longus
Daphnis and Chloe 2.5–6; “Metiochus and Parthenope” in Stephens and Winkler 1995,
86–87, 91–92.
22. See, for example, Orphic Argonautica 14: difyb perivpAa kydrbn “ˆErvta.
23. 1990, 60.
24. West (1983, 131–33) even argues that the account found in Callimachus of Zeus’s
nurture on Crete was Orphic in origin.
25. The poem was supposedly written to replicate the shape of wings. Cameron
(1995, 31–33) suggests that it was inscribed on the wings of a statue and was intended to
account for the statue’s peculiar double iconography.
82 Callimachean Theogonies
Here, after an opening with a list of four local claims to be the birth-
place of the god (three islands, one river), the poet shifts his attention to
two new claims—those who say the god was born in Thebes, and
they—he tells us with the emphatic placement of ceydamenoi—are
wrong, and those who locate Dionysus’s birth in Nysa, near the streams
of the Aegyptus, that is, the Nile.29 The choice then is a Theban or
Greek birthplace, or a Nysan or Near Eastern birthplace, for the god,
and the Greek site is explicitly labeled “false.”
In selecting Nysa as the birthplace of Dionysus, the poet exploits a
folk etymology of the god’s name that links Dionysus and Zeus,30 and
he chooses a place that is geographically fluid. Stephen of Byzantium
lists ten Nysas, several of which were in the Near East or North
Africa.31 This multiplicity of Nysas is complicit in the generation of iso-
morphic tales about Dionysus that could be attached to different loca-
tions in the spread of the Dionysiac cult. Both the etymology of Diony-
28. ceAdomai) ranges in meaning from “being mistaken” to “being a liar.” Without
the rest of the poem it is difficult to know which translation is more accurate. Similarly,
Krpte% deB cePstai (below) is usually translated as “Cretans are always liars,” and that
is certainly the meaning that Paul intends when he quotes the line in the Epistle to Titus,
but in its original context the meaning of the verb may have been closer to “don’t know
how to speak the truth,” marking a capacity rather than a deliberate choice. Callimachus,
needless to say, plays with the full semantic range of ceAdomai. See also Detienne 1996,
85–86; and the full-scale treatment in Pratt 1993.
29. Herodotus locates the Nysa of Dionysus’s birth in Ethiopia (2.146; 3.97), and
Antimachus in the area between the Nile and the Arabian Gulf (fr. 162 Matthews = 127
Wyss).
30. As Diodorus says, “from his father and the place” (1.15.5). This etymology is dis-
cussed in Cook 1965, 271–89.
31. Note also that Nysa was prominent enough for a female automaton so-identified
to be featured in the Grand Procession of Ptolemy Philadephus (Athenaeus 5.198e), on
which see Rice 1983, 62–68.
84 Callimachean Theogonies
sus and the potential for geographic conflation resemble two of Calli-
machus’s own compositional strategies—geographical markers that
exist in more than one location and etymologies that link the god with
multilocal place-names. Moreover, Diodorus Siculus, in a passage that
may have come originally from Hecataeus of Abdera, not only records
the popular etymology of Dionysus’s name, quoting this same Homeric
hymn as evidence, but explicitly links Nysan Dionysus with Egyptian
Osiris, or one dying god with another:
[They say that Osiris] was reared in Nysa, a city of Arabia Felix, near
Egypt, being a child of Zeus, and among the Greeks he is named Diony-
sus, a name derived from his father and the place. And the poet mentions
Nysa in his hymns, namely, that it was near Egypt, when he says: “There
is a certain Nysa, and so on.”32
32. tbn ÈOsirin, kaB trafpnai mBn tp% eDdaAmono% \ArabAa% Dn NAsi plhsAon
ADgAptoy, Dib% gnta paPda, kaB tbn proshgorAan Gxein parb toP% ·Ellhsin dpa te toP
patrb% kaB toP tapoy Dianyson dnomasuAnta. memnpsuai dB tp% NAsh% kaB tbn poi-
htbn Dn toP% Emnoi%, eti perB tbn AGgypton gAgonen, oQ% lAgei, ktl. Jacoby (Diodorus
Siculus 1.15.6–7 = FGrH 264 F 25.15.6–7) considers the identification of Osiris and
Dionysus authentically Hecataean but the etymologizing to be Diodorus’s own comment.
However, the fact that the etymology is embedded within the longer indirect statement
suggests that it may well belong to the original source. See also Diodorus Siculus 3.65.7.
Herodotus also identifies Dionysus and Osiris (2.42).
33. An epigram assigned to Antipater of Thessalonica (AP 7.369) imitates the open-
ing of Callimachus’s hymn specifically as a choice between Greek and Egyptian, which
the poet resolves by linking the two by heredity.
\Antipatroy rhtpro%
\ Dgb tafo%, clAka d\ Gpnei
Grga Panellanvn peAueo martyrAh%.
Callimachean Theogonies 85
I am the tomb of the rhetor Antipater. How great was his inspiration, you may ask all
Greeks as witness. He lies disputed, whether his race was from Athens or from the Nile,
but worthy of both continents. Besides, the lands are of one blood, as a Greek story has
it, the one Pallas’s by lot, the other Zeus’s.
34. See R. P. Martin, “The Seven Sages as Performers of Wisdom,” in Cultural Poetics
in Archaic Greece; Cult, Performance, Politics, ed. C. Dougherty and L. Kurke (Cam-
bridge, 1993) 122; West 1983, 45–53; and Detienne 1996, 55, 131–35. Callimachus in
his own tally of the Seven in the Iambi does not include Epimenides.
35. Hopkinson 1984a, 140–44; Clauss 1986, 158; Goldhill 1986, 127–29; and Bing
1988, 76–77 n. 42.
36. Fr. 2 Kinkel = B1 D-K. The line is quoted in Paul’s Epistle to Titus.
86 Callimachean Theogonies
From this early period of Greek poetry we see that the relationship
of the Muses, the goddesses who inspire and regulate poetic utterance,
to truth, and in turn the poet’s relationship to truth, is marked as less
than straightforward. Truth (dlhuAa) and the appearance of truth
(ceAdea pollb . . . DtAmoisin cmoPa) would seem to be indistinguish-
able to the average mortal, though the Muses, and presumably their
clients, the poets, know the difference. The Muses breathe a divine
voice into Hesiod that enables him to celebrate the future and the past,
and they order him to sing about the brood of the eternal gods (30–34).
He then begins his song by paraphrasing the song of the Muses, who
themselves are represented as singing theogonies. Much has been made
of this Hesiodic passage and what it implies about the writing of Greek
poetry in general.37 For our purposes, it is worth considering what effect
the indeterminacy of truth has for writing about cosmic origins and di-
vine hierarchies, subjects that by their very nature are unknowable, and
then to what extent the plurality of available versions, and what is at
stake in preferring one account over another, might have been central to
Callimachus’s project. M. Detienne’s observations about the relation-
ship of the poet to the construction of cosmic order and kingship in the
Theogony are illuminating:
The ordering of the world in the Greek cosmogonies and theogonies was
inseparable from myths of sovereignity. Furthermore, the myths of emer-
gence, while recounting the story of successive generations of the gods,
foregrounded the determining role of a divine king who, after many
struggles, triumphed over his enemies and once and for all established
order in the cosmos. Hesiod’s poem . . . does appear to provide the final
remaining example of sung speech praising the figure of the king, in a so-
ciety centered on the type of sovereignity seemingly exemplified by Myce-
nean civilization. In Hesiod’s case, the royal figure is simply represented
by Zeus. At this level the poet’s function was above all to “serve sover-
eignity”: by reciting the myth of emergence, he collaborated directly in
setting the world in order.38
37. On this passage, see especially Detienne 1996, 21–25, 30–33; P. Pucci, Hesiod
and the Language of Poetry (Baltimore, 1977); G. B. Walsh, The Varieties of Enchant-
ment (Chapel Hill and London, 1984) 22–36; and Pratt 1993, 106–13. See Reinsch-
Werner 1976, 26–27, for Callimachus and Hesiod.
38. Detienne 1996, 44–45 (italics mine).
Callimachean Theogonies 87
39. Cameron (1995, 119–32) rejects the widely held view that the Dream was the
original opening of the Aetia, and the current opening, or Prologue, was appended as a
new introduction for the second publication. Rather, he takes the Prologue and Dream to
be two parts of the orginal introduction, with no conceptual break between. If he is cor-
rect, it would bring the opening of the Aetia and the Hymn to Zeus into an even closer
alignment. See pp. 362–73 in Cameron for his discussion of Callimachus’s relationship to
Hesiod.
88 Callimachean Theogonies
40. M. L. West (1983, 47–53) expresses some doubt that all of the poetry atttributed
to him was really written by the historical Epimenides. The correctness of attribution is
irrelevant to the following argument, since the material was composed and circulated
under the name of Epimenides well before Callimachus.
41. Fr. B5 D-K; and West 1983, 48.
42. Fr. B4 D-K: perB tpn gegonatvn mBn ddalvn dA.
43. 1 (409E = B11 D-K): oGte gbr rn gaAh% mAso% dmfalb% oDdB ualassh%¢ | eD dA tA%
Gsti, ueoP% dplo% unhtoPsi d› gfanto%.
44. Maass 1892, 344–46. West (1983, 47–53) follows Maass; see also Detienne’s re-
marks (1996, 15, 55, 65).
45. dfAketa pote \Auanaze dnbr Krb% gnoma \EpimenAdh% komAzvn lagon oCtvsB
r\huAnta pisteAesuai xalepan¢ <mAsh% gbr> cmAra% Dn DiktaAoy Dib% tpi gntrvi keA-
meno% Epnvi baueP Gth syxnb gnar Gfh DntyxePn aDtb% ueoP% kaB uepn lagoi% kaB \A-
lhueAai kaB DAkhi. = A1.16–21 D-K, where the source is Maximus of Tyre. See Maass’s
discussion (1892, 345).
46. 1.111 = A1 D-K. Diels and Kranz, following Maass (1892, 343), take lines 30–36
of Aratus’s Phaenomena to be based on Epimenides. Kidd (1997, 185) seems to agree;
Callimachean Theogonies 89
The tomb of Zeus on Crete was well known in the Hellenistic age,
though we have no certain information before that period. The Cretan
deity connected with this tomb is generally taken to be kin to Near
Eastern dying gods. According to M. L. West, the Cretan divinity was
Martin (1998, 2: 164) is more skeptical. Aratus’s subject is the Dictaian Couretes, and the
language is clearly reminiscent of the Zeus hymn, lines 51–54. He may simply be depend-
ent on Callimachus, but it is equally possible that both Callimachus and Aratus are re-
calling an earlier treatment by Epimenides. See further Wilamowitz’s remarks (1924,
2.3–4, n. 1).
47. 1985: 154–55.
90 Callimachean Theogonies
48. C. Austin, Nova fragmenta Euripidea in papyris reperta (Berlin, 1968) fr. 79. See
also West 1983, 153: Burkert 1985, 127, 262 and notes.
49. M. P. Nilssen, Geschichte der griechischen Religion (1941) 1: 321. On the tomb
of Zeus, see Cook 1965, 940–43.
50. Iambus 12.15–17 (fr. 202 Pf.) on the empty Cretan tomb may also refer to Euhe-
merus (as A. Kerkhecker’s rather cryptic remarks would seem to imply.) He apparently
suggests further connections that, given the extremely fragmentary texts, are scarcely ten-
able (Callimachus’ Book of Iambi [Oxford, 1999], 24–25, esp. n. 79).
Callimachean Theogonies 91
In Parrhasia, Rhea bore you, where there was a hill quite sheltered with
bushes. Afterwards the place was sacred, and no crawling thing requiring
Eileithyia nor any woman draws near it; but the Apidanians call it Rhea’s
primeval place of giving birth. There, when your mother laid you down
from her great womb, immediately she looked for a stream of water in
which she might cleanse herself of the stains of birth and in which she
might wash your body. But mighty Ladon did not yet flow, nor did Ery-
manthus, the clearest of rivers; as yet all Azania was uninundated, but it
was to be called “well-watered” from the point when Rhea loosened her
cincture; indeed liquid Iaon bore many oaks above it, Melas carried many
wagons, and many poisonous creatures had their lairs above Carneion,
wet though it was, and a man on foot might walk upon Krathis and stony
Metope, thirsty, while abundant water lay beneath his feet. In her dis-
tress, Lady Rhea said: “Dear Earth, give birth also; your birth pangs are
easy.” She spoke and, raising up her great arm, struck the hill with her
staff; it was torn wide apart for her and poured forth a great flood.
92 Callimachean Theogonies
Next, she gave the newborn to the nymph Neda to bring into “a Cretan
covert” (34: keyumbn Gyv krhtaPon). When Zeus arrived in Crete, he
was deposited in a golden cradle and rocked by the nymph Adrasteia,
nourished by the she-goat Amaltheia, and fed upon honeycomb.
Around him the Couretes danced and beat their armor in order to pre-
vent Cronus from hearing his cries. Here he quickly grew to manhood,
whereupon, we learn, he did not attain his kingship by lot but was cho-
sen to rule by the older generation of deities because of his deeds of
prowess. If we examine the details of this narrative, it is obvious that
Callimachus only partially rejects the Cretan tradition. Although he lo-
cates the actual birth of Zeus in Arcadia, within minutes of birth he
narrates the child’s transference to the land of liars. Many Cretan ele-
ments—the child is hidden, nursed, and reared in Crete—form an es-
sential part of his narrative.51 Callimachus devotes twenty-three lines to
Arcadia, thirteen to Crete. Both parts of the story open with a geo-
graphical description that yields an aition: lines 10–14 provide an ac-
count of the “primeval childbed of Rhea,” while lines 41–45 tell us
about the “Plain of the Navel.” Between the two are eight lines devoted
to the lineage and activities of the nymph Neda, who is instrumental in
the transfer from one place to the other.
In treating the local geographies of Arcadia and Crete the poet cre-
ates a series of deliberate slips between signifier and signified that ob-
scure rather than clarify the different locations. Instead of maintaining
the separateness of these two regions, as the hymnic opening would
seem to demand, Callimachus occasionally merges them by using geo-
graphical markers that are attested for both locations at points in the
narrative when Zeus is supposedly transported from one place to the
other. The geographical misprisions begin even earlier with his first for-
mulation of the problem: in line 4 Callimachus asks whether he should
hymn the god as Dictaean or Lycaean in what we take to be a synec-
dochic substitution of the names of local mountains in Crete and Arca-
dia for the regions themselves. In lines 6–7 he appears to vary these
terms with an unbalanced pair—“in the Idaean mountains” or “in Ar-
cadia.” But the phrase “in the Idaean mountains” (\IdaAoisin Dn oGresi)
in Homer and other poets refers not to Mt. Ida in Crete but to Mt. Ida
in the Troad, which was yet another location that claimed to be the
birthplace of Zeus. There was apparently no tradition that Zeus was
51. This is usually seen as Callimachus cleverly reconciling the two inherited versions
of the myth, though why he should do so is not obvious within the terms of the text.
Callimachean Theogonies 93
born on Mt. Ida in Crete, but rather in a cave located on its slopes.52
G. R. McLennan, capping a trend found in earlier commentaries, re-
marks on this phrase: “Such variation is typical of Callimachus; in this
case he may have achieved it at the expense of mythological accuracy.”53
However, we might take leave to doubt this. Again, at line 34, we are
informed that the newborn was given to Neda to “bring into a Cretan
covert.” At first we imagine that we have somehow missed the shift to
Crete, but a few lines later we find ourselves apparently still in Arcadia.
According to Pausanias, Cretea (KrhtAa) was not Crete after all, but an
area located on Mt. Lycaeon in Arcadia.54 Then, in lines 42–43, Calli-
machus mentions Thenae. In fact, there were two Thenaes—one in Ar-
cadia (where we thought we were), the other in Crete.55 The poet calls
attention to the geographic doublet with an aside: Thenae—the one
near Cnosos.56
eRte Qenb% dpAleipen DpB KnvsoPo fAroysa,
ZeP pater, c NAmfh se (QenaB d’ Gsan DggAui KnvsoP)
toytaki toi pAse, daPmon, dp’ dmfala%¢ Gnuen DkePno
45 \Omfalion metApeita pAdon kalAoysi KAdvne%.
When the Nymph left Thenae, carrying you towards Cnosos, Father
Zeus (for Thenae is near Cnosos), then did your navel fall away, Daimon:
hence the Cydonians call that place the Plain of the Navel.
52. Cook 1965, pt. 1, pp. 932–33; and West 1983, 131–32.
53. McLennan 1977, 33.
54. Pausanias 8.38.2; see also McLennan 1977, 66, with his bibliography on this
point.
55. McLennan 1977, 74–75; and Hopkinson 1984a: 143.
56. These lines are so contorted in word order, and the transition between Arcadia
and Crete so sudden, that Meineke suspected a textual problem, as did Schneider (1870,
14–18), though Kuiper (1896, 21) provided the answer above.
57. 8.53.4. Kuiper 1896, 21–22.
94 Callimachean Theogonies
context we might also recall the remark of Epimenides noted above that
if, indeed, there was an “omphalos,” it was “clear to the gods but hid-
den to mortals.” The sentence, therefore, records a contested group des-
ignating a contested location for something that may or may not exist.58
It is possible, with McLennan, to attribute one or even two of these
double locations to “inaccuracies” of the poet. But Callimachus, ac-
cording to the Suda, wrote a monograph on Arcadia, and probably was
as familiar with its mythic traditions as Pausanias was. Rather, we are
experiencing a geographical hoax: the misprisions serve to confuse,
then momentarily collapse the mythological landscape. These succes-
sive superimpositions of the Cretan landscape on Arcadia or the Arca-
dian landscape on Crete disorient the reader and undermine Calli-
machus’s original disjunction—Arcadia or Crete. We might suspect that
the purpose of all this geographical legerdemain is to absorb the Cretan
geography into the Arcadian, an erudite leg-pull that demonstrates that
Zeus was born in Arcadia by constructing a narrative in which all so-
called Cretan locations are really in Arcadia. A leg-pull for which there
is some authority, since Pausanias records a local Arcadian tradition
that Zeus was reared on Mt. Lycaeon: “There is a place there called
Cretea, . . . and the Arcadians claim that Crete, where the Cretan story
has it that Zeus was reared, is this place, not the island.”59 However,
Callimachus does not abandon his baby Zeus in Cretea, leaving the rest
in silence. He rather perversely goes on to include characters like the
Couretes who are apparently not collocated in Arcadia. Nor he does
confine his geographical duplicity to Arcadia and Crete: the conflation
of the two Mt. Idas—that in Crete and the other in the Troad—is pro-
leptic of the introduction of later figures like Adrasteia, who was origi-
nally connected with the Trojan birth story of Zeus, into the Cretan
story.60 Within the context of theogonic discourse this geographical in-
stability serves a wider purpose than mere cleverness. It highlights the
competing nature of traditional myths and, by deliberately confusing or
conflating elements from competing regional claims to locate the birth
of the god on the hometown mountain, Callimachus paradoxically cre-
ates a kind of Ur-myth. He shows us a pattern that emerges for every
mountain, which in its ubiquity and capacity for literary transpositions
The Arcadian portion of the story opens with a five-line section de-
voted to describing the particularities of the birth spot, capped by an
aition, followed by an eighteen-line section on the cleansing of Rhea,
which as a consequence causes the previously subterranean rivers of
Arcadia to flow and the previously arid land to be irrigated. It begins as
follows:
10 Dn dA se ParrasAi ^ReAh tAken, rxi malista
Gsxen gro% uamnoisi periskepA%¢ Gnuen c xpro%
Cera%, oDdA tA min kexrhmAnon EDleiuyAh%
Crpetbn oDdB gynb DpimAsgetai, dlla C ^ReAh%
dgAgion kalAoysi lexaion \Apidanpe%.
In Parrhasia, Rhea bore you, where there was a hill quite sheltered with
bushes. Afterwards the place was sacred, and no crawling thing requiring
Eileithyia nor woman draws near it; but the Apidanians call it Rhea’s
primeval place of giving birth.
This section shares its language and thought with two archaic
sources.61 The first is from Homer’s Odyssey:
›VgygAh ti% npso%62 dpaprouen eDn clB kePtai,
245 Gnua mBn 6tlanto% uygathr, dolaessa Kalyca,
naAei DJlakamo%, deinb uea%¢ oDdA ti% aDtu
mAsgetai oGte uepn oGte unhtpn dnurapvn.63
A primeval island lies far away in the salt sea; there the daughter of Atlas,
artful Calypso, dwells, the fair-haired, dire goddess. Nor yet did anyone
approach her, neither god nor mortal man.
The most remarkable feature of the second part of the Arcadia story is
the connection between the birth of the divinity and sudden emergence
of rivers to irrigate a previously arid land. In both language and narra-
tive Callimachus forges a causal link between water, life, and the birth
of the god. The rare form for the genitive of Zeus (Zhna%) that opens
66. Plato Cratylus 396a–c, where Socrates comments on the doubleness of Zeus, as
exemplified in the double name—Zeus, Dios. See also Hopkinson 1984b, 176; Bornmann
1988, 117–18; Depew 1993, 75–76. Note that Scytobrachion provides an explanation
for the name that connects it with the beneficence of kingship (Diodorus Siculus 3.61.6 =
F13 Rusten); see above.
67. Plato Cratylus 402b. Hopkinson 1984b, 176.
68. Hopkinson 1984a, 141. The original suggestion about \Apidanpe% was made by
F. von Jan in his dissertation, “De Callimacho Homeri interprete” (Strassburg, 1893), on
the basis of Eustathius’s commentary on Dionysius the Periegete ad 415. Kuiper (1896,
10–11) expresses doubts.
69. 1977, 50.
70. Bornmann (1988, 121) argues that the spontaneity of nature is intended to locate
Arcadia in a primordial time before civilization.
71. 1985, 184–85.
72. Pausanias 8.20.1; cf. Strabo 8.4.4, 4.33.1.
98 Callimachean Theogonies
erwise desiccated landscape, which coincided with the birth of the god
Horus, the divine prototype of the pharaoh. The centrality of the inun-
dation for all who resided in Egypt, whatever their ethnic origins, and
the extensive mythology and ritual that surrounded the annual event
were bound to be more familiar to residents of Alexandria than an Ar-
cadian tradition that its rivers became fully functional only at the time
of Zeus’s birth, if in fact such a tradition existed at all outside of Calli-
machus’s poetic imagination.
If Callimachus connects the “birth of baby Zeus” in a causal way to
the irrigation of hitherto dry lands, a number of other elements of Cal-
limachus’s description reinforce an impression that the reader is being
relocated in an “Egyptian” space. Lines 19–21 provide an example:
Gti d’ gbroxo% ren epasa
\AzhnA%¢ mAllen dB mal’ eGydro% kalAesuai
aRti%¢ DpeB thmasde, ^RAh ete lAsato mAtrhn.
As yet all Azania was uninundated, but it was to be called “well-wa-
tered” from the point when Rhea loosed her cincture.
73. Line 1485. The words occur in a choral passage (1478–94) describing the passage
of cranes from Egypt to Greece, a reversal of direction from the famous simile in Homer
Iliad 3.3–6. Callimachus Aetia fr. 1. 13–14 Pf. makes use of the same reversal of direc-
tion. (I am indebted to Benjamin Acosta-Hughes for this observation.)
74. The earliest dated example I have found is PHibeh I 85.25, a loan of 261 b.c.e.,
referring to land that has been declared as uninundated. Wilamowitz (1924, 6 n. 3), Erler
(1987, 31 n. 113), and Bing (1988, 137 n. 90) also note the significance of this term.
Callimachean Theogonies 99
the river of Egypt | One crosses the water on foot; | One seeks water for
ships to sail on, | Its course having been turned into shoreland.”79
Within the context of Egyptian literature this kind of description
usually belongs to texts that connect the prosperity of the land with the
rule of a good king, and this order was often inverted to tell of all the
disasters that befall the land when the good ruler is absent. A central
feature of such “national distress” literature was the failed flood or the
drying up of the Nile, a theme that was regularly attached to the post
eventum prophecy of a king’s reign.80 Within an Egyptian context the
god’s birth, like a new pharaoh, imposes order (maat) on the universe,
beginning with the natural and extending through the social order. The
trajectory of Callimachus’s hymn is precisely that: to move from Zeus’s
birth, signaled by the life-giving natural phenomenon of water, to his
maturity when he assumes kingship of the gods.
The description of Zeus’s birth at lines 10–14 (translated above) is
also described in terms that parallel Egyptian myth:
Dn dA se ParrasAi ^ReAh tAken, qxi malista
Gsxen gro% uamnoisi periskepA%¢ Gnuen c xpro%
Cera%, oDdA tA min kexrhmAnon EDleiuyAh%
Crpetbn oDdB gynb DpimAsgetai, dlla C ^ReAh%
dgAgion kalAoysi lexaion \Apidanpe%.
79. Lichtheim 1973, 141. The text is from the Middle Kingdom (ca. 1990 b.c.e.), but
the theme of the dry Nile was not unusual. Compare the “Tale of the Eloquent Peasant”:
“Is crossing the river in sandals a good crossing? No!” (Lichtheim 1973, 177). See also
my discussion in “Egyptian Callimachus.”
80. See M. Lichtheim, “Didactic Literature,” in Loprieno 1996, 243–62 (esp. p. 243,
where she outlines the components of Egyptian didactic, and pp. 248–51 for a discussion
of the “Prophecy of Neferti”).
81. See Burkert 1985, 262; West 1966, 297–98.
Callimachean Theogonies 101
which might be identified as the primeval hill, and the moment of his
divine birth was imagined as an instantiation of that first act of cre-
ation.82 That act was repeated each year when the Nile rose to flood the
land, hence the reason that the beginning of the inundation also marked
the New Year. By insisting that Zeus was born on the hill and describ-
ing that hill as a primeval place from which waters will begin to flow,
again Callimachus’s narrative conforms to Egyptian ideology. In fact, a
much closer parallel to Callimachus’s text than traditional Greek
sources is found in an Egyptian hymn from the great temple of Isis at
Philae, which was constructed under Philadelphus: Isis, Horus’s mother,
is invoked as “Isis, giver of life, residing in the sacred mound, . . . she is
the one who pours out the Inundation.”83
Within this description Callimachus notes that “no crawling thing re-
quiring Eileithyia nor woman draws near it” (oDdA tA min kexrhmAnon
EDleiuyAh% | Drpetbn oDdB gynb DpimAsgetai). For the “gods and men”
of his models, Callimachus has “crawling thing” and “woman.” The
need for Eileithyia is a deliberate anachronism. In this time of cosmic
origins, the goddess had not been born, for tradition makes her a daugh-
ter of Zeus and Hera. But Eileithyia is also specifically identified with
Crete where she is associated with chthonic cult;84 therefore, an appear-
ance in this Arcadian birth story would be de trop. Why then does Cal-
limachus introduce this detail? The usual explanation is that giving birth
was prohibited within Greek sanctuaries.85 But the prohibition did not
seem to extend to pregnant animals. We might take this to be ironic—
the “ancient childbed” is now so sacred not even animals may give birth
there. However, Crpetan is an unusual choice of terms. It is a relatively
rare word applied to things that crawl as opposed to things that fly or
swim, and in the Hellenistic period it commonly meant “serpent.” Calli-
machus is said here to be imitating the usage of the Homeric unicum (Cr-
peta) at Odyssey 4.418.86 If he is, that passage would also insert us into
the discursive field of Egypt, for it describes the ability of “Egyptian Pro-
Hesiodic Callimachus
87. 1977, 79–86; see his further remarks in 1993, 44; also Cameron 1995, 54–55.
88. Haslam 1993, 120–21.
Callimachean Theogonies 103
Vast Earth received him from her [Rhea] to cherish and rear in broad
Crete. From thence, carrying him through the black night, she came
swiftly first to Luktos, and, taking him in her arms, she hid him in a deep
cave under the secret places of holy earth.
89. See West 1966, 299 (lines 481ff.); and Reinsch-Werner’s discussion (1976, 41 n.
1).
90. See T. Fuhrer’s discussion (Die Auseinandersetzung mit den Chorlyrikern in den
Epinikien des Kallimachos, Schweizerische Beiträge zur Altertumswissenschaft 23 [Basel,
104 Callimachean Theogonies
1992] 51–52) of Hymn to Zeus 13–14 as a comment on a textual crux in Pindar (Ne-
mean 9.40–42). What she argues is similar to what is happening here.
91. Haslam 1993, 121 n. 19: “Callimachus rejects the stone and normalizes the se-
quence.”
Callimachean Theogonies 105
moisture to a dry land. At the beginning of the hymn this larger pattern
is not discernable, though the particular ways in which Callimachus
calls his audience’s attention to the Egyptian dimension of the tale may
be becoming apparent.
After this considerable excursus on the cleansing of Rhea, Calli-
machus concludes the birth section of the hymn in Crete:
ZeP, sB dB Kyrbantvn Ctarai prosephxAnanto
DiktaPai MelAai, sB d’ DkoAmisen \Adrasteia
lAkni DnB xrysAi, sB d’ Duasao pAona mazan
aDgb% \AmalueAh%, DpB dB glykB khrAon Gbrv%.
50 gAnto gbr DfapinaPa PanakrAdo% Grga melAssh%
\IdaAoi% Dn gressi, ta te kleAoysi Panakra.
oRla dB KoArhtA% se perB prAlin drxasanto
teAxea peplagonte%, Gna Krano% oGasin dxan
dspAdo% eDsaAoi kaB mb sAo koyrAzonto%.
Zeus, the companions of the Curbantes, the Dictaian Ash-Nymphs,
cradled you in their arms, Adrasteia put you to sleep in your golden
cradle, you suckled at the fat teat of the goat Amaltheia, and fed upon the
honeycomb. (For suddenly the work of the Panacrian bee appeared in the
Idaean hills, which they call Panacra.) The Couretes danced a war dance
around you, clashing their armor, so that Cronus would hear in his ears
the sound of the shield, and not your infant wails.
Here the tempo speeds up, and the crowded mythological inventory
presents a marked contrast to the leisurely treatment of Arcadian wa-
terways. This rapid tempo continues into the opening of the aretai sec-
tion, where Zeus’s growth to manhood is compressed into three lines
(55–58):
Fairly you grew, and fairly were you nurtured, Ouranian Zeus; swiftly
you grew up, and down came swiftly to your cheeks, but still a child you
devised all things that were accomplished.
92. West 1983, 127–33. It is impossible to know to what extent Callimachus and his
contemporaries actively used other Orphic sources in addition to Epimenides, though the
material circulated freely enough for them to have had multiple sources, which we are no
longer able to identify.
93. See, for example, West 1983, 133, 167.
94. See McLennan ad loc., and Haslam 1993, 121.
Callimachean Theogonies 107
95. Fr. 24 Winiarczyk ( = Columella 9.2.3): Euhemerus apparently claimed that bees
were a natural phenomenon—sprung from hornets and the sun—and then tended by
nymphs who subsequently became the nurses of Zeus. The evidence is not unimpeach-
able, but if Euhemerus did write about bees in connection with Zeus, Callimachus’s
Panacra may be intended to recall Euhemerus’s imaginary land of Panchaea and its chief
city, Panara. (Panacra is nowhere independently attested apart from Callimachus;
Stephanus Byzantius cites this passage s.v.)
96. Didymus, according to Lactantius, in a context discussing Euhemerus. See M.
Schmidt, Didymi Chalcenteri grammatici Alexandrini fragmenta (Amsterdam, 1964),
220–21.
97. West 1983, 133.
98. LÄ, s.v. Biene. Apiculture was very visible in the agricultural life of the Delta re-
gion, and bees were connected with more than one Egyptian god: for example, Neith’s
temple in Sais was known as the “House of the Bee.”
99. So McLennan 1977, 103.
100. See, for instance, McLennan 1977, 103; Roussel 1928, 38–39.
108 Callimachean Theogonies
fact that bees are so closely connected with both gods’ birthplaces and
that a hieroglyphic of the bee marks the Egyptian pharaoh, it is worth
considering whether Csspna is an attempt to translate an Egyptian term
by its admittedly rare Greek analogue.101
To sum up: Arcadia provides a primordial Greek landscape for
Zeus’s birth, the contours of which are made to resemble Egypt, in that
the arid land comes to be watered at the time of the birth of the divine
child. The Cretan landscape has associations with Near Eastern dying
gods on the one hand, but also the Euhemerist tradition that demotes
the Olympic pantheon to culture heroes, because the divine child is suc-
cessively humanized as we move from the Arcadian (or Greek) to the
Cretan (or Egyptian) landscape in preparation for the implicit linkage
of Zeus and “our king.”
Let us turn now to the second half of the hymn (54–91), which de-
tails Zeus’s rapid growth to maturity and his attainment of royal pre-
rogatives. The argument is very carefully structured to interweave
Zeus, poetry, and “our king”; and the description of Zeus in lines
56–59 is echoed by the appearance of Ptolemy in lines 85–88:
56 djB d’ dnabhsa%, taxinoB dA toi rluon Goyloi,
dll’ Gti paidnb% Dbn Dfrassao panta tAleia¢
tu toi kaB gnvtoB proterhgenAe% per Dante%
oDranbn oDk DmAghran Gxein DpidaAsion oRkon.
Swiftly you grew up, and down came swiftly to your cheeks, but still a
child you devised all things that were accomplished; therefore your kin,
though being older, did not begrudge that you hold heaven as your allot-
ment.
These lines are conceptually and verbally linked with lines 85–88:
85 Goike dB tekmarasuai
cmetAri medAonti¢ periprb gbr eDrB bAbhken.
AspArio% kePna% ge teleP td ken rri noash¢
CspArio% tb mAgista, tb meAona d’, eRte noasi.
It is reasonable to judge by our king; for he has far exceeded the rest. At
evening he accomplishes what he thinks of in the morning. At evening the
greatest things, the lesser as soon as he thinks of them.
101. In Pythian 4.60–65, Pindar links the Delphic prophecy to the Battiads with bees.
According to the scholium on the passage, “Battis” was not a proper noun but what the
Cyreneans called their rulers—that is, it meant “king” (so also Herodotus 4.155). The
suggestion that Battus and bit are cognates has been made by more than one scholar; see
Schneider (1993, 174–75) for details, though he remains skeptical.
Callimachean Theogonies 109
102. See the discussion on the dating of the poem, pages 77–79 above.
103. See Erler 1987.
110 Callimachean Theogonies
tion. If the defeat of the Titans, or the Ouranids, brings the Olympian
regime to power, Typhoeus presents the first, and hence prototypical,
challenge to Zeus’s rule. Defeating Typhoeus then is the signal that
Zeus is capable of maintaining the position he has been given, and it
serves as a portent of the future stability and order of the rule. While
the conflict of Zeus and Typhoeus appears to have been marginal in
much Greek poetry that has survived, their struggle occupied a more
central position in the theogonic and cosmogonic texts.104 Certainly it
figured in Epimenides’ writing, whose Cretan Zeus apparently killed
Typhoeus by a thunderbolt when he attempted to attack him.105
The Zeus-Typhoeus struggle in these texts provides a close parallel
to the story of Horus, who became the first divine king of Egypt and ul-
timately the chief god of the country. The similarity is not surprising:
wherever Hesiod and the cosmogonic writers may have gotten it, the
origin of the material is clearly Near Eastern and formed an integral
part of Egyptian mythology from a very early period.106 Since Greek
writers, well before Callimachus, were used to identifying Typhoeus
with Egyptian Seth,107 a Greek audience actually within Egypt, if they
knew their Hesiod, would be likely to make such an obvious connec-
tion. Further, Callimachus’s choice of the rare proterhgenAe%,108 which
elsewhere means “of an earlier generation,” to describe the kin who as-
sented to Zeus’s kingship, while inappropriate for Zeus’s brothers, fits
very well the situation in the Theogony (881–85) and by extension the
Egyptian story. Horus’s rights were validated by an older order of
deities (the so-called Ennead, or nine primal forces, which include
earth, air, darkness, and watery chaos), and because of the justice of his
claims and his behavior he became the chief god of the country.109
As the hymn draws to a close, Callimachus moves from the Hesiodic
104. For example, a central feature of Pherecydes of Syrus’s theogony was a battle be-
tween Zeus and Ophioneus, a serpentlike divinity. See Schibli 1990, 81–88.
105. B8 D-K = Philodemus De pietate 61b1, p. 46G.
106. West 1966, 379–83; 1997, 300–304; Fontenrose 1980, 70–76, for “Zeus and
Typhon.” The transmission of this material seems to me parallel to Childéric’s bees—in
origin it must be Egyptian, but this would not have been apparent to Callimachus. Only
the fact of its obvious similarity to a known Egyptian story would have been relevant for
him.
107. West 1966, 379–83.
108. The word is very rare in Greek. Antimachus uses it of the Titans (see Matthews
1996, 164), and Apollonius chooses it to describe the Egyptians (mathr AGgypto% pro-
terhgenAvn aDzhpn, 4.268), who were apparently coeval with the Apidanians, Greece’s
aboriginal men (4.263). The scholiast on Aratus Phaenomena 16 takes protArh genea to
be contemporaries of Ophion and Eurynome and Ouranos and Kronos.
109. Gwyn Griffiths 1960, 7–10, 85–93.
Callimachean Theogonies 111
realm of divine origins to the world of men by actually quoting first the
Theogony, then adopting language from the Works and Days. Simulta-
neously the poem shifts from Zeus to Ptolemy, who is formally intro-
duced in lines 85–88 (see above):
‘‘Dk dB Dib% basilpe%’, DpeB Dib% oDdBn dnaktvn
80 ueiateron¢ tu kaA sfe tebn DkrAnao lajin.
dpka% dB ptolAeura fylassAmen, Ezeo d’ aDta%
gkris’ Dn polAessen, Dpacio% oE te dAkisi
labn Cpb skolips’ oE t’ Gmpalin DuAnoysin¢
Dn dB ryhfenAhn
\ GbalA% sfisin, Dn d’ eli% glbon¢
From Zeus come kings; nothing is more divine than the lords of Zeus.
And so you chose them as your own portion. You gave them cities to
guard, and you seat yourself in the high point of cities, overseer of
those who rule their people with crooked judgments, and those who
rule otherwise. You have given flowing wealth to them and abundant
prosperity.
110. See Bing 1988, 76–83, for an excellent discussion of lines 68–78.
111. r\ ydbn dfneioPo, Odyssey 15.426.
112. Erler (1987) treats the subject at length; see p. 30 for the Zeus hymn.
113. M. L. West (Hesiod, Works and Days [Oxford, 1978] 213) provides Semitic as
well as Greek parallels for this section of Hesiod.
112 Callimachean Theogonies
the Theogony, from the song of the Muses, while the language of
crooked judgments comes from Works and Days 218–63, a passage
emphasizing the punishment and rewards that the god metes out for
just and unjust behavior, punishment that even kings will be unable to
escape unscathed if they behave badly. The strongly minatory affect of
the Hesiodic context is certainly present and important here, but Calli-
machus emphasizes reward, not punishment, and highlights a causal
link between Zeus, the divine king, the earthly king who is his surro-
gate, and the flowing prosperity of the kingdom. Callimachus’s intro-
duction of “our king” is a necessary component of the chain. In Egypt-
ian thought, it is the just behavior of the king that guarantees the
prosperity of the kingdom and simultaneously validates him as the sur-
rogate Horus. Indeed, the language that Callimachus chooses to de-
scribe the behavior of “our king”—“for he has far exceeded the rest. At
evening he accomplishes what he thinks of in the morning. At evening
the greatest things, the lesser as soon as he thinks of them”—is a for-
mula found in Egyptian hymns and royal inscriptions to describe the
extraordinary power of a god, and by extension the pharaoh.114 But it is
also language reminiscent of the Zeus of lines 56–59 and his accom-
plishments, namely, the link between thought and actuality (frassao
panta tAleia).
The quotation from Hesiod (Dk dB Dib% basilpe%)115 returns us di-
rectly to the context of the earlier quotation of Epimenides. Here, as in
that earlier passage, which was on the surface about the tomb of Zeus
but led us to Hesiod’s proem on the nature of poetic speech, surface
musings about kings lead us again to poetry. The Hesiodic line contin-
ues: “Happy is he whom the Muses love; sweet song flows from his
mouth” (f d’ glbio%, fn tina MoPsai | fAlvntai¢ glykera oC dpb sta-
mato% rAei
\ aDda, 96–97). If that earlier passage was characterized by
confusion over the narrative voice, confusion over where Zeus was
born, here Callimachus speaks securely in his own poetic persona and
117. In his analysis of this poem, Bing (1988, 138–39) discusses the connection be-
tween the Delos hymn and the Herodotus passage as well as the significance of Apollo’s
prophecy (pp. 139–43). Many of the observations I shall be making were also made by
him, though with different emphases. Koenen focuses on rather different aspects (1983,
174–90; those arguments are reprised in 1993, 48–80, with a discussion of Delos in par-
ticular at pp. 81–84). Mineur’s commentary (1984, esp. 13) also identifies a series of
Egyptian motifs in the Delos hymn; see also Weber’s comments (1993, 377 n. 1).
Callimachean Theogonies 115
in the sea with golden foundations, its lake flows with gold, its olive
tree blooms with gold foliage (260–65). The island herself (i.e., the
nymph Asteria) takes up the newborn and becomes his nurse, devising
a series of games to amuse him that then become part of the island’s cul-
tic ritual. If we place the Zeus and Delos hymns side by side, we see the
following similarities: there are two divine children, Zeus and Apollo,
either born or hidden on islands; each has a nurse—Neda and Asteria—
a detail that is apparently new to the inherited mythic tradition; the
previously submerged Arcadian rivers burst forth after Zeus’s birth just
as the Inopus is swollen from the subterranean Nile flood at the time of
Apollo’s birth. Further, Cos, the future site of Ptolemy’s birth, is said to
be a “primeval island”—dgygAhn . . . npson—which inserts the human
king into the same mythological field as Zeus and Horus.
Callimachus’s Delos hymn is, of course, based on the Homeric
Hymn to Apollo, but there are notable differences. There is a consid-
erable expansion of Leto’s wandering and her persecution by Hera.
Callimachus also conflates the nymph Asteria with the island,121 delib-
erately blurring the distinctions between the natural world and the an-
thromorphized realm of the minor deities like nymphs.122 In the Home-
ric hymn, for example, Delos is not the newborn’s nurse. Finally,
Callimachus inserts the long prophecy of Apollo, delivered from the
womb, about the birth of Ptolemy II on Cos at some point in the distant
future. All three of these changes serve to bring the Greek narrative into
alignment with Egyptian myth. The birth of Horus is always preceded
by the wanderings of his mother, Isis, around the southern Mediter-
ranean, either to search for the body parts of her husband, Osiris,
whom Seth had killed, or, in some versions, in flight from her brother,
Seth himself, who wished to destroy her and her unborn child. For this
reason she came to bear the child in a secret location in the Delta,
sometimes identified as Chemmis, which afterward the Egyptians ven-
erated as a holy place. There is no single Egyptian analogue for
Neda/Asteria, since the newborn Horus had many different nurses. For
example, Gywn Griffiths in his discussion of the Egyptian myth,123
121. He seems to be playing with and reversing the normal elements of a katasterism.
Here an undistinguished star falls from the heavens, where she performs a signal service
to the gods by becoming the site of the birth as well as the nurse of Apollo. In contrast,
Aratus’s bears (30–33) or Olenian goat (163–64) are translated to the heavens and be-
come constellations as a result of nursing Zeus.
122. See Bing 1988, 117–19.
123. 1960, 94.
Callimachean Theogonies 117
124. The aridity of the Argolid was, according to myth, the result of Poseidon’s anger
against Inachos for preferring Hera to him as the local divinity. While not directly men-
tioned in the Zeus hymn, the Hesiodic catalogue that serves as an intertext had related
the story.
118 Callimachean Theogonies
125. Bing (1988, 117) suggests that “for Callimachus, the Niobe myth has a special
point, since it counterposes quantity (Niobe’s many children) to quality (Leto’s two).” It is
also possible that “slanderous woman” was an allusion to Arsinoe I, who was exiled to
the Thebaid between 279 and 276 b.c.e., or shortly before the writing of the Delos hymn
(see Mineur 1984, 128 ad 96). In spite of being younger than his brothers Zeus becomes
king of the gods, and Apollo is the more beloved of Zeus’s sons, though Ares is older (58);
this preference for younger sons would seem to connect Olympian and human behavior,
because Ptolemy II was the youngest of Soter’s sons. Could the Niobe reference be to
Soter’s earlier wife, Eurydice, and her six children, in contrast to Berenice I, who was the
mother of Philadelphus and his sister-wife Arsinoe II? See Koenen 1983, 178 n. 96, for a
different explanation.
126. Typhaon is a variant of Typhoeus, which occurs at line 367 in this poem. See
Allen, Halliday, and Sikes 1963, 244–47, on the various identifications of Pytho with
Tityos and Typhoeus. Lucian (Dialogues of the Dead 10.2) records that Apollo and
Artemis slay the serpent for harassing their mother, Leto, and preventing their birth. The
context of this story in Lucian suggests Pindar’s now fragmentary ode on Delos.
Callimachean Theogonies 119
Apollo speaks twice from the womb. On one level, this rather
baroque behavior can be understood as stretching the limits of the hym-
nic tradition, which already includes the precocious behavior of infant
deities. If Hermes can invent the lyre and steal the cattle of Apollo on
his first day of birth, Callimachus’s Apollo goes one better: he begins his
prophetic activities even before he is born. Greek mythological precoc-
ity, however, coincides with Egyptian ideology. Gods—and by extension
the king—were often active in the womb. Two contemporary examples
will suffice: a hymn from the Philae temple addresses Osiris as follows:
[He] who created light in the body of his mother, | When he illuminated
his brothers in the womb | . . . Gleaming child, he is inundating water, |
Being born at the First of the Year. | Come truly great, joyful and rejoic-
ing, | Be gracious to the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Ptolemy, | He is
Horus, | Repel all evil from him.128
Apollo’s prophecies order not only in this cosmic sense, but also poeti-
cally. As we have seen, it is the particular linking of the divine realm
with the human event that transforms the significance of them both,
that moves them from the mythologically quaint or historically mun-
dane into the symbolic realm of cosmic ordering. Within the frame-
work of the poem, Apollo creates the order by making the link. Thus he
is an analogue of the poet, whose vision creates the entire symbolic
realm of the poem, ordering its parts in ways that permit the connec-
tions of subtext and context to yield meaning. Like the Zeus hymn, the
Delos hymn too is a theogony, but again a theogony that orders a par-
ticular universe—that of the king of Egypt. Apollo and Ptolemy are
overtly linked in the Delos poem as Zeus and Ptolemy are implicitly
linked in the earlier hymn; but both links exist and are efficacious by
virtue of the imagination of the poet. He is self-consciously construct-
ing poetic fictions, and he never allows his audience to lose sight of this.
As Callimachus expresses it in the Hymn to Zeus, his is the ability to
create more persuasive fictions. His is the ability to create new theogo-
nies that not only showcase the old but insert many elements of the new
as a fitting tribute to the new king of the Nile.
chapter 3
Theocritean Regencies
For the most part Theocritus’s poetry exists in a timeless and apolitical
setting, the exact physical location of which is not identifiable. The cul-
tivated simplicity of style, vivid ecphrases, and dialogue combine to
make him more immediately accessible to a modern reader than either
Callimachus or Apollonius, with the result that his poetry has also re-
ceived a more favorable critical reception. But Theocritus also pro-
duced court poetry that has been less favorably received by his critics
and is usually judged to be of inferior poetic value.1 He wrote two
poems addressed to living monarchs, Hiero of Syracuse (Idyll 16) and
Ptolemy Philadelphus (Idyll 17); the Alexandrian court figures signifi-
cantly in two others—Idylls 14 (Aeschinas and Thyonicus) and 15
(Adoniazusae); and a number of other poems are generally understood
to belong to the world of the Alexandrian court because they focus on
mythological themes that were closely connected to the Ptolemies—
Idyll 18 on Helen, Idyll 22 on the Dioscuri, Idyll 24 on Heracles, and
Idyll 26 on the Bacchae. If these last poems are in some sense about the
Ptolemies,2 in Theocritus’s handling of myth we can see how the images
of the royal figures were being invented, elaborated, or modified. In-
deed, the poems have been studied as a group, and their function as
court poems has been elucidated by F. Griffiths in Theocritus at Court.
1. See, for example, Griffiths 1979, 71, for typical assessments of Idyll 17.
2. Griffiths 1959, 52, though not all would agree: e.g., Schwinge 1986, 66.
122
Theocritean Regencies 123
Griffiths’s study remains fundamental for this chapter, though what fol-
lows differs considerably from his work in emphasis. Griffiths articu-
lates well the relationship between poet and patron within the environ-
ment of an imperial court, though, like other commentators on these
poems, he reads exclusively within the framework of Greek myth and
of Greek poetic antecedents. My focus, in contrast, is how Theocritus’s
poems situate Ptolemaic kingship not only in a Greek context but also
within an Egyptian milieu, and in particular the ways in which Egypt-
ian imperial motives are played out within the context of traditional
Greek poetry, and the ways in which these competing modes of royal
behavior create the opportunity for discourse on the nature of kingship.
I have chosen to concentrate on only two texts, the Heracliscus (Idyll
24), for the way it treats a Ptolemaic ancestor, and the Encomium to
Ptolemy (Idyll 17), which is indisputably about the king. Together the
two texts stand in a self-conscious relationship with the Zeus and Delos
hymns, the two poems of Callimachus discussed in the previous chap-
ter. A. S. F. Gow, for example, remarks in his commentary that the com-
position of the Heracliscus might be located at the time of coronation
of Philadelphus, and on the Ptolemy he observes: “[It] resembles the
Hymns of Callimachus . . . , and with two of these, that to Zeus (H. 1)
and that to Delos (H. 4), it has resemblances that cannot be wholly ac-
cidental.”3 Thus, Theocritus’s two poems can provide an alternative set
of insights into the experiments with genre and mythmaking that were
taking place within court circles, experiments that were necessary for
the symbolic encoding of the new rulers, as well as for the poets’ con-
struction of their own relationship to their patron.
the heracliscus
Heracles and Ptolemy
3. Gow 2: 325 (Idyll 17) and 2: 418–19 (Idyll 24). Gow’s text of Theocritus is used
throughout. The translations are his, though with some modifications.
124 Theocratean Regencies
(103–40). Unfortunately, the poem has lost about forty lines from its
ending, although a fragmentary portion has been preserved in a fifth-
century papryrus codex.4 Generically, the Heracliscus has been claimed
for the nebulous category of “epyllion,”5 though more than one scholar
has raised doubts about the viability of the category for Hellenistic po-
etry, particularly for so early as specimen as the Heracliscus.6 Given that
hexameters tended to replace lyric meters in the Hellenistic period and
that in this poem Theocritus’s closest generic affinities are to the hymn
and encomium, it seems to me more reasonable to assume that the poet
is experimenting within the parameters of well-established generic
models rather than conforming to another that may or may not have
actually existed.7 In the first two sections of the poem Theocritus fol-
lows rather closely Pindar’s narrative of the infant Heracles in Nemean
1, addressed to Chromius of Aetna for his victory in the horse race, and
he also incorporates elements from a fragmentary paean or hymn of
Pindar on the same theme.8 Further, in these earlier sections he shows
considerable dependence on the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, and while
the Heracliscus now shares little beyond the opening name (ˆHraklAa)
with the very brief Homeric Hymn to Heracles, both may end with a
prayer.9 The third section, on the education of Heracles, has no known
poetic antecedents. From a scholium written against the right margin of
the final fragmentary column of the papyrus, it appears that Theocritus
ended his poem with a request to Heracles for victory.10 This, taken
with the fact that in Idyll 17 the poet alludes to winning a prize in an
earlier competition, provides grounds for speculation that the Heraclis-
cus was performed. On its own the prayer to Heracles could indicate
nothing more certain than the mimesis of performance,11 but Theocri-
tus’s remark in Idyll 17 that “no one has come for the sacred contests of
4. POxy. 2064, the so-called Antinoe Theocritus. See A. Hunt and J. Johnson, Two
Theocritus Papyri (London, 1930).
5. See Gutzwiller 1981, 10–18.
6. See most recently the discussion in Cameron 1995, 446–53.
7. Gutzwiller herself remarks that “in the over-all structure of his poem Theocritus
has imitated the archaic narrative hymn” (1981, 12).
8. POxy. 26.2442 fr. 32 = Paean 20 Snell-Maehler. See Hunter’s comments on this
poem (1996a, 12–13) and on Theocritus’s use of Pindar in general (pp. 82–90).
9. To judge from the fragmentary papyrus text, Theocritus does not appear to have
used dAdoy d› dretan te kaB glbon, the ending of the hymn to Heracles, to conclude his
own poem, though Callimachus does use this line to end his Zeus hymn. On this, see
Schlatter 1941, 28–30.
10. k(aB) tbn poih(tbn) pant(a%) nikpsai.
11. So Griffiths 1979, 94–96, and Hunter 1996a, 13.
Theocritean Regencies 125
16. Mnemosyne series 4, 30 (1977) 139 and 1979: 19. On Aratus, see Kidd 1997,
382–84. Gow also notes this parallel, though he does not explore its implications for dat-
ing the poem.
17. We saw in chapter 2 that Calypso’s island was called \VgygAh ti% npso% (Odyssey
5.244) and noted the relevance of the “primeval island” to the birth of the young god. It
may not be fanciful to see in Theocritus’s allusion to this passage of the Odyssey a similar
recollection of Horus on the island, for it is there that the baby is attacked by serpents.
Further, Theocritus’s insistence on Orion and the Bear has resonance in Egyptian astron-
omy, where they are identified respectively as Osiris and Seth (see Te Velde 1967, 86; also
Selden’s discussion of that section of the night sky in connection with the transported lock
of Berenice [1998, 344]).
18. Pindar mentions it in Nemean 1.70–71.
Theocritean Regencies 127
since Hebe and Heracles were only half siblings, the parallel would not
have been particularly apt. More likely the marriage to Hebe functions
not as a topical reference but to reinforce Heracles’ newly acquired sta-
tus of divinity by demonstrating that he succeeded even in marrying
into Olympus’s most distinguished family.
In the preceding chapter I set out arguments that Callimachus’s
Hymn to Zeus was also a birthday poem for Philadelphus, written at
the time of his ascension to the coregency. Though absolute corrobora-
tion is lacking, on balance, the likelihood of Theocritus’s and Calli-
machus’s poems being contemporary is very high,19 and they provide us
with a unique opportunity to examine the contrasting ways in which
the two poets attempt to construct images of kingship at the beginning
of Philadelphus’s reign and to position themselves vis-à-vis their poetry
within the new court. There are a number of similarities between the
two poems that make them suitable for the inception of Philadelphus’s
reign: (1) both select for their topic the precocity of the newborn hero
or god—though Callimachus does this more than once, Theocritus does
so only with this poem;20 (2) the infancy is coupled with a miraculous
event that can be linked to Egypt—the prodigious killing of snakes, the
coming of water to an arid land; (3) the child is threatened by divine
hostility, which is muted (in Callimachus) or easily overcome (in The-
ocritus); (4) the mother is more prominent than the father; (5) the
adulthood of their subjects is all but ignored—the labors of the adult
Heracles are confined to Teiresias’s prophecy, and the deeds of the adult
Zeus are only hinted at in the link drawn between thought and accom-
plishment; (6) both babies are predicted to achieve greatness; and (7)
both poems play with a set of Egyptian themes that are particularly rel-
evant to kingship, as we shall see below. There are also substantial di-
vergences, the most significant of which is that Callimachus chooses a
divine model, Zeus, and appropriates the language of Hesiod and
theogonic writing; Theocritus, on the other hand, chooses a heroic
model, Heracles, and works within the framework of an earlier Greek
hymnic tradition. This is a consistent pattern throughout their writings:
Callimachus looks to the Olympians—Zeus and Apollo—to construct
his paradigms of the imperial court, while Theocritus favors the second
19. Clauss (1986, 180 n. 15) also notes this possibility, and Cameron (1995, 58) fol-
lows him.
20. In Idyll 17, however, Theocritus does treat Ptolemy II’s birth on Cos (56–65).
128 Theocritean Regencies
rank of divinities, those with immortal fathers (Zeus) but human moth-
ers—Heracles in particular, but also Polydeuces, Helen, and Dionysus.21
This is not a mark of restraint or a decorous avoidance of the excesses
of flattery on Theocritus’s part; rather, the selection of a different
mythological model carries both generic and narrative implications,
which I will explore in the rest of the chapter.
The poem opens with a gesture in the direction of the hymn by nam-
ing its subject—Heracles—but the usual hymnic posturings about pre-
cisely how to treat the subject are absent. Instead Theocritus creates a
vivid scene of maternal domesticity:
\HraklAa dekamhnon Danta pox› c Midepti%
\Alkmana kaB nyktB neateron \Ifiklpa,
dmfotAroy% loAsasa kaB Dmplasasa galakto%,
xalkeAan katAuhken D% dspAda, tbn Pterelaoy
\AmfitrAvn kalbn eplon dpeskAleyse pesanto%.
Once upon a time when Heracles was ten months old, the Midean lady,
Alcmena, bathed him with Iphicles, who was younger by a night, gave
them both their fill of milk and laid them down in a bronze shield, the
fair implement that Amphitryon stripped from Pterelaus when he fell in
battle. (1–5)
I heard this story about Heracles, namely, that he was one of the twelve
[Egyptian] gods. . . . It was not the Egyptians who took the name Hera-
cles from Greeks. But rather the Greeks took it from the Egyptians—
27. See W. Burkert, “Demaratos, Astrabakos und Herakles: Königsmythos und Poli-
tik zur Zeit der Perserkriege (Herodot 6, 67–69),” MH 22 (1965) 168–69, esp. nn. 5–7
and 24; Burkert 1979, 82–83; and West 1997, 458–59. In addition, Burkert points to the
fact that the pharaoh was traditionally connected with Egyptian Thebes, while Heracles
was born in Greek Thebes. West links the story that Heracles was suckled by Hera (which
is not present in Theocritus’s poem) to “Egyptian reliefs [that] show the royal child being
suckled by a goddess” (1979, 459). Although West rarely draws parallels between Greek
and Egyptian material in his East Face of Helicon, he does so most extensively in his dis-
cussion of Heracles (pp. 548–72).
Theocritean Regencies 131
those Greeks I mean who gave the name to the son of Amphitryon. There
is much evidence to prove the truth of this, especially that both the par-
ents of Heracles—Amphitryon and Alcmene—were of Egyptian origin.28
The result of these researches make it quite clear that Heracles is a very
ancient divinity; and I think that the most correct approach is taken by
those Greeks who maintain a double cult of this deity, in one of which
they worship him as divine and called Olympian, and in the other they
honor him as a hero.30
28. 2.43.1–2; presumably because they were both descended from Perseus (who was
descended from Danaus), whom Herodotus regards as Egyptian (2.91). See Lloyd 1976,
200–205.
29. See Lloyd 1976, 205–12.
30. 2.44.5.
31. A. F. Laurens, LIMC 3 (1986) s.v. Bousiris, 147–52 and illustrations, particularly
nos. 11, 19, 23, and 28. What relationship if any the Idalian cup with a pharaonic figure
in its center and Heracles (?) in the frieze has to the figure of Busiris is unclear. See Jour-
dain-Annequin 1992.
32. See Burkert 1979, 83–85; M. Davies, “Stesichorus’ Geryoneis and Its Folk-Tale
Origins,” CQ 38.2 (1988) 277–80; and now West 1997, 463–64.
132 Theocritean Regencies
along the circuit of Ocean to rise again in the morning sky. Heracles in
the bowl was a popular subject for vase painters in the fifth century,33
and the story received full-scale treatment in Stesichorus’s lyric poem
Geryoneis. Theocritus, who was a fellow Sicilian, seems actively to
have been influenced by Stesichorus in a number of places, in his use of
Doric dialect and the palinode on Helen,34 and possibly in the construc-
tion of Daphnis in Idyll 1.35 Thus Heracles lying in the rocking shield at
the beginning of his career of killing monsters, snaky or otherwise, may
have been intended to recall a labor from the end of the career of the
adult Heracles, who rests in another unconventional object. Within this
context of an already complex cross-fertilization or cultural contami-
nation, Heracles with his Greek as well his Near Eastern heritage was
an ideal ancestor for the Ptolemies and would have provided Theocritus
an opportunity to exploit multiple elements already present in narra-
tives about Heracles and in his iconography. Even an obvious draw-
back to Heracles as a king figure—the fact that he consistently operated
on the margins of the civilized world—as we will see shortly, had al-
ready been refashioned by Hecataeus of Abdera to fit into a Greco-
Egyptian model of idealized kingship.
Throttling Snakes
33. P. Brize, Die Geryoneis des Stesichoros und die frühe griechische Kunst, Beiträge
zur Archäologie 12 (Würzburg, 1980) 51–52, and for a list of illustrations, pp. 145–46.
34. See, for example, Hunter 1996a, 150–51.
35. Halperin 1983, 79–80.
36. See Woodford 1983, 121–29.
Theocritean Regencies 133
37. PMG 543.21–22. See Gutzwiller 1981, 11; Hunter 1996a, 26–27.
38. AR 4.1513–17.
39. PMG 543.21–22. Lloyd (1969, 79–86) makes a strong case for it being Horus.
See above, chapter 1.
134 Theocritean Regencies
them by their throats in his bare hands (28–29). Indeed, he still holds
them in this fashion when Amphitryon appears, and he proudly dis-
plays the now dead creatures to his father (56–57: f d’ Dß patAr
\AmfitrAvna | Crpetb deikanaasken) and lays them at his father’s
feet. As we saw in the previous chapter, the rather rare word Crpeta oc-
curs in the Hymn to Zeus, where—I have argued—it alludes to Seth’s
attempt to kill the newborn Horus by sending snakes and poisonous in-
sects to bite him. In this passage, Theocritus creates a scene that resem-
bles in many ways the attack on the infant god, and chooses to describe
the snakes with the same word—one that has a semantic and allusive
field that includes Typhoeus (Pindar Pythian 1.25) as well as poisonous
creatures that creep.
In order to protect against this threat of snakebite (an all-too-com-
mon phenomenon in Egypt) Egyptians routinely employed an
apotropaic plaque (now called a cippus; see plate 3). On it the child-
god, Horus, is represented standing on a crocodile and holding scorpi-
ons and snakes in each hand as he faces front.40 The cippi reached all
levels of society: they might be large enough to erect as freestanding ste-
lae or small enough to carry or wear in order to ward off danger. They
were erected in temple complexes as well as in private gardens (rather
like the Greek herm). Cippi first appeared in the New Kingdom but
were extremely popular in the Ptolemaic period; they have been found
exported throughout the Mediterranean from Iraq to Rome,41 and in
Alexandria these amulets were probably as familiar to the Greeks resi-
dent there as coins or vases on which the scene of Heracles grappling
with the snakes was represented.42 Further, they came with an inscribed
narrative that detailed Horus’s magic revival from poisonous
snakebites. Ritual use required some part of the cippus to be submerged
in or come in contact with water, thereby being suffused with its magic
healing properties. Thus even those who could not read the inscription
40. The cippi are so common that Egyptologists refer to them as “Horus on the
crocs.”
41. Ritner 1989, 106.
42. Woodford (1983, 128) raises the possibility that the motif of Heracles throttling
the snakes in Greek art and literature was inspired by “figurines of Egyptian dwarf-gods
collectively known under the name of ‘Bes’ [that] were widely diffused and in some of
their modifications might provide just the sort of image that was necessary.” Ritner
(1989, 105) points out that the “earlier iconography [of Bes] was the inspiration for the
posture of Horus” on the cippus. In other words, these Egyptian statues of Bes throttling
snakes might have been the ancestor of both the Egyptian cippus of Horus and the Greek
representations of the infant Heracles (see plates 3 and 4).
Theocritean Regencies 135
were likely to have been familiar with the story of Horus’s recovery,
since it is a vital element in the ritual use of the charm. I suggest that
Theocritus may have constructed the opening scene of the Heracliscus
to allow his audience to see double by deliberately relating a familiar
Greek story to provoke (if fleetingly) recollection of this familiar Egypt-
ian icon and the story that underpins it. Elements suggestive of the con-
text of the icon include the following: (1) when Alcmena sings a lullaby
to her children, she expresses a wish for their safety in the night with
two rare words, DgArsimon (a sleep from which one will wake) and
eGsoa (be safe), both of which suit an amuletic context; (2) the state-
ment that he “gripped them by the throat where the dread venom of
dire snakes reside, which is hateful even to the gods” (28–30) resembles
the narrative that accompanies the cippus where, according to the tra-
dition, Horus throttles the potentially destructive creatures to “seal
their mouths; against biting”;43 (3) the hostility of the gods to the ser-
pents and their venom, for which Gow can find no parallels,44 makes
sense in Egyptian myth, particularly for Isis and her sister, since serpents
actually attack the infant god, and in a more general sense can represent
the forces of chaos; (4) Theocritus makes much of Heracles’ presenting
the dead snakes to Amphitryon (which is not in Pindar), and this resem-
bles the scene of the cippi in which the figure is facing front and holding
out snakes and scorpions, more than the Greek, in which the child is
regularly shown entwined with the snakes, rather like Laocoön.45
To sum up: many elements in this opening vignette, beginning with the
subject himself, are capable of being understood within two different
mythologies, and for an audience that de facto inhabited two cultural
spaces—Greek and Egyptian—the intertextual matrix would have in-
cluded the visual as well as the written. Reading the opening against
Pindar’s treatment of the same story, which certainly does not lend itself
to the double vision that I have been suggesting for Theocritus, we find
slight variations in Theocritus’s version that provisionally allow at least
four potential intertexts, any one of which could have evoked an Egypt-
ian context. The most obvious is the mention of Amphritryon’s shield,
which foregrounds Heracles’ paternity, but there is also the hymn of Si-
monides, which suggests Perseus, the linguistic overlap with Calli-
machus (Crpeta, and the similarity between Heracles in the shield and
Heracles in the golden bowl of the sun. Additionally, there is the visual
similarity of the Horus cippus to the baby Heracles throttling snakes.
At this stage, however, it is well to be cautious—we may be seeing
double or merely a mirage. We must look at subsequent elements of the
poem to clarify our vision.
46. 2: 430–31.
47. 2: 430 ad 91: “The treatment prescribed resembled that meted out (according to
Tzetz. Chil. 5.735) to farmakoA.” A good guess, though the accuracy of Tzetzes’ knowl-
edge of earlier Greek cult practice is open to question.
138 Theocritean Regencies
48. Fr. 86 Waddell = DIO 73. For the ritual burning of the enemy or symbolic surro-
gates, see Ritner 1993, 157–58, 208–10, esp. 210, where Ritner discusses the burning of
a wax figure of Seth on a fire of bryony.
49. See the discussion in Ritner 1993, 147–48, with bibliography; and Vasunia 2001,
185–93.
50. 1977, 66 and n. 135. See also his discussion in 1993, 48–50.
51. Burstein 1991, 142–44. For pharaonic titulature of the Ptolemies and a discus-
sion of the meaning of the title in Ptolemaic texts, see Beckerath 1999, 234–47.
Theocritean Regencies 139
52. Thissen (1966, 33) renders the hieroglyphic as meaning H’r nbtj in the Ptolemaic
period and translates as “der zu Nb ( = Ombos) gehörige,” in place of the traditional H’r
nbw.
53. Koenen 1993, 48–50, and n. 56 with bibliography. See Ritner 1993, 132, with
the extended discussion of “trampling the foe.” Selden (1998, 387) notes the Ptolemies’
continuous identification with Horus. He observes that the term “his majesty” in hiero-
glyphics is “written as an upright club placed beside Horus the Falcon sitting on his
perch.”
54. G. Zanker (1989, 98 n. 89) objects that “even if the phrase dysmenAvn . . . kauy-
pArteroi at Id. 24.100 reminded Philadelphus’ contemporaries of his Hornub title,
dntipalvn CpArtero% . . . we are still not obliged to postulate . . . an Egyptian reference
behind Teiresias’ words.” If the name in question were entirely irrelevant to the events in
the rest of Teiresias’s prophecy, the argument would be cogent, but since the phrase comes
as a necessary consequence of a series of acts that form a coherent pattern in Egyptian
terms as the reenactment of triumphing over foes, while in Greek they appear to be ritu-
als elaborated for no particular purpose beyond the adding of realistic detail, his argu-
ment is substantially weakened.
55. Koenen (1983, 180) would see in the burning of the Gauls an allusion to this
practice of the burning of Typhonians. If correct, it suggests that what was represented in
the mythological realm in the Heracliscus is treated historically in the later poem of Cal-
limachus.
56. See above, chapter 1.
57. West 1966, 337–38.
140 Theocritean Regencies
tence. She reveals herself in her divinity, filling the room with light, then
abandons the halls. Demophoön’s sisters, upon hearing the commotion,
enter the now darkened room, pick up the child up and console him,
light a fire, and rouse their mother. At dawn the men are informed of
the events (242–95). Alcmena and Amphitryon with their servants be-
have like the sisters of the hymn: they arrive too late to affect events
and can only tidy up the domestic space. While Demeter instructs
Metaneira to build a temple in expiation, in the Heracliscus it is for
Teiresias to clarify the will of the gods. This divergence serves to convey
a sense of human helplessness and confusion at the workings of the di-
vine order. Just as Demophoön’s failure to become immortal empha-
sizes the vast division between human and divine and, in terms of the
hymn, accounts for the need for the institution of the Eleusinian mys-
teries,60 Theocritus’s evocation of the Demeter hymn in his own narra-
tive displaces Heracles’ potentially divine parentage and foregrounds
his humanity, requiring us to locate the immortality he attains as some-
thing distinctly other than that which the gods possess. This is rein-
forced by the specific terms of Teiresias’s prophecy:
dadeka oC telAsanti peprvmAnon Dn Dib% oDkePn
maxuoy%, unhtb dB panta pyrb TraxAnio% Ejei·
Twelve labors will be accomplished by him, fated to dwell in the house of
Zeus, but a funeral pyre at Trachis will have all that is mortal. (82–83)
Unlike real gods, Heracles must die, and, in whatever fashion he enters
the house of Zeus, it is only after the death and dissolution of his phys-
ical body. This insistence on humanity in a context that includes allu-
sions to an Egyptian mythology of divine kingship is doubly pointed:
Heracles is not only subject to the laws of nature within the framework
of Greek models; we are also reminded of the reality that lies not very
far beneath the surface of the Egyptian ideology—the pharaoh, too, for
all the identification and interaction with the divine pantheon, is subject
to death, and the myth of divine birth carries no protection against the
forces of nature. Indeed, the elaborate process of tomb building that
commenced with each new pharaoh must have been a constant re-
minder of the mortal dimension of every divine king and a further
demonstration of the dualism of Egyptian thought.
The Hymn to Demeter provided an aition for the establishment of
70. See, for example, the Satrap decree from 311 b.c.e., translated in Bevan 1968,
29–32.
71. See K. Bringmann, “The King as Benefactor: Some Remarks on Ideal Kingship in
the Age of Hellenism,” in Bulloch et al. 1993, 7–25; and F. Walbank’s response to it
(pp. 116–20).
72. Diodorus Siculus 1.53.9–10 = FGrH 264 F25.53.9–10.
73. A. Herrmann coined the term Königsnovelle to describe what he considered a lit-
erary genre featuring prophecies and dreams directed at the king and the events that they
precipitated (Die ägyptische Königsnovelle, Leipziger ägyptologische Studien 10 ;[Glück-
stadt, Hamburg, and New York, 1938]). See now A. Loprieno, “The ‘King’s Novel,’ ” in
Loprieno 1996, 277–95; Loprieno argues that these elements occur within a much
broader spectrum of Egyptian as well as other Near Eastern writings.
74. Murray 1970, 168.
Theocritean Regencies 145
logical progenitors; he also sets out a paradigm for the future behavior
of the newly crowned king. It is by benefiting his people in material as
well as spiritual terms that the young Ptolemy can, like his forebear,
hope to attain to divine honors.
Heracles, admittedly, is not a Sesoösis or an Alexander: his natural
habitat would seem to be the untamed, precivilized world in which he
can destroy monsters with his club or his bare hands. Lines 79–81, in
which Teiresias describes the man who will achieve immortality, call
that Heracles to mind:
toPo% dnbr ede mAllei D% oDranbn gstra fAronta
dmbaAnein teb% yCa%, dpb stArnvn platB% grv%,
oQ kaB uhrAa panta kaB dnAre% essone% glloi.
So great a man will ascend to the star-laden heaven, your son, a hero
broad in chest, stronger than all beasts and men.
While ostensibly a poor, if not ludicrous, match for the refined court of
the second Ptolemy, in fact even this Heracles had been adapted to
Hecataeus’s scheme. Heracles’ prehistoric conquest of monsters created
the possibility for civilized community and hence is a clear example of
the sort of benefaction that merited immortality. Euhemerus makes the
point very clearly:
With respect to the gods, then, men of old have handed down to later
generations two conceptual categories (dittb% . . . DnnoAa%): they say that
some of the gods are everlasting and imperishable (didAoy% kaB dfuar-
toy%). . . . Others, they say, were of the earth (DpigeAoy%) and attained
immortal honor and fame (timp% te kaB dajh%), like Heracles, Dionysus,
Aristaeus, and others like them.75
tellectual tradition of Democritus, tracing its development in Euhemerus and later writ-
ers. Therefore, it is a fair assumption that Diodorus had some passage of Hecataeus in
mind here, whether or not it follows the actual order of Hecataeus’s books.
77. See Rusten 1982, 96–97.
Plate 1. Cartouche of Ptolemy I (Tuna el-Gebel), preceded by a sedge
and bee designating the King of Upper and Lower Egypt. Courtesy of
the Römer- und Pelizaeus Museum, Hildesheim, Germany.
Plate 6. The Sun emerging from a hill at dawn (from The Amduat). Courtesy
of the British Museum.
Theocritean Regencies 147
78. For evidence of the marriage, see Fraser 1972, 2: 367 n. 228. On the death of Ar-
sinoe, see Grzybek (1990, 103–12), who would place it in 268, and H. Cadell (“À quelle
date Arsinoe II Philadelphe est-elle décèdée?” in Le culte du souverain dans l’Égypte
ptolémaïque au IIIe siècle avant notre ère, ed. H. Malaerts [Leuven, 1998] 1–3), who
dates it to 270 b.c.e. The two-year difference results from whether Ptolemy II’s rule is
counted as beginning at the death of his father (282) or at the beginning of his coregency
(285). See Grzybek 1990, 107–12; Koenen 1993, 51 n. 61; Cameron 1995, 160–61.
79. See Gow (2: 326), who would restrict it to around 273/2 b.c.e., and Fraser’s ar-
guments (1972, 2: 933–34) for a wider window, ca. 276/70. Lines 34–52 refer to the de-
ification of Ptolemy II’s mother, Berenice, but neither the date of her death nor the date of
the institution of her cult is known.
80. See, for example, Meincke 1965, 116–24; Weber 1993, 213 n. 3; and Funaioli
1993, 212 n. 3.
81. The form of this poem has been much analyzed. See Meincke 1965, 85–164,
which is the most comprehensive discussion; see also Schwinge 1986, 60 n. 32, and
Weber 1993, 217–43, for a discussion of topoi and bibliography.
82. Of course, as R. Hunter observes, “the later rhetorical tradition [of the prose en-
comium] is itself a descendant of the hymnic tradition” (1996a, 79 n. 13). See, for in-
148 Theocritean Regencies
Theocritus ends with Zeus (as he promised in his opening line), but
Callimachus’s doublets of prosperity and virtue are reordered. Theocri-
tus uncouples excellence—this is the only occurrence of the word dreta
in the poem—from prosperity and assigns the dispensation of the for-
mer to the divine, the latter to Ptolemy. In fact, the poem is a meditation
on prosperity—that Ptolemy possesses it, how he disposes it, and how
he should dispose it for the future—while excellence (dreta) is rele-
gated to the last line of the poem, in which Theocritus seems to dismiss
heroic values.86 But “As for excellence, seek it from Zeus” could equally
well be a sly reference to Callimachus’s Zeus hymn, in which, in spite of
its formal hymnic closing, arete is not much present. Further, Calli-
machus ends with a disingenuous self-referentiality: he asserts that
“there has not been, there shall not be” a poet to praise the works of
Zeus, and we readily understand Callimachus himself to occupy that
86. For various interpretations of this line, see Wilamowitz, Textgeschichte der
griechische Bukoliker (Berlin, 1906) 54–55; Schlatter 1941, 28–30 and note; Griffiths
1979, 75, as well as Schwinge’s comments (1986, 75–77). While it is certainly true that
the cultural values implicit in arete had undergone a transformation since the Homeric
period and included much more than excellence in battle, arete is a very prominent fea-
ture of encomiastic writing, and, therefore, its almost total absence in the Ptolemy is the
more striking.
Theocritean Regencies 151
89. Given the prominence of the anecdote in both Herodotus and Hecataeus, I won-
der whether in this context Theocritus may wish us to recall the behavior of Sesoösis the
archetypal warrior king, for whom to be female was the mark of the coward or weakling.
See Herodotus 2.106; Diodorus Siculus 1. 55.7–9. See Weber 1993, 215, on the represen-
tation of Soter as a “Quasi-Diener.” Heracles plays a similarly feminized role vis-à-vis
Artemis in Callimachus Hymn to Artemis 142–51.
90. See Hippothales’ remarks in Lysis 205c-d.
91. Though presumably not within the parameters of Soter’s other cultic manifesta-
tions, one of which—that of the Theoi Soteres—is mentioned at line 123.
Theocritean Regencies 153
Compare:
tu mBn KApron Gxoisa Diana% patnia koAra
kalpon D% eDadh r\adinb% Dsemajato xePra%.
On her the Queen of Cyprus, Dione’s august daughter, laid her delicate
hands, pressing them upon her fragrant breast. (Idyll 17.34–35)
95. See Griffiths 1979, 22; also Hunter (1996b, 161–63), who suggests it might have
resonance with the contemporary burial practices of the Ptolemies.
96. M. Edwards (The Iliad: A Commentary, vol. 5, Books 17–20 [Cambridge, 1991]
238) remarks on Iliad 19.38: “Here ambrosia and nectar are dripped into the nostrils,
which suggests a reminiscence of an embalming technique, cf. Herodotus 2.86.3.”
97. For Anubis touching the dead person, Coffin Text I 223f–g; making the dead
smell sweet, Coffin Text I 195g.
98. Žabkar 1988, 44–45, where the text quoted is Coffin Text VI 284r.
99. These ideas could be used of men as well. In Osorkon’s victory stele from the
eighth century b.c.e., Osorkon is said to be “sweet-scented amongst the courtiers like the
large lotus bud which is at the nose of every god . . . as a worthy youth, sweet of love
even as Horus coming forth from Chemmis” (Caminos 1958, 260).
Theocritean Regencies 155
opator, and Epiphanes. (In the trilingual Rosetta stone this phrase is
translated as eDkanoß zpshß toP Diaß, or “living likeness of Zeus.”)105
“Likeness” to one’s divine father necessarily entailed a commensurate
likeness to one’s human father, who in his turn equally resembled the
god, but there were also practical consequences of the resemblance. In a
boundary stele of Sesostris III, for example, the true son establishes his
claims to his status by replicating his father’s deeds. The inscription is
typically Egyptian in that it plays with a multiple senses of “image” of
the king: the king’s actual deeds are inscribed, the stele also bears his
physical likeness, and finally it serves notice of how to identify his true
image, or son:
Now, as for any son of mine who shall make firm this boundary
my Person made,
he is my son, born of my Person;
the son who vindicates his father is a model,
making firm the boundary of his begetter.
Now as for him who shall neglect it, shall not fight for it—
no son of mine, not born to me!
Now my Person has caused an image of my Person to be made,
upon this boundary which my Person made,
so that you shall be firm for it, so that you will fight for it.106
105. See Thissen 1966, 40, and Beckerath 1999, 236. Soter and Philadelphus use the
variant mrj-Jmn ( = “beloved of Amun”).
106. R. B. Parkinson, Voices from Ancient Egypt (Norman, Okla., 1991) 46: cf.
Lichtheim 1973, 119–20.
107. Caminos 1958, 260.
108. Daumas 1958, 306–8; the passage is discussed in Koenen 1983, 163.
Theocritean Regencies 157
ish drinking, while Berenice is united in death with the divine and care-
giving aspects of Aphrodite and continues to bring benefits to mortals.
Similarly, Amphitryon, rushes from his chamber with sword and
baldric, like the epic hero he was, only to fade from the picture while
Alcmena takes action that decides Heracles’ future. In each case The-
ocritus presents the fathers of his subject within the terms of heroic
Greek myth that seems to be inert, while the women (and as the poems
progress, their sons) are located specifically in a dynamic and evolving
contemporary world. In the Ptolemy, this has been taken to imply
Ptolemy II’s failure to live up to the military achievements of his father,
but of course that cannot be said of Heracles in the Heracliscus. There
we identified Theocritus’s poetic behavior as (in M. Fantuzzi’s words)
“demythologizing” the heroic past.109 In this poem do the two divergent
representations of divinity presuppose some qualitative or generic dif-
ference? How are we to rank the divinity of Soter, who interacts with
Heracles and Alexander, in comparison to the cult of cohabitation with
one of the Olympians that is Berenice’s fate? Are they equal, or is one
inherently superior? Having determined that Ptolemy is not a god in the
same sense as Zeus, Theocritus reveals himself less certain about just
what form his immortality is destined to take—will he be elevated to
the heights of Olympus like his father or deified in cult like his mother?
Or is the point to leave him suspended between the two—each of which
provides a template of sorts for imperial achievement?
Theocritus finally reaches his subject, Ptolemy II, via another formu-
laic device—the priamelic allusion to two epic heroes, Diomedes and
Achilles (53–57). The progress is from Diomedes to the more famous
Achilles, with Philadephus filling out the triad. Theocritus plays again
with the similarity of fathers to sons: both heroes exceed the fame of
their fathers, which holds out the promise that Philadelphus will also
exceed his father’s fame, while the symmetry of the phrases aDxmhtb
PtolemaPe, | aDxmhtu PtolemaAi guarantees at least that he begins life
as the mirror image of his father.110 The allusions have usually been read
less than positively. Commentators point out that Philadelphus was
hardly the military equal of his father, Soter, and owed his success in the
Syrian war to his wife, Arsinoe II.111 But perhaps the limitations and
Great and the Macedonian Heritage, ed. E. Borza and W. L. Adams (Washington, D.C.,
1982) 197–212, provides a more realistic assessment.
112. See Hunter’s remarks on Theocritus’s use of Hesiod (1996a, 81–82) and Bing on
Callimachus’s use (1988, 76–83).
Theocritean Regencies 159
appears on their coins, and confronted gilt eagles fifteen cubits high sur-
mounted the skhna in which Ptol. Philadelphus held his symposium
(Ath. 5. 197A). This symbol is more likely to explain than to be ex-
plained by the story (Aelian fr. 285) that Ptol. Soter, when exposed in in-
fancy, was protected by an eagle.113
The eagle, the bird of Zeus and marker of his royal power, and, by
extension, kings, has a long pedigree in Greek art and literature. Both
Theocritus and Callimachus allude to Hesiod on the subject. But
Zeus’s eagle has an equally potent Egyptian kin. The Horus falcon
was not simply an indicator of divine protection in pharaonic art and
symbol of kingship; in the Late Period, it sometimes took precedence
over the pharaoh as the icon of divine kingship.114 Old Kingdom
pharaohs are often shown being embraced by the wings of the Horus
falcon, and two millennia later in the second century b.c.e., a major
Ptolemiac construction was dedicated to the Horus falcon at Edfu.
Outstretched falcon wings were used as a common framing device
for lunate commemorative stelae or as a protective device on temple
walls and were particularly associated with the king.115 Thus a fond-
ness for eagles served to situate the Ptolemies within two separate
cultural frames of reference and facilitate their movement from one
to another. If Greeks saw the bird of Zeus, and Egyptians saw a
Horus falcon, both saw a familiar accoutrement of royal power.
Euergesia
The speaking island does not so much predict Ptolemy’s success as take
it for granted. Theocritus echoes Callimachus in his quotation of Hes-
iod—the proper or reverent (aidoios) king is a prosperous one, and this
is exemplified by the wealth of Philadelphus. But where Callimachus
limits his characterization of Ptolemy’s wealth to r\yhfenAa, a coinage
that calls to mind the richness of the Nile, Theocritus embroiders the
theme of wealth (glbo%) and the good king for twenty lines. He con-
trasts the rest of the world with the fecund plains of Egypt “when the
Nile overflows and breaks up the soil” where “three hundred cities
have been built therein, and three thousand and thrice ten thousand,
and twice three and three times nine”—to a total of 33,333. The num-
ber is undoubtedly constructed for its symbolic or mystic perfection,116
but it is also close to the figure used by ancient writers. Diodorus, who
will have gotten his figure from Hecataeus, gives the number of villages
in Egypt at the time of Ptolemy, son of Lagus, as “more than thirty
thousand,”117 and a scholium to the Iliad places the number around
33,000.118
Theocritus has taken more than the number from Hecataeus. Com-
pare his description of Ptolemy’s behavior with that of Sesoösis as a
good king in Diodorus.119 Theocritus insists that Ptolemy
would outweigh other kings in wealth, so much comes daily into his
wealthy halls from every quarter. And his people go about their work in
peace. For no enemy crosses the teeming Nile on foot to raise the cry of
battle in villages not his own; none springs from his swift ship upon the
shore, harrying with armed violence the herds of Egypt. So great a man
is enthroned on those broad plains, yellow-haired Ptolemy, who knows
how to shake a spear, to whom it is a care to guard his ancestral her-
itage. As a good king, he increases them himself, and the gold does not
lie useless in the wealthy house, like the wealth that the ever-toiling ants
pile up. But much the glorious temples of the gods receive, much is
given to mighty kings, much to cities, and to his good companions.
(95–110)
We three are brothers whom Rhea bore to Cronus, Zeus and I, and
Hades lord of the dead is the third. Into three parts was everything di-
vided, and each of us had his share.126
128. Homonoia was a concept connected with Alexander’s grand plan for his king-
dom. See Tarn 1933, 123–48.
Theocritean Regencies 165
to the same mythological repertory is kept in play. Delos and Cos exist
in a temporal relationship to each other: Delos, whatever its date of
composition, must be poetically prior, while Cos serves to fulfill
Apollo’s prophecy and continue the poetic chain of speaking islands
from Homer through Callimachus to Theocritus, thereby linking
Ptolemy and his birth to hymnic as well as encomiastic modes of ex-
pression. The cosmic disorder that is transformed into harmony at the
birth of Apollo is continued in the encomium, as if the promise of
Ptolemy in the one is fulfilled in the other. If in the Delos hymn the
forces of chaos—Pytho and the Gauls—will need to be defeated in the
future, the encomium paints a picture of the results of these events and
the ensuing cosmic accord, or what happens when the foe is routed.
Both poets use Egyptian models, but while Callimachus focuses on the
myths of divine birth once again as the moment when cosmic harmony
begins, Theocritus focuses on the adult behavior of the king as the liv-
ing instantiation of harmony, in the form of prosperity, and on the
king’s role in facilitating culture.
The encomium must also be read in relationship to the Heracliscus.
The general shape of the two is similar, and the presence of Heracles in
both as a model for his descendant, Ptolemy, is significant. The Hera-
cliscus, like the Zeus hymn, began by seeming to construct a dual Greek
and Egyptian mythology for its subject—Heracles—and by the selec-
tion and treatment of the incident of Heracles throttling snakes to re-
flect in many particulars the myth of Horus. But in Callimachus the
double construction of plot continues throughout the poem to leave the
late appearance of Ptolemy in the poem suspended between the two
narratives as Callimachus’s “doubts” never resolve themselves but are
externalized as “plausible fictions.” In contrast, Theocritus’s double
narrative unites in Teiresias’s prophecy, as Theocritus moves from the
mythical models of earlier Greek poetry to a historical model similar to
that found in Hecataeus. The prophecy not only brings to closure the
incident of defeating serpents, or triumphing over enemies, it also pro-
vides the stimulus for the education of Heracles as a young prince, just
as Sesoösis’s father was stimulated by a dream of his son’s future ac-
complishments. The similarity of the Hecataean narrative about Sesoö-
sis suggests that Theocritus is working within the same conceptual
framework as Callimachus, but while Callimachus remains within the
parameters of archaic Greek poetry to construct an ideal of kingship,
Theocritus moves to contemporary political and philosophical debate.
Sesoösis serves as a concrete example for a newly crowned king who
166 Theocritean Regencies
rules over both Greeks and Egyptians, because Sesoösis is a “real” his-
torical Egyptian king whose behavior has been conformed to an ideal-
ized Greek model. While Callimachus’s Hesiodic basileus with straight
judgments can function as a parallel for or allusion to the Egyptian king
who governs by maat, Theocritus borrows a figure in whom Egyptian
ideals of maat have already been translated into Greek concepts and
just judgment has been expressed by euergesia, or generosity on an im-
perial scale.129
Moreover, in both of Theocritus’s poems the narratives progress
from openings that seem to search for behavioral models within the
framework of the archaic or heroic world to conclude with behaviors
that conform to modern ideals of kingship. As we saw in Hecataeus,
prosperity (olbia) and ultimately immortality were granted to those
rulers who had conferred benefactions upon mankind (euergesia).
What is also at stake is a realignment of immortality. Theocritus clearly
separates the realms of human and divine, most obviously in the Hera-
cliscus, as we saw above, but also in the Ptolemy, where he maintains a
distinction between Zeus and Aphrodite, on the one hand, and the
demigods, like Heracles, who sup with the immortals but are subject to
the normal events of human life—birth, maturation, and death. For this
secondary rank, immortality is to be gained by good works: as Isis and
Osiris and the other early Egyptian kings in Hecataeus are deified for
their signal benefits to humankind, so in an analogous way might oth-
ers be elevated. One means of benefaction in Hecataeus is the introduc-
tion of the cults of the gods. Already in the Heracliscus Theocritus may
have intended his audience to understand the allusions to the Eleusinian
mysteries in this context, either as a past example of benefits conferred
or, if Soter had indeed introduced something similar in Alexandria, a
current one. It is in this context that ruler cult seems to function in the
Ptolemy. We are told:
Alone this one of those men who formerly or still warm the dust with the
imprint of their feet as they go has established shrines to his dear mother
and father, in which, splendid in gold and ivory, he has placed them to as-
sist all mankind. (121–25)
129. The Egyptian pharaoh acted as a creator who renewed and expanded maat
through buildings and other monuments (Hornung 1992, 156). For the way in which this
pharaonic motif of building plays out in Callimachus’s Hymn to Apollo, see Selden 1998,
384–408.
Theocritean Regencies 167
Soter and Berenice continue their benefactions, then, even in death, and
in marked contrast to the heroes of mythic hymns Ptolemy alone has in-
stituted cult not only as an act of filial piety but also as a benefaction in
turn for mankind. At this point we should recall that other contempo-
rary writer, Euhemerus, who, like Hecataeus, organized divinity into
two categories—ouranioi and epigeioi. For him even Zeus was an ex-
ample of this latter category, since among his other services to humans
he instituted cults to his parents. Theocritus proleptically locates
Ptolemy II in this same company of such divinized humans with the
image of footprints in the dust. There was a well-documented Egyptian
belief that the imprint of the foot of a divinity or of the king personified
the divine force and was an index of the beneficient effect of the divine
presence. Plaques with the imprint of feet have often been found among
temple dedications.130 Thus Ptolemy’s footprint not only places him in
the exclusive company of those gods and kings important enough to
leave footprints but elevates him above the rest. It serves as the tangible
manifestation of the qualities that will in the fullness of time lead to his
own deification, as well as the benefits that his current activities confer
on his subjects.
Theocritus, as we have seen, has ample precedent for the dynamic of
his narrative, but his originality lies in the poetic attempt to conform or
adapt these prose models specifically to Ptolemy as well as in the dy-
namic interplay of the two different mythological frames of reference
that he chose to employ. A similar dynamic appears to have been at
work in Idyll 15, the Adoniazusae. In that poem the chaos and disorder
of the streets of Alexandria, with their babble of competing regional ac-
cents and threats of trampling horses, are transformed into the beauty
and harmony of the royal palace. Theocritus is surely playing with the
Egyptian constructs of order and chaos in two ways: he inverts the nor-
mal relationship between Egyptian and other when he attributes (at
least partially) the disorder of the streets to Egyptian pickpockets and
order to Ptolemy for cleaning up the street crime. But by attributing the
bringing of order to Ptolemy, Theocritus simultaneously marks him as
pharaoh, albeit a pharaoh triumphing over petty theft not Gaulish
hoards. The poem itself celebrates the beneficium of the Adonis festival,
which the queen, Arsinoe, instituted for the citizens of Alexandria. And
however one interprets the event, the quality of the Adonis song, and
Theocritus’s intentions (ironical or otherwise), the pleasure of the two
ladies, Gorgo and Praxinoa, is represented as genuine, and their praise
of the singer—panolbAa (146)—could equally serve as an epithet for
the Ptolemaic city itself.131
It is within the context of a dual Greek-Egyptian kingship that has
moved out of the realm of the mythological—or potential, where Calli-
machus seems to have left it—and into the contemporary—or actual—
that brother-sister marriage comes to play a role.132 This is a real
pharaonic practice with ample precedent in national myth; not only are
Isis and Osiris brother and sister as well as man and wife, their siblings,
Seth and Nephthys, are also a pair. But, apart from the obvious paral-
lels with Zeus and Hera, the two couples have very little in common.
Isis is an entirely loyal wife and sister as well as mother, and the Egypt-
ian pair are given to good works that benefit their son as well as mor-
tals in general, rather than to complaints and philandering. Their sex-
ual relationship is focused on and culminates in the production of the
son and legitimate heir, Horus, and in many versions of the story Isis
conceives Horus posthumously. In contrast, Zeus, in the context of
myth (as opposed to philosophy), seems to have fathered half of the he-
roes in Greek legend,133 while Hera is often quarrelsome and vindictive.
Theocritus’s decision to end the Ptolemy by mentioning the marriage of
Ptolemy and Arsinoe II is explicable in terms of Egyptian kingship—the
loving family pair is a fit finale to his portrait of political, social, and
cosmic harmony, but in terms of Greek myth we find the same in-
concinnity as in the heroic priamel. However, within the contemporary
prose writings of Hecataeus and Euhemerus, it seems that Zeus and
Hera were constructed rather differently. According to Hecataeus,
there were other gods, who were terrestrial (DpigeAoy%), they say, who
had once been mortal, but who because of their intelligence and their
131. For the relationship between the Adonia and Osirid festivals, see Reed 2000,
319–51.
132. Brother-sister marriage was a notorious feature of Greco-Roman Egypt. For the
most recent study, see W. Scheidel, “Brother-Sister and Parent-Child Marriage Outside
Royal Families in Ancient Egypt and Iran: A Challenge to the Sociobiological View of In-
cest Avoidance?” Ethnology and Sociobiology 17 (1996) 319–40.
133. There are obvious political implications in stories that position one or another
family in a direct line from Zeus, and the power structure of Egypt, with its dominant
centralized monarchy, will not have needed to generate the same set of myths, but still the
differences between the divine brother-sister pairs are remarkable. See Hall 1996, 88–89,
on the function of theogeniture.
Theocritean Regencies 169
Theocritus, then, was not alone in finding Zeus and Hera positive mod-
els for kingship. While this may not have alleviated the difficulty of
packaging brother-sister marriage for Greek consumption, it does pro-
vide a more nuanced context for the analogy. In philosophical and his-
torical discourse the construction of divinity was at odds with the
mythological apparatus of the inherited hymnic tradition. In more gen-
eral terms this points to the genuine conceptual difficulties poets of this
new age faced in writing for a court. The poetic traditions of the past,
produced as often as not in different political environments, could be
only a partial fit for hymning the Ptolemies.
134. Diodorus Siculus 1.13.4–5 = FGrH 264 F25.13.4–5. I have omitted the portion
of 1.13.4 that Jacoby rejects.
135. Note, for instance, how much is written about the end of Callimachus’s Hymn
to Apollo and how little about the poem as a whole. In contrast, see Selden 1998,
384–405.
170 Theocritean Regencies
Apollonian Cosmologies
1. 1993, 3. See Hunter’s assessment at pp. 152–69, and in 1989b and 1995. In con-
trast, Weber rarely mentions the Argonautica in his treatment of Hellenistic “court”po-
etry (1993), and Green (1997) reads it as a throwback to the archaic worldview of an ear-
lier age. Even Pietsch’s study of the unity of the Argonautica (1999) discusses its
“theology” entirely in terms of Homer and classical models, without any attention to
Hellenistic philosophical discourse.
2. Bakhtin 1981, 15. While it is fashionable to critique Bakhtin’s formulations as ap-
plicable only to the earliest, perhaps only oral epic, in fact his observations about the tem-
poral relationship of past and present are true even for Vergil: Vergil constructs an epic
171
172 Apollonian Cosmologies
past for the Augustan age precisely because that period comes invested with heightened
cultural significance.
3. Goldhill (1991: 284–333), for example, explores the relationship of past and pres-
ent in Apollonius entirely in terms of the literary.
4. The disagreement among modern scholars about whether or not the Aeneid was
intended as pro- or anti-Augustan suggests that even this epic, despite it proclamations of
the manifest destiny of Rome, cannot be read as a simple validation of Augustus’s reign.
Apollonian Cosmologies 173
Events of the epic past do not valorize the present nor necessarily ac-
count for it causally, nor do they serve as model for “modern” action.
Rather, epic confers a particular kind of existence upon events, and by
locating events of the narrative within an epic framework the poet val-
orizes them within a preordained and culturally accessible symbolic
system. It is by fashioning a past to partake of or participate in epic
meaning that Apollonius’s epic functioned in the Ptolemaic present—a
present without access to a past or cultural heritage distinct from that
of the Panhellenic or polis world of the Greek city-states. But the
uniqueness of Alexandria, with its bicultural formation, the ethnic di-
versity of its Greek population, its lack of autochthonous heroes, as
well as the historical circumstance of its very recent foundation, made it
sufficiently unlike earlier Greek cities that the Homeric epics with their
heroic values and their focus on the defining moment of the Trojan War
were an uneasy fit for the emerging apparatus of the Ptolemaic state.
Thus neither Jason nor Heracles is meant to be Ptolemy any more than
Aeneas is meant to be Augustus—though individual readers may be
able to draw parallels of behavior or circumstance. Rather, the activities
of a hero operating within the temporal framework of epic, which
stand in some relationship (originary or otherwise) to the present, con-
fer status and stability—a mythic historicity—that parvenu cultures like
that of Alexandria were manifestly lacking.
5. Meuli 1925 discusses elements of the Argo myth embedded in the Odyssey. Dräger
1993 and Moreau 1994 provide full-scale treatments of earlier and later versions of the
myth. Hunter 1989a, 12–21, and Braund 1994, 11–39, have useful summaries.
174 Apollonian Cosmologies
the encounter of Greek and non-Greek, barbarian, the other, and the re-
sulting cooperation and ultimate union of the two. The union can be
read in various ways: as a reciprocal union of Greek and non-Greek, as
the triumph of civilizing Greece over barbarian culture, as the traducing
of Greek innocence and values by barbarian treachery and magic prac-
tice, as an uneasy cultural liaison, or as one doomed to failure. By lo-
cating the event in the past all potentialities are possible; no particular
future is preordained. Equally, there is no autonomous narrative of the
events Apollonius relates, only a series of earlier myths and legends,
each embedded within a specific generic context. Collectively this mate-
rial formed the intertextual matrix for Apollonius’s own composition,
but it does not seem to have been prescriptive or necessarily limiting of
his own narrative voice.6
While we do not have earlier epic treatments of the voyage of the
Argonauts to compare with Apollonius’s, previous versions of the tale
formed part of the Greek literary heritage, in both poetry and prose.
Herodotus, for example, in the opening of his Histories organizes a se-
ries of disparate legends into a coherent chronology for the war with
Persia. For him the conflict between Greece and Persia originates in a se-
ries of “woman-stealings” on both sides (1.2–2.3). First, Phoenician
merchantmen snatched away Greek Io from the port of Argos; later,
some Greeks (probably Cretan, Herodotus remarks at 2.1) stole Europa,
the daughter of the local king, from Tyre. About fifty years later, armed
Greek merchantmen in Colchis abducted the king’s daughter, and all this
culminated in Paris taking Helen. The resulting enmity between Greek
and barbarian—for his rhetorical purposes, Herodotus lumps Phoeni-
cian, Colchian, and Trojan together and implicitly identifies them with
Persian—led to the Persian wars, which he and fifth-century Greeks in
general mythologized as the triumph of Greek cultural values over bar-
barian despotism. But equally implicit in Herodotus’s scheme is the
mythologically entangled, quasi-familial relationship of Greek and
Egyptian cultures, for Io, as a Greek, became the ancestor of Egypt and
Libya, while the Phoenician Europa became the eponymous mother of
7. These trends are also visible in Apollonius’s contemporary Lycophron, who uses
the same Herodotean scheme—Io, Europa, and Medea (1291–1321)—but recounts the
expedition of the Argonauts only in allusive details (1209–21).
8. The link between Colchis and Libya and Egypt is well attested in ancient writing
(Braund 1994, 9, 17–18), but it is not a prominent feature in most accounts of the voyage
of the Argo. Other Hellenistic writers also note the connection: Callimachus in the open-
ing of the fragmentary “Victoria Berenices” (SH fr. 254 + fr. 383 Pf.) links Colchis and the
Nile in respect to weaving, while Lycophron in his tale of the Argonauts (1312) identifies
Colchis as Libyan: eD% KAtaian tbn Libystikan.
9. 2.1015–25, and compare Herodotus 2.35.
176 Apollonian Cosmologies
16. Diodorus Siculus 1.55.2–3 ( = FGrH 264 F 25.55.2–3), and see Fusillo’s discus-
sion (1985, 52–54).
17. On homonoia, see Tarn 1933, 123–48. For a discussion of this scene in Apollo-
nius, see Feeney 1991, 75–77, and Hunter 1995, 18–24.
18. The role of the Greek gods within this poem has been treated elsewhere and is not
central to this study. See Feeney 1991; Hunter 1993, 75–100. Pietsch (1999) has argued
for a unifying “theology” throughout the Argonautica, in which Zeus’s anger and his jus-
tice are overarching.
Apollonian Cosmologies 179
19. Pythian 4.13–15. The text and translation are adapted from Braswell 1988, 41
and notes on 15 (a)–(b) on pp. 81–83.
20. Virtually the same trajectory is found in Lycophron’s compression of the tale of
the Argo (891–894), though he connects possession of Libya not with the clod/island, but
with possession of the tripod that the Argonauts give to Triton (cf. Argonautica
4.1547–49 and Herodotus 4.179).
21. See Calame 1990, 275–341, for an analysis of the Cyrenean foundation myths in
Pindar Pythians 4, 5, and 9, Callimachus, and Apollonius. I am following Calame’s read-
ing of Pythian 4, but my argument about Apollonius is entirely different from his (see esp.
his pp. 284–85).
180 Apollonian Cosmologies
Apollonius further changes the Pindaric version: the clod is not washed
overboard, nor is the prophecy forgotten by the Argonauts, rather Eu-
phemus, instructed by Jason, deliberately casts it into the sea
(4.1750–61) to activate the chain of events that guaranteed the subse-
quent Greek return to North Africa. What is accidental in Pindar be-
comes a deliberate action to accomplish divine will.
The Argonautica was most likely to have been written between 270
and 240 b.c.e., or within a generation or two of the foundation of the
22. Callimachus praises the Battiad line because he is related to it, but the Battiads
had not controlled the Cyrenaica for over a century. During the period in which Apollo-
nius is likely to have written the Argonautica, it was ruled either by Ptolemy II’s half
brother Magas or by the Ptolemies themselves (Laronde 1987, 379–454). See Braswell’s
comment (1988, 130 n. 49 [b]).
23. However, see below, note 29.
Apollonian Cosmologies 181
24. For details of chronology, see Hunter 1989a, 1–7, and Cameron 1995, 261–62,
264–65.
25. Apollonius moves the prophecy of Medea from the beginning of Pythian 4 to the
end of his own fourth book, and Pindar’s phrase diamonAh bplaj (Pythian 4.33) appears
at Argonautica 4.1734.
26. Q. Curtius Rufus tells a related story, adding that Alexander originally intended
to build on the island itself but found it too small (4.8.1–2). Plutarch also knows this tale,
which he attributes to Alexandrian sources, though in his version the apparition is not
Ammon, but Homer (Alexander 26.3–7).
182 Apollonian Cosmologies
27. G-P lines 3110–19. On the location of the temple, see Strabo 17.800. The epi-
gram is generally placed before Arsinoe’s death in 270 or 268 b.c.e. See Fraser 1972, 1:
239, 2: 389 n. 393. See also fr. 228.51 Pf., where Callimachus uses Libya for North
Africa in general (including Egypt).
28. In pharaonic terms, Libya was one of the traditional enemies of Egypt. On the
translation of this traditional conflict into Hellenistic poetry, see Selden 1998, 326–37.
29. It is possible to regard the Argo’s reentry into the Mediterranean from Lake Tri-
tonis in the vicinity of modern Benghazi as an allusion to Ptolemaic control of the area (so
Livrea 1991; Hunter 1993, 152–53). In ancient times the town of Euhesperides (Beng-
hazi) was renamed for Berenice, the daughter of Magas who became the wife of Ptolemy
III. On the renaming of Euhesperides, see Laronde 1987, 382–83.
Apollonian Cosmologies 183
35. Pratt’s travel tales are for the most part related in the first person and are most
closely comparable to fanciful Greek travel narratives like that of Pytheas of Marseilles or
to the work of the geographers of the Hellenistic period. My point is not that Apollonius’s
poetic goals were necessarily the same as this seventeenth- and eighteenth-century senti-
mental fiction, but that the relationship of certain types of cognitive experience to narra-
tive may well have been similar. Indeed, the categories into which Braund (1994, 10–11)
organizes myths about ancient Georgia—achievement and evaluation, geography, kin-
ship—are similar to Pratt’s, though they lack her analysis of the relationship of perceptual
categories to narrative styles.
Apollonian Cosmologies 185
the nymphs have been mourning the death of their guardian serpent,
Ladon, at Heracles’ hands, when he came in quest of the apples of the
Hesperides. Heracles, who had taken the apples only the day before,
killed the beast with arrows dipped in poison from the Lernaean hydra,
whom he had defeated in an earlier struggle. But this episode is told
from the perspective of the nymphs themselves, and to them, Heracles,
the traditional bearer of a more civilized order, who clears the lands of
monsters, is himself the monster:
He came yesterday, a man most dire in insolence and aspect; his eyes
flamed out from under his lowering brow, ruthlessly. And around him
was the hide of a monstrous lion, raw, untanned. (4.1436–39)
The serpent rotting in the sun, now gpnoo%, who guarded the golden
apples, of course, was an analogue of the unsleeping (gypno%) serpent
guarding the golden fleece. And what from the perspective of the literate
Greek audience was another example of the laboring Heracles perform-
ing necessary and admirable tasks, from the viewpoint of the indige-
nous nymphs was wanton robbery and destruction. Thus a narrative
trajectory that appeared to convey the conventional Greek message of
civilization triumphing over barbarism is deflected by an attack of cul-
tural relativism. The moral issues are complex, however: whatever the
nymphs’ perception of Heracles his presence was a gain for the Arg-
onauts because his brutalization of the landscape created a necessary
spring that “saved his companions, overcome with thirst” (4.1459).
If the response of Heracles to his environment is to rid it of the un-
civilized, the response of Jason and his men in their journey from “old”
Greece to new beginnings would seem to serve as the bearers of their
own version of civilized community. In the outward journey they mark
the landscape with new foundations, that is, with their own religious
cults and interpretations of or explanations for what they meet along
the way. The telling of an explanatory story, an aition, had considerable
vogue in Hellenistic poetry. Callimachus’s now fragmentary Aetia is the
best example, and Apollonius himself is known to have written consid-
erable material of this type.40 The prominence of foundation stories re-
40. Dougherty (1994, 35–46) suggested that an autonomous genre of foundation po-
etry did not actually exist in the archaic period but was invented in Alexandria. N. Kre-
vans, in “On the Margins of Epic: Foundation Poems of Apollonius,” Hellenistica
Groningana 4: 69–84, extends Dougherty’s questions about a ktisis-genre to Alexandria
itself and asks whether Apollonius’s ktiseis were discrete poems or rather subsections of
larger works.
188 Apollonian Cosmologies
In this manner, the foundation of the cult itself and one of its most dis-
tinctively foreign features can be traced to prior Greek activity, while
subsequently the non-Greek peoples of the region, the Phrygians, are
stripped of cultural autonomy and assigned the role of mere imitators.42
The relationship of the Greeks in the Hellenistic period to these re-
gions, however, was distinctively different from that of the archaic pe-
riod. By Apollonius’s time the landscape into which he launches his
Argonauts had already been the site of colonial activity by Greeks for
several centuries. It was impossible for Apollonius merely to reassert
old stories (as found in Pindar, for example) in order to link the Ptole-
maic world to previous claims for Greekness; the Ptolemies were not al-
ways competing with barbarians for these locations, but with other
Macedonian-Greek princelings—the descendants of Alexander’s gener-
als, who had parceled out for themselves the eastern Mediterranean. In
these lands many peoples were already Greek, and many foundations,
like Mt. Dindymon (1.1110–52), already part of a Hellenized land-
scape. In this brief vignette, for example, Apollonius acknowledges
This king was not a Greek, but the Egyptian Sesostris, and his be-
havior, which is shaped to recall the recent expedition of Alexander, un-
dermines the authority of the Greek presence by suggesting an even ear-
lier Egyptian one, as well as the transitory, or recurring, nature of such
cultural occupations. Indeed, the very language and construction of this
passage in the Argonautica borrows its strategies from aition but now
locates Egypt as prior.
ˆEstin gbr plao% gllo%, fn duanatvn Cerpe%
pAfradon, oF Qabh% TritvnAdo% Dkgegaasin.
OG pv teArea panta, ta t’ oCranu eClAssontai.
oDdA tA pv Danapn Cerbn gAno% ren dkoPsai
peyuomAnoi%¢ oRoi d’ Gsan \Arkade% \Apidanpe%,
\Arkade%, oF kaB prasue selhnaAh% CdAontai
zaein, fhgbn Gdonte% Dn oGresin¢ oDdB PelasgB%
xubn tate kydalAmoisin dnasseto DeykalAdisin,
rmo% et’ \HerAh polylaio% Dklaisto,
mathr AGgypto% proterhgenAvn aDzhpn,
kaB potamb% TrAtvn eDrArroo%, Q Epo ppsa
grdetai \HerAh.
For there is another course, which the priests of the immortals who have
sprung from Tritonian Thebes43 have made known. Not yet did all the
constellations move in the heaven, nor yet could one hear of the sacred
43. Vian (1981, 157 n. 260) points out that DkgAgaa indicates parentage, not origin;
hence the meaning is “from Thebe, the daughter of Triton.” If so, it will be a metonymy
for Thebes. The sense must be priests from the city, not priests who trace their descent
from the nymph. Unlike Greeks, in Egypt only the king could have divine ancestors.
190 Apollonian Cosmologies
race of the Danaans, if one should make inquiry. Alone were the Arca-
dian Apidanians,44 Arcadians, who are said to have lived even before the
moon, eating acorns in the hills. At that time the Pelasgian land was not
ruled by the glorious sons of Deucalion; Egypt was then called fertile
Aeria (\HerAh polylaio%), mother of men of an older generation, and the
broad-flowing river by which all Aeria was watered was called Triton.
(4.259–69)
The third narrative type that Apollonius employs is the erotic en-
counter of Jason and Medea, one that develops logically from earlier
modes of contact. This event represents the most intimate interaction
between Greek and other, and potentially the most threatening, be-
cause of the risk it presents to bloodlines and family stock. It also pro-
vides the most extended and obvious space in which transculturation—
the adaptation of either Greek or non-Greek to the behavioral patterns
and values of the other—is likely to take place. The erotic response of a
foreign woman to the arrival of the adventuring male is legible as a
projection of colonial discourse that functions to legitimate the in-
truder (and his desires for acquisition) within this alien territory. As
Pratt puts it, “romantic love rather than filial servitude or force guar-
antees the wilful submission of the colonized.”46 These encounters seem
to possess a common set of characteristics, whether they are located in
eighteenth-century Latin America or Vergil’s Aeneid: the women are of
high status and in their generosity and sympathy are often perceived as
more like the intruder than inhabitants of their own less civilized
world. But “while the lovers challenge colonial hierarchies, in the end
they acquiesce to them. Reciprocity is irrelevant.”47 Often the lovers
enter into a marriage of sorts, but the local women are ultimately aban-
doned in favor of a legitimate wife from the man’s own ethnic group.
Finally,
in their very unreality . . . these idealized half-European subalterns do
embody another thoroughly real dimension of the late eighteenth century
Caribbean society. By that time, in both the Caribbean and much of
Spanish America, populations of non-enslaved people of mixed ancestry
had everywhere come to equal or outnumber whites in both the
Caribbean and much of Spanish America.48
The situation will have been similar for the eastern Mediterranean in
the reign of the Ptolemies. Colonization over a three-century period
meant that Greek men in these environments consistently married na-
tive women and that local populations, however they identified them-
selves, Greek or otherwise, were likely to be descendants of ethnically
mixed arrangements.49 Such a condition could pose problems for family
loyalties. We find even in the remote region of Colchis these mixed mar-
riages with their potential for divisiveness: when the Greek Phrixus
reached Colchis, he was given one of Aeetes’ daughters, Chalciope, in
marriage. The four sons who resulted from this union are first cousins
of Medea as well as more distant kin of Jason, a circumstance that
destabilizes the tidy opposition of Greek/barbarian. The Argonauts en-
counter these young men on their way to Orchomenus to claim their
Greek father’s heritage (2.1141–56). Subsequently they play a crucial
role in gaining Jason an introduction to Aeetes’ court as well as in per-
suading their Colchian mother to aid the Argonauts.
The episode of Jason and Medea also has an aetiological dimension.
The conquest of and marriage with Medea, who is the daughter of the
king of Colchis and granddaughter of Helios, can operate as an ana-
logue of the many divine couplings between gods and local nymphs that
populate Greek colonization myths, and in a structural sense could
stand for the conquest of Egypt by Greece, paralleling the way in which
the marriage functions in Pythian 4. It might also call to mind more re-
cent examples of the marriages arranged by Alexander between his
Macedonian generals and local princesses. But Apollonius complicates
this reading by introducing allusions from the Odyssey as well as an al-
ternative foundation myth. In the Odyssey, the hero’s sexual adventures
are no more than interludes, only one of which, that with Nausicaa in
book 6, even hints at the possibility of legitimate marriage. Odysseus’s
adventures occur away from Ithaca, the place of legitimate marriage
and the son who will continue the line. Jason’s meeting with Medea is
marked by many Homeric allusions that suggest it will be a similar
transitory encounter, but Jason does not abandon the foreign girl; he
“marries” her in that same Odyssean Phaeacia from which Odysseus
returned home to his legitmate (that is, Greek) family. This marriage
was later put aside in favor of a Greek wife.50 It is not the marriage with
Medea that would seem to guarantee Greek claims to Egypt, and it is
not Jason and Medea’s line that will inherit it. Rather, it is the clod (dai-
monAh bplaj, 4.1734), the gift to Euphemus, and his descendants, the
product of an earlier adventure with foreign women (the Lemnians)
upper strata of society, or that Cyrene became a city of ‘mixed-Greeks’ (mijAllhne%),” cit-
ing the epigraphic evidence of mainly Dorian names. However, names are not a particu-
larly accurate gauge of ethnicity, and laws are not usually passed in a vacuum.
50. For readers who do not recall their Euripides, at this point in his narrative Apol-
lonius thoughtfully provides the cautionary tale of another of Medea’s cousins, Cretan
Ariadne and her fateful interlude with the Greek Theseus (4.433–34).
Apollonian Cosmologies 193
Up to this point I have been reading the Argonautica against the world
of Ptolemiac Alexandria in order to consider the question of how and
why the poet shaped his narrative as he did. Unlike Vergil, who wrote
after several centuries of collective Roman self-definition (however
novel the Augustan age), the reign of the Ptolemies was just beginning.
Images and ideologies were in the process of evolving but could not as
yet have worked themselves very deeply into the collective unconscious
of Ptolemy’s subjects or other contemporary Greek populations. The
poems of Homer and Hesiod may have provided a synthesis of values
and beliefs that created a “Panhellenic” paradigm for archaic and clas-
sical Greek culture,53 but the inherited belief system of these poems was
of only limited value for an imperial court located in and ruling over
non-Greek Egypt. Apollonius’s epic sets out to provide a new template.
He does not create a Homeric Egypt, populating his poem with figures
like Odysseus, Menelaus, and Helen; rather, he adapts Pindar’s account
of Greek claims to North Africa. But he also creates from various non-
Homeric articulations of Greekness a world that adumbrates his own:
at times Greek and non-Greek are conventionally opposed; at times
they seem to converge. On one level the poem celebrates the civilizing
role of Greek culture; on another this culture appears reprehensible; at
still other moments the poem expresses nostalgia for worlds or ways of
seeing and behaving lost in the civilizing process. I have borrowed a set
of observations from Pratt’s work on seventeenth- and eighteenth-cen-
tury colonial literature to focus my argument. She provides one final in-
sight important for what follows in this chapter: all colonial literature is
inherently hierarchical in that it is the dominant culture that narrates
the “other,” but it is also reciprocal: within the space of encounter,
which Pratt calls a “contact zone,” one finds “copresence, interaction,
interlocking understandings and practices.”54 I suggest that for Apollo-
nius the Ptolemaic age was such a moment of “copresence,” not just of
various ethnicities but of the symbolic worlds that encoded them, and
that he experiments with a variety of styles to create a narrative reflec-
tive of this circumstance. In contrast to Homer’s heroic Greek past,
Apollonius’s past is characterized by a cultural heterogeneity that at the
close of his poem is overtaken by the promise of new beginnings and
marked by the birth of an island. Mainland Greece and its achieve-
53. See G. Nagy, Greek Mythology and Poetics (Ithaca, N.Y., 1990), 36–82.
54. Pratt 1992, 7.
196 Apollonian Cosmologies
ments are marginalized in this new epic space, while North Africa is po-
sitioned to assume a central role.
copresence
So far we have been considering how Apollonius constructed the liter-
ary space of Egypt and North Africa from the perspective of Greek
myth and history, particularly through Pindaric allusion and the “his-
torical” accounts of Sesostris found in Herodotus and Hecataeus of Ab-
dera. I now wish to alter the focus and to turn to what I believe are re-
flections of the Egyptian symbolic world, particularly the themes of
order and chaos, theogony and kingship, and their attendant symbols.
Identifiably Egyptian elements occur throughout the poem, I shall sug-
gest, as discrete and sometimes fleeting images, through a series of in-
tertextualities with the work of contemporaries, and more pervasively
in the controlling cosmogonic framework of the poem as a whole, that
is, in the emergence of light from darkness or order from chaos to cul-
minate in the birth of an island. Moreover, I suggest that Apollonius
adapts Egyptian elements in such a way that they escape their individ-
ual cultural formations: they may be found sometimes in connection
with the Colchians, who are linked in Apollonius’s text with Egypt, but
also sometimes with the Greeks themselves—as represented by the Arg-
onauts. In the remainder of the chapter I shall examine a series of inci-
dents that illustrate how this cultural interweaving of Egyptian with
Greek plays out in Apollonius’s text.
At the opening of the tale Apollonius introduces his cast and sets the
tone for the ensuing voyage. Its hero, Jason, arrives suddenly, wearing
only one sandal (8–11).55 His semishod state (7: oDopAdilon) is a per-
sistent feature of the Argo myth56 and is specifically connected to a
prophecy foretelling Pelias’s death, a death that results from Medea’s
magic, as many readers will know. The wearing of only one sandal was
a widespread motif in Greek culture that marked liminality and a con-
nection with danger and/or death,57 and the sandal wearer was fre-
55. Apollonius describes him as having lost the sandal crossing the river Anaurus,
and again at 3.64–75. Whether Apollonius alludes to different incidents or versions of the
story is disputed. See Hunter 1989a, 105.
56. Also found in Pherecydes of Athens (FGrH 3 F105) and Pindar (Pythian 4.75).
See Vian 1974, 239 n. 17, with useful bibliography.
57. Moreau 1994, 132–36 and 140–41 (n. 81). Moreau and others connect the limi-
nality of the wearer of one sandal with ephebic activities, that is, with young men about
Apollonian Cosmologies 197
to undergo initiatory rites, and they read the Argonautica as a chronicling of such experi-
ences.
58. See Kingsley 1995, 238–39, esp. n. 21, and pp. 289–316.
59. Meuli 1925; Fontenrose 1980, 477–87; Moreau 1994, 129–36.
60. 1994, 128–29.
61. See Fusillo 1985, 61–64. Hunter (1993, 163 n. 41) remarks that “Gmpedon aDAn in
1. 499 may, as David Sider points out, be an echo of Empedocles’ punning on his own
198 Apollonian Cosmologies
name, cf. frr. 17.11 ( = 26.10), 77.1 DK.” Changelessness or durability was also in Greek
minds characteristic of Egypt (see above, note 12).
62. See, for example, Herodotus 2.81.
63. Kingsley 1995, 238–39, esp. n. 21. He points to PGM IV 2292–94 (toPto gar
soy sAmbolon tb sandalan son Gkryca, kaB klePda kratp. gnoija tartaroAxoy
klePura KerbAroy . . . ) and 2333–34 (eRta kdga soi shmaPon Drp¢ xalkeon tb san-
dalon tp% tartaroAxoy, stAmma, kleA% . . . ), in which the possession of one bronze san-
dal is explicitly connected with Hecate.
64. If the Hymn to Zeus was written in 285/4 (or even early in Ptolemy II’s reign, as
most scholars believe), it must have been prior to the Argonautica. Apollonius is generally
regarded as slightly younger than Callimachus and Theocritus. It is clear that their writ-
ings show considerable artistic interdependence, and much has been written about the lit-
erary relationships of the three poets; see, for example, Hunter 1989a, 7 and n. 29, and
Cameron 1995, 264. Although the issue of priority of Callimachus’s Zeus hymn is rele-
vant for this argument, with respect to coincidences with his other poetry, I am using a
model of dialogue rather than of origin or derivation.
Apollonian Cosmologies 199
from the creation story is another detail that aligns it with Egyptian
cosmology, in which Geb and Nut produce Isis and Osiris, who pro-
duce the child Horus, the end and fulfillment of the cycle of cosmic gen-
eration, and the necessary link to human political formations. The song
ends with a conspicuous reference to the thunderbolts of Zeus, by
which means he subdued his cosmic opponents (the Titans, Typhoeus)
to establish a rule of law. Zeus, however, has not yet assumed that role.
With the sequence of mountains (oGrea), rivers with their nymphs
(potamoB . . . aDtusin nAmfisi), and crawling things (Crpeta) we have
entered another primeval landscape, Callimachus’s Arcadia before the
birth of Zeus and the creation of rivers by Rhea. There is also a close
correspondence in language between 1.508 (gfra ZeB% Gti koPro%, Gti
fresB napia eDda%) and Hymn to Zeus 57 (dll’ Dti paidnb% Dan
Dfrassao panta tAleia). Apollonius’s Zeus, while a child, thinks like
a child, in contrast to the preternaturally accomplished Zeus of Calli-
machus for whom thought and action were simultaneous (and charac-
teristically Egyptian). If Callimachus’s poem aimed at providing a suit-
able theogonic narrative for a new kind of kingship—a kingship that
Callimachus, at least mythologically, marked out for prodigious accom-
plishment—Apollonius recalls this narrative by incorporating many of
its elements and distinctive language but recasts it as first times, as be-
ginnings, when the world and his epic protagonists—even the gods—
were young. Kingship with the attendant ideologies that we encoun-
tered in Theocritus and Callimachus is either muted or absent, and
Egyptian motifs (if they are present) are not yet political, but confined
to the cosmic stage. And even in that context they appear as latent or
vestigial, as if the two—Greek and Egyptian—had not yet differentiated
themselves.
The Empedoclean thought world continues, according to the scho-
liast on the passage, in the description of the cloak that Jason wore
when he appeared before Hypsipyle (1.721–68). On the cloak the con-
test of philia and neikos moves from the realm of nature to culture.
The scholiast tells us that the cloak is an allegory for the cosmic and
human order. Divine justice is represented by the first scene, the Cy-
clopes just completing a thunderbolt for Zeus. The second scene, the
building of Thebes by Amphion and Zethis, marks the establishment
of cities. What takes place in human settlements, love and strife, is the
subject of the next two vignettes—Aphrodite peering into the shield of
Ares and the raid of the Taphian pirates. Contests and marriages are
represented by Pelops fleeing in his chariot with Hippodamia, while
Apollonian Cosmologies 201
In the final scenes of the poem it is Jason who correctly interprets events
and understands the significance of the gift of the clod of earth. It is he
who instructs Euphemus to throw it into the sea to activate the se-
quence that will guarantee the Greek return to North Africa. In retro-
jecting such a role for Jason into his epic time of the world’s beginnings
Apollonius seems to be delimiting a model of kingship similiar to what
79. 1.1101: ZeB% aDtb% KronAdh% Cpoxazetai. The Greek verb does not convey sim-
ply filial respect but fear. It is borrowed from a unique passage in the Iliad (4.497) in
which the Trojans recede in the face of Odysseus’s battle mania.
80. 1.1147–49: dnAbraxe dicado% aGtv% | Dk koryfp% gllhkton. \IhsonAhn d’
DnApoysin | kePno potbn kranhn perinaiAtai gndre% dpAssv.
81. See Hunter 1988, 150–51.
204 Apollonian Cosmologies
Beasts not like wild beasts, nor like men in body, but with limbs of vari-
ous kinds mingled, they crowded together, as sheep from the fold follow-
ing the shepherd, such creatures even from the primordial ooze (pro-
tArh% Dj DlAo%) Earth herself brought forth, fitted with various limbs,
when she had not yet compacted beneath a thirsty sky nor yet from the
rays of the scorching sun had she received many drops of moisture. But
82. Clauss 1993, 167–75. At pp. 169–71 Clauss discusses several “points of contact”
between Apollonius and Callimachus, including two geographic correspondences: “Zeus
was reared in a cave on Mount Dicte (cf. H. 1.34,47) = the Dactyls were born in a cave
on Mount Dicte (Argo. 1.1130); . . . Callimachus calls the Arcadians the grandsons of the
Lycaonian Bear (LykaonAh% grtoio, 41) = the Argonauts initiate the rites in honor of
Rhea on Bear Mountain (OGresin 6rtkvn, 1150)” (p. 170). Like Clauss, I would read
this as an acknowledgment on Apollonius’s part of Callimachus’s geographic gamesman-
ship, but I would also connect it to the phenomenon of bilocal geographies I discuss
below.
Apollonian Cosmologies 205
Indeed, even in our day during the inundations of Egypt the generation of
forms of animal life can clearly be seen taking place, . . . for whenever the
river has begun to recede and the sun has thoroughly dried the surface of
83. See Livrea, pp. 205–9. Also see Hunter’s remarks about the “fracturing of time”
in this episode (1993, 165–66).
84. Sch. on AR 3.1179 Wendel = FGrH 3 F 22. Aeetes’ use of the seeds is apparently
repeated, and none of the Earth-born men survive; Cadmus sows them once, and a few
survive as regional ancestors.
206 Apollonian Cosmologies
the slime, living animals, they say, take shape, some of them fully formed,
but some only half so and still actually united with the very earth.85
“Egypt” in Hecataeus and Aeaea, both west and east, in Apollonius oc-
cupy the same imaginative space. Otherness is extended beyond cul-
tural behavior and into the very physical environment, in which nature
seems to be suspended in a stage of experiment that has elsewhere dis-
appeared.
Apollonius uses another device that draws Greece itself in this pre-
civilized world. He describes the dragon’s teeth as
the dire teeth of the Aonian dragon, the guardian of Ares’ spring, whom
Cadmus killed in Ogygian Thebes, when he came seeking Europa. There
too he settled, guided by the cow (boa%) whom Apollo in a prophecy
gave him as a conductor of his journey. But the [teeth] the Tritonian god-
dess ripped from its jaws and gave as a gift likewise to Aeetes and the
slayer himself [sc. Cadmus]. (3.1177–83)
85. 1.10.6–7 = FGrH 264 F 25. Diodorus states the idea earlier in 1.10.2–3 with re-
spect to mice. For a discussion of the relationship of the three passages (1.7, 1.10.2–3 and
6–7), see Cole 1990, 182–95. On Egypt as the oldest place and the site of spontaneous
generation, see sch. on AR 4.257–62c Wendel.
86. See above, pages 96, 100–101, for Callimachus’s use of “ogygian.”
87. Sch. on Lycophron 1206 (ed. R. Foerster [Berlin, 1958] 347.25–348.7). Tzetzes
cites the the following passage of Dionysius the Periegete as evidence: Qabhn dgygAhn,
Ckatampylon. Gnua gegvna% | MAmnvn dnetAlloysan Dbn dspazetai \Hp (lines
249–50).
Apollonian Cosmologies 207
Earlier I suggested that the habit of double naming was a feature of ae-
tiological writing, a practice of the colonizing group, who replaced the
unfamiliar with familiar names. Apollonius exploits these geographical
doublets for another reason as well. In this passage Egypt is said to be
“mother” of an earlier generation of men (mathr AGgypto% proterhge-
88. Hymn to Zeus 15: xytlasaito. In Dionysius Scytobrachion, Athena was born by
Lake Triton, hence her epithet. Callimachus similarly locates her birth in North Africa;
see fr. 37 Pf. On Tritonian Athena, see Calame 1990, 290 and n. 29.
89. The scholiast on this passage (4.1311 Wendel) helpfully remarks that “Triton was
a river in Libya and was also a river in Boeotia. Athena was born by one of them.” I dis-
cussed the similar conflation of geographic locations in connection with the Homeric
Hymn to Dionysus above.
90. The passage is also discussed above, page 189, where the Greek is provided. On
this passage, see Vian 1981, 157–59, nn. 267–80, and Livrea, pp. 84–96, notes ad loc.
208 Apollonian Cosmologies
91. Livrea suggests at 4.269 that Apollonius might have made a mistake: “forse er-
roneamente allude identificandola con il Nilo.” Triton = Nile also in Lycophron 119 and
576.
92. Dionysius Scytobrachion engages in a similar relocating, but the respective
chronologies of the two are uncertain, and it is impossible to say if this is a trend or an
imitation.
Apollonian Cosmologies 209
Richard Hunter, in his 1993 study, read the sequence of these events at
the end of the book, and indeed the entire dynamic of the poem, as the
creation of a new order:
Whereas the conquest of Talos apparently removed the last vestiges of vi-
olent brutalism, and rescue from the chaos proved the gracious power of
Apollo, as representative of the “new” Olympian order, so the story of
the clod projects the Argonauts themselves into the future through their
descendants, while placing them at the mythic scene of the creation of the
Aegean islands. Euphemos’ dream shows clearly that philia has replaced
neikos as the creative impulse.93
94. 2.687–89. The appearance of Apollo at dawn foreshadows his final appearance
at 4.1713–16, on which see below.
95. 2.705–8. See also 1.507 (gfra ZeB% Gti koPro%, Gti fresB napia eDda%) and Cal-
limachus Hymn to Zeus 57 (dll\ Dti paidna% Dan), discussed above.
Apollonian Cosmologies 211
the ritual cry Dhpaiaona.96 In both the slaying of the snake/dire monster
by arrows is immediately followed by mention of Apollo’s mother,
Leto, which serves to underscore the god’s youth.97 In Callimachus’s
hymns to Apollo and Delos the significance of Apollo’s behavior in
Egyptian terms has already been discussed by other scholars,98 and the
unusual detail of 2.707 (koPro% Dbn Gti gymna%) suggests that Apollo-
nius too might be operating within this Apollo/Horus matrix.99 Only in
Egyptian myth does a naked child-god kill snakes.100 Although long hair
was a standard feature of Apollo, as Apollonius emphasizes in the lines
that immediately follow, the phrase Gti plokamoisi geghua% suggests
that it was a temporary condition. It is the Egyptian child, Horus, for
whom this language is most appropriate, since it would describe the
forelock of immaturity worn by all Egyptian youths, as is seen on the
Horus cippus, but cut at the time of adulthood.101 The inclusion of Leto
may point in the same direction: Leto is not important in the Homeric
hymn at this juncture, but Isis and Horus are closely joined in Horus’s
youthful exploits, especially in repelling the various manifestations of
Seth. In the Argonautica the youthful Apollo/Horus in his triumph over
96. 2.702. Callimachus writes Cb paipon to conform the cry to his etymology: “Hurl,
child, an arrow.”
97. Callimachus employed the Delphi story in at least two other places: the Hymn to
Delos, which was discussed in chapter 2, and the end of the Aetia (fr. 88 Pf.), where the
serpent is called Delphyne. For further parallels between Callimachus and Apollonius, see
Hunter 1986, 58–59. On Delphyne, see Vian 1974, 276. The order of composition of
these four texts (one of Apollonius, three of Callimachus) is in doubt, but irrelevant for
this argument. What may be relevant is the fact that Apollonius’s story is also framed as
a hymn, and while Callimachus’s Apollo hymn ends with the discord of Phthonos and
Momus, Apollonius’s culminates in the establishment of a temple to Concord
(Homonoia) (2.718–19).
98. See Selden 1998 on the Hymn to Apollo; Koenen 1983 and Bing 1988 on the
Hymn to Delos. Selden (pp. 390–405) provides a particularly detailed discussion of the
correspondences between the events of the Apollo hymn and Egyptian rituals described in
the Edfu temple.
99. See the remarks of commentators on the passage who try to emend or otherwise
account for gymna%: e.g., Hunter 1986, 56–57.
100. It is possible to invoke Heracles as a naked child killing serpents as a parallel for
Apollo’s activities, but we have already seen that representations of Heracles throttling
snakes in a Greek context are themselves likely to be indebted to Egyptian analogues.
101. In this context consider the depiction of Apollo slaying Tityos, another Earth-
born creature, who is depicted on Jason’s cloak at 1.759–62. Apollo is said to be boApai%
oGpv polla% (760). The rare boApai% is a comic word, which very obviously has con-
nections with the cow, namely, “cow-child.” The passage already seems to play on the
derivation of Apollo from polA%, so Apollonius might have included a punning allusion
to the Egyptian cow-headed deity (Isis/Io), who is the mother of Horus. Cf. Callimachus’s
“cowborn” Danaus fr. 383 Pf. and SH 254.4.
212 Apollonian Cosmologies
the serpent would seem to provide the template for subsequent occur-
rences of overcoming serpents, particularly in books 3 and 4. This im-
pression is further reinforced by the narrative sequence itself. The sim-
ile immediately before Apollo kills Delphyne compares the heroes
plying the oars of the Argo to oxen plowing (2.662–68). Earlier the
young Jason as he sets out on his adventure is compared to Apollo
(1.306–10). At the climax of the quest he must confront a terrible ser-
pent to accomplish his task, so that the fleeting sequence of images
here—oxen plowing, appearance of Apollo, confrontation with
guardian serpent—appears to be proleptic of Jason’s actions in Colchis.
If Jason and Apollo seem to resemble each other, and if one aspect of
Jason’s behavior, namely, establishing cults and bringing civilized com-
munity, can be read as conforming to patterns of kingship found also in
Hecataeus, many other aspects of his character have posed problems
for all commentators.102 Although Jason frequently acts in the manner
of a Homeric warrior, he does not do so consistently but vacillates be-
tween boldness and timidity. He is not a clearly dominant leader of the
expedition— the presence of Heracles initially threatens his position of
authority. Even more troubling is the importance of his good looks and
his amiability in motivating the action, particularly when it is directed
towards women. Moreover, Jason can complete the tasks set by Aeetes
only with the aid of magic, and a woman’s magic at that, which dis-
tances him from the world of the Homeric hero and might seem to dis-
allow any claims for him as a viable model for kingship.103
Yet the very qualities that are disturbing when viewed within a
Greek context form part of a consistent picture within an Egyptian
framework. Jason’s prehistory, like that of Horus, who was raised in se-
cret in Chemmis, is somewhat obscure; we first see him as the half-shod
youth at the beginning of the poem, in an entrance that appears to al-
lude to Pindar.104 In contrast to Greek heroic models of behavior, many
of Jason’s seemingly unheroic characteristics are not only acceptable
but delineate significant aspects of Horus as divine king. Among
Horus’s attributes are his youth and his beauty, which encompass both
102. The literature is extensive. See Hunter 1993, 11: “Scholars have often differed
only about whether poetic design or incompetence is responsible for this apparent trav-
esty of an epic hero”; see also Hunter’s notes ad loc.
103. Thetis’s magic enhancement of Achilles is a parallel of sorts, but it plays no part
in the dynamics of the Iliad.
104. In Pindar, Jason was raised in secret by the centaur Chiron; Apollonius may al-
lude to this at several points in the Argonautica (e.g., 1.33, 554), though he nowhere
states it explicitly.
Apollonian Cosmologies 213
generosity and affection but cross over into the erotic energy associated
with procreation and the regeneration of life.105 In a victory stele of Os-
orkon, for example, the king can be addressed as:
sweet-scented amongst the couriers like a large lotus bud . . . a worthy
youth, sweet of love, even as Horus coming forth from Chemmis. . . .
One looks at his body [when he flings himself] upon the war chariot like
a star darting up, [even] the matutine Horus in the starry firmament.106
This theme is found even in the Book of the Dead: “Everyone adores
his beauty. How sweet is his love for us: his kindliness has converted
our hearts. Great is his love for everybody when they have drawn near
to the son of Isis.”107
In Greek myth Zeus’s youth and lineage are relatively unimportant
in his attainment of kingship, and he is represented as a mature,
bearded male. It is his son Apollo who retains the iconographic attrib-
utes of young manhood. Despite the entourage of Olympians, Zeus,
like a Homeric hero, defeats Typhon alone, and his strength can even be
personified as Kratos and Bia, who execute his divine will and sit along-
side his throne.108 Horus, the child of Isis, in contrast, is consistently
identified as young, and his mythological role is always that of good
son, or avenger of his father. He is regularly supported by Egyptian di-
vinities, sometimes as their equal, sometimes as their subordinate. In
the Naucratis stele of Nectanebo I, for example, erected in the fourth
century b.c.e., the following qualities are singled out in an encomium of
the king (as a Horus surrogate). His puissance in battle is commended
with the address “powerful one with active arm, | Sword master who
attacks a host”; his beauty is noted: “all eyes are dazzled by seeing him,
| Like Re when he rises in lightland, | Love of him greens each body”;
his acquiescence to advice and counsel is mentioned: “whom the gods
acclaim, . . . who wakes to seek what serves their shrines . . . who acts
according to their words, and is not deaf to their advice”; and, finally,
his role in cult is described: “who builds their mansions, founds their
walls, supplies the altar, . . . provides oblations of all kinds.”109
105. These attributes of Horus derive from his father, Osiris, the god of regeneration,
who can be praised as follows: “Thy phallus is within the maidens” (Book of the Dead,
Spell 162 [Allen 1974, 158]).
106. Caminos 1958, 48, 114.
107. Book of the Dead, Spell 185 A S4 (Allen 1974, 204).
108. They are even characters in Prometheus Bound.
109. Lichtheim 1980, 87–88. Compare also the Mendes stele, where Philadelphus is
praised as appearing on the horizon with four aspects: “who lightens the heaven and
214 Apollonian Cosmologies
earth with his rays, who comes as the Nile, and when he nears the Two Lands, he is the
air to all the people” (Roeder 1959, 177).
110. Gwyn Griffiths 1960, 41–46; Lichtheim 1976, 217–18.
111. Lichtheim 1980, 87.
112. 1993, 17–19.
113. Ritner 1993, 24.
Apollonian Cosmologies 215
result that they do not return to their homeland but scatter and settle
elsewhere. Jason kills Apsyrtus in part because as his father’s surrogate
he was demanding the return of Medea, whom Aeetes in his last ap-
pearance in book 4 seems to require even more than the fleece (4.231).
Jason’s theft of and marriage to the king’s daughter completes the se-
quence: by trial, by conquest, and by marriage it would seem that
Colchis, and by extension Egypt, might be claimed by a Greek. Jason’s
actions at the end of book 3 and the opening of book 4, however, are
not unidirectional: Jason began as a Greek hero, who with his com-
rades set out upon an ostensibly Greek encounter with barbarians, but
here he takes on the role of the other for himself, and for the remainder
of the poem the two worlds will become increasingly intermingled.
In light of these observations I would like to juxtapose Jason’s en-
counter with the guardian of the fleece in book 4 with a vignette found
in the Egyptian underworld books. Earlier in book 2 the Colchian ser-
pent was explicitly identified as an offspring of Typhaon ( = Typhon),
who was an emblem of chaos and a Seth-equivalent:
Such a serpent (gfi%) is on guard around and about [the fleece], immor-
tal and unsleeping, whom Earth herself brought forth on the flanks of the
Caucasus, where the Typhaonian rock is, there they say Typhaon was
struck by a thunderbolt of Zeus, when he reached out his mighty hands
against him, and warm gore dripped from his head.119
The serpent, sprung from Typhaon’s gore, recalls the moment when
Zeus defeated Typhaon and also looks forward to the serpents sprung
from the Gorgon’s head, who populate the Libyan desert. Book 4 opens
with Jason and Medea approaching the golden fleece just before dawn.
When they (and the reader) first see it, the day is still dark, but the fleece
is “like a cloud grown red from the rays of the rising sun” (4.124–25:
nefAli DnalAgkion, et’ dnianto%, delAoy flogerusin AreAuetai dk-
ing of these body parts served to tally the number of dead, and soldiers were regularly
given rewards on the basis of numbers of hands. See, for example, Lichtheim 1976,
12–15 and 15 n. 9. The mutilation of Apsyrtus serves a number of other narrative pur-
poses as well, on which see below.
119. 2.1208–13. The only other place in the Argonautica where Typhon is mentioned
is also in book 2, where Amycus is likened to Typhoeus, and Polydeuces to a star
(2.38–42). The chthonic-Ouranian opposition of Amycus and Polydeuces might be in-
tended to function within both cultural realms, but it is not as clearly marked as the
Apollo-Pytho scene. (See Hunter’s assessment [1993, 160–61].) Egyptian gods often ap-
peared as stars (particularly Horus, who was the morning star) in their nightly battle with
Apophis. (The passage from Osorkon’s stele on page 213 above provides an example of
this.)
Apollonian Cosmologies 217
120. The Homeric term dosshtar (“aider” or “assistant”), which Apollonius em-
ploys as an epithet of Sleep (4.146), Callimachus uses of Apollo (Hymn to Apollo 104).
121. R. Hunter, “Medea’s Flight: The Fourth Book of the Argonautica,” CQ 37
(1987) 132–33.
122. According to the scholiast at 4.156–61, Apollonius is following Antimachus in
the details of putting the dragon to sleep. In Pindar, Pherecydes of Athens (FGrH 3 F31),
and in Herodorus (FGrH 31 F52) the dragon is killed by Jason. (Hunter [1993, 183] sug-
gests that the snake might have died here too.)
123. Hornung 1992, 105–6. The passage to which Hornung 1992 refers may be
found in Hornung 1971, 133–34. See further the discussion of Talos below.
218 Apollonian Cosmologies
Isis’s magic allows the solar boat to pass just as Medea’s magic allows
Jason to take the fleece (shining like the sun) and and begin his return to
Greece. If this were the only scene with close correspondences, it would
be easy to dismiss, but as book 4 continues, the number of coincidences
of Greek text with Egyptian myth increases to suggest a specific pattern.
124. The idea is an old one; see, for example, Meuli 1925; Fontenrose 1980, 477–87;
Hunter 1993, 182–88; Moreau 1994, 117–38. Livrea (1991) sees it as a metaphor of
death and rebirth.
125. So Moreau 1994, 117–38.
Apollonian Cosmologies 219
through the realms of the night. I would further propose that this un-
derworld experience is organically linked to the symbolic collapse that
occurs at the end of the book, to the replacing of neikos with philia, to
the emergence of islands from the void, and, most importantly, to the
promise of a new Greco-Egyptian cultural order.
The essential details of the Sun’s journey are as follows: the Sun, Re,
was accompanied by a variety of divinities, who were sometimes
thought of as the stars. The most important of these were Hu, Sia, and
Heka—Authoritative Speech, Intelligence, and Magic—who aided Re
in overcoming the many obstacles he encountered on his journey. The
chief obstacle was the serpent of originary chaos, Apophis, who tried to
impede the Sun’s progress or swallow it. Storms and eclipses were signs
that Apophis had temporarily at least hindered or blocked the course of
the solar boat. The stages of the day could be mapped onto the stages of
a human life—the Sun was newborn in his morning appearance, a
fierce, warlike adult god at midday, and an old man near death at
evening. In Egyptian religion each had a particular name and set of di-
vine attributes, and they accompanied the Sun in the underworld.126 The
journey through the night world was much more terrifying than the
daily journey, because it traversed a space where time had collapsed,
and past met future,127 where regeneration and rebirth coexisted with
putrefaction and death. It was imagined as a return to darkness and the
primeval waters from which all creation originally sprang, hence each
new day was not simply analogous to but actually was a new creation.
During the twelve hours of night, each of which might be imagined as
filling a much longer period, since the “time” of the day world did not
operate, the solar boat encountered lakes of fire, caverns, and shoals.
The journey itself is imagined not as a straight course from the place of
the sun’s setting in the west to its rising in the east, but convoluted and
folded back upon itself. Because no wind blew in the underworld, the
boat needed to be towed through its realms. Spells and magic were cru-
cial here to defeat the various manifestations of Apophis, usually in the
form of serpents, who threatened to destroy the boat. But the power of
serpents could also be enlisted for use against Apophis. The fact that
126. The similarity of the three stages of the sun’s daily life to Oedipus’s solution to
the riddle of the sphinx is not fortuitous. The Egyptian sphinx was a form of the sun-god
and ancestor of the Greek monster. See Paul Jordan, Riddles of the Sphinx (New York,
1998) 206–7.
127. See Hunter’s remarks on the fracturing of time in the Argonautica (1993,
165–66).
220 Apollonian Cosmologies
snakes shed their skins made them symbols of regeneration. Time itself
could be imagined as a serpent with its tail in its mouth (the
ouroboros), so when the solar boat reached the final hour and drew
near to the gate to the upper world, it was depicted as having taken the
form of serpent or of passing through the body of a serpent (that is,
passing through time) in order to emerge from the darkness to rise
again in the eastern sky.128
According to Hornung,
our sources of information about the sun’s descent and ascent date back
to Old Kingdom Pyramid texts and include writings from as late as the
Greco-Roman Period. In a collection of New Kingdom religious texts,
the Egyptians seem increasingly systematic in their exploration of the
sun’s voyage. Known as the Books of the Netherworld, these texts used
to be characterized as “guides to the Beyond.” They include the Amduat,
the Book of Gates, the Book of Caverns, and the Book of Earth. Their an-
cient generic designation “books about what is in dat” indicates their
aim: to provide information usually from the standpoint of the sun god
and his companions about the underworld, dat, its inhabitants, and its
topography in both written and pictorial form.129
131. The Hellenomemphites, for instance, were adopting elements of Egyptian burial
practice in the fourth century b.c.e.
132. A. Piankoff, The Wandering of the Soul: Texts Translated with Commentary,
completed and prepared for publication by H. Jacquet-Gordon, Bollingen Series 40.6
(Princeton, 1974), 117–20. Piankoff observes that in one such game “the draughtsmen
used by Horus and Seth while playing the game were considered to be the teeth of Mehen
[a serpent inhabiting the underworld]” (p. 117). These ideas may have had currency in
Demotic literature of the Greco-Roman period; see P. Piccione, “The Gaming Episode in
the Tale of Setna Khamwas as a Religious Metaphor,” in For His Ka: Essays in Memory
of Klaus Baer, ed. D. Silverman, Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization 55 (Chicago,
1994) 197–204.
133. Hecataeus must have been familiar with Egyptian underworld lore; see
Diodorus Siculus 1.72 and 1.92 (FGrH 264 F 25.72 and 92), discussed in chapter 1.
134. West 1996, 470–77. He points to the adventure in the golden bowl of Helios
and the fetching of Cerberus from Hades.
135. See the discussion above, pages 131–32.
136. In her 1977 University of Illinois dissertation, “Astronomy in the Argonautica
of Apollonius Rhodius,” P. Bogue presents the most thorough demonstration and docu-
mentation of the celestial references, which, she argues, map to a solar year of about 354
days for the voyage from beginning to end. See Bogue, pp. 25–31, for the astral associa-
tions of the heroes of the Argonautica. Cf. Vian, who in his edition of book 4 posits a
voyage of six months (1981, 12–13). S. Noegel, in an unpublished paper, also discusses
the “solar journey” of the Argo.
222 Apollonian Cosmologies
137. LIMC 2.1.924 for the Argo as a constellation with illustration (2.2.681). The
constellation was well attested in the Hellenistic period; see Kidd 1997, 311 (on Aratus
342–54).
138. DIO 22; and see Gwyn Griffiths’s discussion (1960, 377–78). See also F. Boll,
Sphaera: Neue griechische Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Sternbilder
(Leipzig, 1903) 169–81. Boll rightly rejects the suggestion that the Argo was made a con-
stellation in conformity with Egyptian astronomic lore (though Kidd accepts the identifi-
cation [1997, 311]). For Egyptians the ship of Osiris could not have been a constellation,
since it traverses the underworld, not the night sky. It is much more likely that the identi-
fication of this boat with the Argo is a Greek idea.
139. Fr. 11a in M. L. West, Iambi et elegi graeci ante Alexandrum cantati, vol 2 (Ox-
ford, 1972). Mimnermus’s fragment is cited in Strabo 1.2.40.
140. See Pindar: toPsi lampei mBn mAno% delAoy tbn Dnuade nAkta katv (fr. 129
Snell-Maehler), and surely that is the sense of Callimachus’s remark that the sun, when it
has set, shines upon the sons of Ophion (fr. 177 Pf. = fr. 259 SH): \OfionAdusi faeAn[ei).
Apollonian Cosmologies 223
141. On the basis of 4.278–81 the “language of the ancestors” must have been
Egyptian.
224 Apollonian Cosmologies
142. See Braswell’s discussion (1988, 345–48) and sch. on AR 4. 257–62b Wendel.
143. If Cameron’s argument that books 1–2 of the Aetia preceded the composition of
the Argonautica is correct, is the fact that in the Aetia Callimachus began his account of
the Argonauts’ adventure with an aition on Anaphe a sufficient reason for its prominence
at the end of Apollonius’s poem? See Cameron 1995, 25–62, and esp. 261–62, for his
proposed chronology of the works of the two poets.
144. For example, Apollodorus reverses the order of the encounter with Talos and
the appearance of the island of Anaphe (1.9.26).
Apollonian Cosmologies 225
3. As they flee Colchis the Argonauts take a route home that differs
from their outgoing journey. Argus, the son of Phrixus, tells them about
an alternate course known to the Colchians from the writings of their
ancestors:
oF da toi graptPß patArvn Euen eDrAontai,
kArbia% oQ% Gni ppsai cdoB kaB peArat’ Gasin
Crgp% te traferp% te pArij DpinissomAnoisin.
They preserve writings of their ancestors, kurbiai, on which are all the
paths and boundaries of the sea and land for those going around.
(4.278–81)
149. Noegel, in an unpublished paper, remarks about the golden fleece that “it would
have been difficult for a reader of the Argonautika living in Egypt not to think also of the
god Amon-Re.”
150. Hornung 1982, 105.
151. graptP% is rare, but the phrase graptP% dnurapvn does occur in a small frag-
ment of Eratosthenes’ Hermes (SH fr. 397.ii.2), where the editors suggest the context
might be the invention of writing by Hermes-Thoth.
152. See, for example, Hornung 1999, 10, for an illustration of one such map from
the Book of Two Ways.
Apollonian Cosmologies 227
Turnus) must affect our reading of the text as a whole. The murder is
brutal and treacherous, yet allusively framed both to undermine and to
reinforce this impression. The murder has been understood as part of
Jason’s ephebic transition into full manhood,153 or as a mark of his
amechania154 or his generally nonheroic character. A number of scholars
have pointed out the sacrificial aspects of the scene. Jason’s murderous
act is explicitly likened to a butcher striking a bull, and the deed is done
in the forecourt of a temple (4.468–70).155 Jason then mutilates his vic-
tim by cutting off his extremities and thrice licking his blood, thrice
spitting the pollution from his mouth (4.477–78). This mutilation of
the corpse enacts the ritual of the maschalismos, which Orestes also
performs after killing his mother and Aegisthus.156 Prima facie this sug-
gests that the murder and its expiation are part of the inexorable move-
ment from the precivilized chthonic world towards the “justice of
Zeus,” and this is reinforced by the “judgment” of Circe, who cleanses
the murderers of their blood guilt in the same way that Orestes was pu-
rified at Delphi.157 Alternatively, the killing in the realm of the Brygi in
the forecourt of a temple pulls the action into the world of the Iphige-
nia in Taurus with the sacrifice of strangers to Artemis; an allusive ma-
trix would position Jason as a Thoas figure and a barbarian. The con-
fusion is unlikely to have been accidental: Apollonius seems to have
altered his sources in a number of particulars in recounting the death:
sometimes Apsyrtus was an infant or a child, scarcely old enough to
command a fleet; often it was Medea who killed him,158 not Jason, and
in one memorable version the infant Apsyrtus is hacked to pieces and
strewn upon the waters to distract a pursuing Aeetes.159
If we alter the frame of reference to Egyptian myth, the events are
more coherent. Three elements of the scene are important: Apsytrus is a
The killing of Apsyrtus fits this pattern. He is cast as the “real” time
enemy of Jason and Medea but acts as a Seth/Apophis figure in hinder-
ing passage of the Argo. He is butchered like a sacrifical animal in the
forecourt of a temple. Seth was frequently identified as a bull, and in
Egyptian temple practice, by the Ptolemaic period, the slaughter of a
bull was allegorized as the killing and mutilation of Seth as a retaliation
for his murder of his brother. Moreover, this event was commemorated
in the night sky, where the “foreleg of Seth” was the Egyptian constel-
lation that Greeks subsequently identified with the Bear, while Osiris
was equated with the star of Orion.161 The “foreleg of Seth” was lo-
cated in that quadrant of the sky to which Berenice’s lock was trans-
ported,162 and thus could have been known to those Hellenistic Greeks
who took an interest in astronomical lore. In addition to the link be-
tween killing Seth and the ritual slaughter of a bull, H. Te Velde points
out that daily temple service at this period required the making of a fig-
ure of Seth in red wax or wood, binding it, treading on it with the left
foot, thrusting a spear into it, and cutting it into pieces, thus sympa-
thetically reenacting Horus’s triumph over his enemy and guaranteeing
that Seth was kept at bay.163 This ritual event necessarily had its ana-
logue in the underworld, where repelling “Seth and his gang” was es-
sential for the successful voyage of the solar boat. Repelling Seth was
accomplished by the reciting of spells in which spitting was a significant
component, for example: “I have warded off Seth for you. I have spat
on his confederacy for you.”164 These parallels may not make the overall
scene less troubling to a modern reader, but it does align the Egyptian
signification with the Greek in the following sense: killing and mutilat-
ing Seth or one’s enemy reenacted the triumph of order over chaos, just
as allusion to the murders committed by Orestes conforms Jason to a
trajectory that leads from the chthonic tyranny of the Furies to the en-
lightened world of Zeus and Apollo.
166. In Hecataeus of Abdera, Osiris/Dionysus is presented as the god who brings the
civilizing arts, including agriculture (Diodorus Siculus 1.15).
167. The scholiast (4.1153–54 Wendel) tells us that while Timaeus located the mar-
riage in Corcyra, Dionysus the Milesian placed it in Byzantium, and Antimachus, in his
Lyde, by the banks of the river in Colchis. At 4.1141 the scholiast mentions that Philitas
says the pair were married in the house of Alcinous (fr. 9 Kuchenmüller).
168. Scene 46 from the Book of Gates proclaims: “Thriving are the fields of the
Netherworld, | As Re shines over the body of Osiris. | At your rising the plants appear”
(Hornung 1990, 118, and see the illustration on p. 119).
Apollonian Cosmologies 231
Compare the final simile that Apollonius chooses for the Argo:
As a serpent writhes along its crooked path when the sun’s hottest rays
inflame it, and with a hiss turns its head from side to side, and in fury its
eyes blaze in fury like sparks of fire until it goes down into its lair through
a fissure in the rock, so too the Argo wandered for a long time as it
sought an outlet from the lake.172
8. As the adventure nears its end, the Argo encounters one final ob-
stacle, Talos, who is said to have been the last of the men of bronze cre-
ated in an earlier age, and left to guard the island of Crete. Talos is the
final vestige of the chthonic and world, and with his defeat the Arg-
onauts are at last able to complete their journey. The scene with Talos
has features that make it almost a doublet of the encounter with the
guardian of the fleece. In neither do Jason or his men effect the removal
of the dangerous creature, but Medea does it for them, thus opening
and closing book 4 with potent demonstrations of the efficacy of her
magic. Just as she called upon Sleep in the earlier scene, she summons
fellow creatures of Hades, the heart-devouring Spirits of Death
(4.1665–66), with her charms to aid in her task. She bewitches Talos by
her glance (4.1670), causing him to stumble and pierce the vulnerable
vein on his ankle. Once the ankle has been opened the ichor drains
from his body, and he collapses, and with him the last impediment to
the return to Orchomenos. These details are unique to Apollonius.173 In
the Egyptian netherworld, in the eleventh hour before sunrise, Apophis
has swallowed up the waters on which the sun bark floats. He must be
pierced with knives to disgorge the waters in order for the boat to pro-
ceed, and his menacing presence is further repelled by magic, either of
Isis174 or of Seth. Compare Spell 108 from the Book of the Dead:
As for that mountain of Bakhu, on which the sky rests, it is in the east of
the sky; it is three hundred rods long and one hundred and fifty
broad. . . . A serpent is on the top of that mountain; it is thirty cubits
long; eight cubits of its foreparts are of flint, and its teeth gleam. . . . Now
after a while he will turn his eyes against Re, and a stoppage will occur in
the Sacred Bark . . . or he will swallow up seven cubits of great waters;
Seth will project a lance of iron against him and will make him vomit up
all that he has swallowed. Seth . . . will say to him with magic power:
“. . . I stand before you navigating aright and seeing afar. Cover your
face, for I ferry across, get back because of me . . . , I am the great magi-
cian . . . and power against you has been granted to me.”175
173. In a lost play of Sophocles, Talos died when the pin in his ankle that held in the
ichor was removed (sch. on AR 4.1646–48 Wendel). Elsewhere he was made by Hep-
haestus for Minos. See LIMC 7.1.834–37, s.v. Talos; and Cook 1964, 719–30.
174. Hornung 1982, 106. This incident occurs in the eleventh hour of the Book of
Gates.
175. Wasserman 1994, 113. (This is a slightly less cumbersome translation of the
spell than in Allen 1974, 85–86.)
Apollonian Cosmologies 233
Night terrified them, night, which they call enshrouding;176 the stars did
not break through that deadly night, nor did the beams of the moon.
From heaven descended black chaos (mAlan xao%), or perhaps another
darkness came rising from the lowest depths (drarei skotAh myxatvn
dntioPsa berAurvn). But whether they were drifting in Hades or on the
waters they knew not at all. (4.1695–1700)
Sunrise is the moment when the sun bark emerges from its netherworld
journey. It is the central moment of Egyptian religious and cosmogonic
speculation in which creation, the birth of gods, and the new day con-
176. See Livrea, p. 465 n. 1695, on the rare word (katoylada) used in this passage.
177. 4.1706–18. Apollonius’s language for Anaphe in line 1712 (dlAgh% . . . nasoy)
echoes that of Callimachus for Calypso’s island (dlAghn nhsPda KalycoP%, fr. 470b Pf.).
In describing the Arcadian hill upon which Zeus was born, Callimachus borrows the lan-
guage of Odyssey 7.244 (dgygAh ti% npso%, i.e., Calypso’s island). If Apollonius’s choice
is deliberate, the Hidden (Calypso’s island) becoming the island of Appearance (Anaphe)
well suits Egyptian cosmogony.
234 Apollonian Cosmologies
verge (see plate 6). Hornung describes the final events of the under-
world journey in this way:
All the other gods and blessed dead are lifted from the dark depths of
water and earth along with the sun god, and the sleeping likewise emerge
from the world of dreams . . . and return to the sensible light of con-
sciousness. The world is young as at Creation, when everything was first
allowed to rise out of the dark watery abyss. . . . The Egyptian was thor-
oughly convinced that the creation could be repeated, that the “first
time”—as he called the emergence of time—was in fact repeated every
morning with the dawn, which returned youthful freshness to the
world.178
178. Hornung 1992, 92. Spell 15 (Allen 1974, 12), for example, proclaims: “How
beautiful is thy rising from the horizon, when thou illuminatest the Two Lands with your
rays. . . . My body becomes new at beholding thy beauty.” Cf. also Spell 162 (Allen,
pp. 158–59).
179. Assmann 1995, 44–49.
180. Assmann 1995, 46.
181. Quirke 1992, 23.
182. Frankfort 1978, 150–51.
Apollonian Cosmologies 235
into an aition.183 Thus we are presented not simply with another epic
daybreak, but one significant enough to stimulate the foundation of a
cult and be remembered in the name of an island. In its selection of de-
tail—the name of the island (“Appearance”) and the title of Apollo (the
“Gleamer”)— this daybreak is so close to Egyptian hymnic formula-
tions that it could even be translating them.
183. Goldhill (1991, 326) regards these aetiologies as “exploring the possibilities of
(causal) connection, both in its telling of the sequence of events and in the implication of
such events in a continuing history of the terrain mapped by the narrative’s journey.”
While essentially a formulation embedded in language and text, the relevance to politics
and history cannot be overlooked.
236 Apollonian Cosmologies
184. 4.728: “The race of Helios was plain to see, since they shot in front of them a
gleam of gold from their far-flashing eyes.”
185. See Selden 1998, 389, on Ptolemy II’s use of the Horus title, especially the inno-
vative “Child Triumphant,” where he is referring to the Pithom stele (Sethe 1904–16, 2:
84).
186. The bareness of Anaphe is so complete that only water is available to perform a
ritual, and the slave women accompanying Medea ridicule the inadequacy of the ritual
event. Callimachus tells a similar story about Anaphe at the opening of the Aetia (fr. 7
Pf.), but not enough remains to compare treatments.
Apollonian Cosmologies 237
other. By constructing the events in book 4 in such a way that they are
coherent in both Greek and Egyptian narrative terms, Apollonius has in
fact written a poem of and for the new hybrid political state, by retro-
jecting into the epic past elements of both worlds and by creating an
epic template for new beginnngs that partakes of both. This accounts
for the final doublet—the two islands that close the text—Anaphe and
Thera of the future. By ending with two islands, Apollonius focuses the
reader’s attention on Egypt of a new order. This is not the older order of
Egyptian solar cosmogony or of Greek conquest, but potentially at least
a new symbolic realm, signified by the appearance of Apollo and the
promise of a new Greco-Egyptian reign of Horus-the-Child. The dawn
of this new order requires new symbols and new narratives, the unique-
ness of which Apollonius and his contemporaries collectively have
striven to articulate.
chapter 5
1. The second and fourth throne names were respectively the “Two Ladies,” referring
to the red crown of Lower Egypt and the white crown of Upper Egypt, and the Nswbity,
or “he of the sedge (nsw) and the bee (bit),” King of Upper (sedge) Egypt and Lower (bee)
Egypt (Beckerath 1999, 10–16 and 21–25). On the Ptolemies’ use of pharaonic titulature,
see Koenen 1993, 58–59.
2. Bleeker 1967, 105.
3. Kemp 1989, 27–31; O’Connor and Silverman 1995, 100–105.
238
The Two Lands 239
4. Herodotus spends considerably more time in the Delta than in Upper Egypt, and
his knowledge of this latter region is quite limited. See Lloyd 1975, 72–76.
5. Ptolemaic control over the South became even more precarious after the battle of
Raphia (217 b.c.e.), when a series of native revolts substantially altered the relationship
between the center and the periphery (see, for example, Fraser 1972, 1: 60). For a snap-
shot of the major events of Ptolemaic history, see the appendix in Hölbl 1994, 343–77.
6. See Koenen 1993, 25–29, with plate facing p. 86, for a discussion of the way this
dual kingship played out in crowns and coinage. Koenen’s evidence dates from the mid-
second century b.c.e.
240 The Two Lands
7. For example, Soter used Egyptian troops in the battle of Gaza (312 b.c.e.) when he
was beginning to gain control of Egypt, but they were not used again apparently until the
battle of Raphia (217 b.c.e.). See Bevan 1968, 165–66, and J. K. Winnicki, “Militäroper-
ationen von Ptolemaios I. und Seleukos I. in Syrien in den Jahren 312–11 v. Chr.,” An-
cient Society 20 (1989) 55–92 (part 1), and 22 (1991) 147–227 (part 2). Egyptian
marines may have been used in the Chremonidean War; see E. Van’t Dack and H.
Hauben, “L’apport égyptien à l’armée navale Lagide,” in Maehler and Strocka 1978,
59–94. Koenen 1993, 32 n. 20, provides an overview with extensive bibliography.
8. Borgeaud and Volokhine 2000, 65–71; and above, chapter 2.
9. For example in Idyll 14 Alexandria is singled out for its potential for material ad-
vancement: Ptolemy is described as “the best paymaster for a free man” (14.59); Herodas
1.26–35 claims that everything can be found in Egypt.
10. Arnold 1999, 138 (for Isis temple), 149–50, and 157. Yves Empereur’s excava-
tion of the harbor makes it clear that pharaonic monuments as well as Egyptianizing
monuments of the Ptolemies were present. While these latter are currently impossible to
The Two Lands 241
date, to judge from similar representations of the Ptolemies in Egyptian style in the chora,
there is no a priori reason to date the material late, only a modern scholarly reservation
that attributes Egyptianization to the later and hence more degenerate of the Ptolemies.
11. Peter Bing points out that this formulation is in great part a response to J. G.
Droysen, who characterized the period as one of Mischkultur.
12. Thompson 1992a and b and 1994.
13. Koenen 1993, 43–44.
14. Clarysse (1992, 51–56) provides evidence for Alexandrian Greek and Egyptian
intermarriage as early as the mid-third century b.c.e. He remarks: “Perhaps the scarcity
of mixed marriages in our third century documentation is for a large part due to the types
of documents on which modern surveyance is based (in the Zenon archive for instance
“irregular” filiations are totally absent from the 1700 Greek documents, but two are
found in the twenty-odd Demotic texts)” (p. 52).
242 The Two Lands
motic” that the term “Hellene” may not have been a straightforward
designation for the ethnic Greek, but that
Hellenes were defined in terms not of origin but rather of either their ed-
ucation or a post in the administration. These were men required to run
the complex written administration in process of development. As mem-
bers of the gymnasium, these new Hellenes would play an important role
in the Ptolemaic adminstration.15
15. 1994, 75. Although questions of ethnic identity and the privileges and/or degree
of separateness accorded to various ethnic groups under the early Ptolemies continue to
be the subject of considerable scholarly interest, it is not possible to draw very firm con-
clusions from what is now available. The problems are multiple. First, recent work of
scholars like Clarysse, Thompson, and La’da underscores the difficulties in any discussion
of the ethnicity of early Ptolemiac Egypt. There is very little documentation at all from the
third century, nothing survived from Alexandria itself, and the Demotic texts are under-
published in comparision to Greek. Next, terms such as “Persian of the Epigone” or even
“Hellene,” which no doubt originally marked real ethnic identities, evolved to indicate
something else—occupation or financial status. (See Csaba La’da, “Ethnic Designations
in Ptolemaic Egypt” [Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 1996], chap. 4; I am grateful to
him for providing me with a copy.) Third, names are not adequate indicators of ethnicity,
since even within ethnically Greek families, a Greco-Egyptian double name could occur
(Clarysse 1992, 54). Fourth, the bulk of the evidence adduced from later periods, without
independent corroboration, is not applicable to the early Hellenistic period. The Roman
administration of Egypt, in particular, significantly altered the relationship of Greeks and
Egyptians, by subordinating both to Romans. Finally, there is also the bias of interpreters.
Ritner (1992, 290–91) points out that two distinguished and competent scholars come to
opposite conclusions about the differential rates of assessment of the salt tax in the early
Ptolemaic period. (This tax was lower for “Hellenes” and disappeared after some years.)
For one scholar this signals discrimination and apartheid; for another the lower tax rate
was an inducement to Egyptians to learn Greek.
16. See, for example, Thompson 1990, 97–100, 114–16.
The Two Lands 243
17. The history of the Alexandrian boule is problematic; see Fraser 1972, 1: 94–96.
18. According to Josephus (Bellum Judaicum 2.495) the Jews also had their own po-
liteuma, and politeumata of other groups like the Idumaeans were known in the cities of
the chora (e.g., Thompson 1988, 101–2). (L. Koenen points out in a private communica-
tion that unpublished papyri in Cologne attest to Jewish politeumata in Herakleopolis.)
19. This pattern was followed also in hiring practices. Relatively few designating
themselves as Alexandrian are found among the Ptolemaic bureaucracy; rather, Coans,
Samians, Cyreneans, Athenians, Syrians, and Persians appear in greater numbers.
20. Huss 1994. See also Johnson 1986; J. Quaegebeur, “Documents égyptiens et rôle
économique de clergé en Égypte hellénistique,” 707–29; and W. Clarysse 1979, “Egyptian
Estate Holders in the Ptolemaic Period,” 731–43; the articles by Quaegebeur and Clarysse
appear in State and Temple Economy in the Ancient Near East, vol. 2, Proceedings of the
International Conference Organized by the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven from the 10th
to the 14th of April 1978, ed. E. Lipinski, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 6 (Louvain,
1979).
244 The Two Lands
work for nearly the whole of the period, allowed Greeks, Egyptians,
and Jews each to operate autonomously.21 This ethnic division of the ju-
dicial system has been taken to indicate that the Ptolemies promulgated
a separate but equal status for these constituent groups, but at least by
118 b.c.e., it was the language of the legal instrument that determined
which court would adjudicate, not the ethnicity of the contracting par-
ties.22 For Egyptians or Jews, for whom ethnic and legal boundaries
were coextensive, Ptolemaic codes can be construed as a gesture of civic
tolerance if not privilege. But for Greeks in the city the legal code must
have functioned somewhat differently—Greeks normally operated
within the laws of their specific ethnic communities or poleis. While
Greeks as a whole were the dominant (though not the most numerous)
ethnic group in the city, in Alexandria a legal code that was not specific
for any Greek ethnos but common to all23 must have undermined the
traditional sense of cultural identity as Coan or Athenian, and while it
would have contributed to the sense of a common Hellenic identity,
Greeks would not have experienced this identity as unique, but as one
of many, defined by opposition to Egyptians or Persians or Jews. More-
over, if Thompson’s supposition about the category “Hellene” is cor-
rect, then there may never have been a category at all in Alexandria for
ethnic Greeks as a whole as opposed to assimilated ethnicities who now
spoke and wrote Greek. To put this differently, in classical Greece,
“Greek” was the unmarked or default category, against which all oth-
ers must be measured, as we see in the traditional Greek-barbarian des-
tinctions in tragedy or in Herodotus’s discussion of the component peo-
ples of the Persian empire. But in Ptolemiac Egypt, and even in
Alexandria, this would not have been the case. If there was an “un-
marked” category from which all other ethnicities needed to distinguish
themselves, it was Egyptian.24
A significant factor in reinforcing community for this diverse group
of Greek speakers was the importation and creation of festivals and
cults. These provided a counterweight to Egyptian religious life with its
temples and lavish imperial displays (which the crown also supported)
on the one hand and substituted for polis-specific events like the Athe-
nian Panathenaia familiar to Mediterranean Greeks on the other. But
the trend towards cultural synthesis is nowhere more apparent than in
these events. Festivals like the Basileia blended elements from a festival
of Zeus Basileus with Egyptian elements by celebrating the royal coro-
nation and the birthday as simultaneous events (as in pharaonic prac-
tice), while incorporating traditional Greek contests. It is even possible
that this festival originated during the initial stage of Greek conquest.
According to Arrian, Alexander entered Memphis and sacrificed to
“the other gods and to Apis and held music and gymnastic contests”
(3.1.4). He then set out for the Siwah oasis, where he was proclaimed
son of Zeus Ammon, and when he returned to Memphis somewhat
later, Arrian tells us, he sacrificed to Zeus Basileus, accompanied by a
procession of his armed soldiers, and celebrated with music and gym-
nastic events (3.5.2). This description certainly suggests, if not corona-
tion, a display of power tantamount to a declaration of kingship. If the
sacrifice to Apis and to Zeus Basileus are to be linked,25 then Alexander
established the pattern for assimilation of Greek and Egyptian deities,
which the Ptolemies subsequently followed. Ptolemy I’s early residence
in Memphis before moving to Alexandria meant that the court would
have been in very close contact with traditional Egyptian religious
forms. In a recent study P. Borgeaud and Y. Volokhine argue persua-
sively that the Sarapis cult later introduced into Alexandria owed its
formation primarily to the Apis cults of Memphis, and that Tacitus’s
account of its inception was a later, Hellenized interpretation of
events.26
A further example of such blending may be seen in the Ptolemaia.
This was a massive display of wealth and power first staged about 276
b.c.e. by Ptolemy II in honor of his father. It would have rivaled tradi-
tional Egyptian festivals such as Opet, which annually celebrated
Amon-Re and the divine birth of the pharaoh.27 In the Ptolemaia, as in
Opet, the mythology promulgated to enhance Ptolemaic claims to the
throne—the link between the Ptolemies, Alexander, and Dionysus—
seems to have been central. The importance of Dionysus to this festival
did not result simply from the desire to promote a divine ancestor for
the Ptolemies, but from Dionysus’s status as the functional equivalent
of Osiris, who was preeminent in Egyptian cult. The canopy and tent
erected for the celebration may have have been in the Egyptian style,28
and various other features described in Athenaeus29 appear to be a
blend of Greek and Egyptian elements. For example, the festival begins
with personified temporal markers—Eniautos and the Horai in the
company of a woman named Penteteris carrying a crown of persea and
a palm branch (Athenaeus 198b). In Egyptian royal reliefs the goddess
Seshet, who measured time, was prominent in the Sed or renewal festi-
val, carrying persea leaves inscribed with the royal titulary and the
number of years in the pharaoh’s reign and the date palm branch,
which served as a hieroglyphic for the year.30 While the procession of
cities “subdued by the Persians” (Athenaeus 201d-e) has definite Greek
antecedents, it suggests also the Egyptian habit of displaying the wealth
of temple estates as females in procession on temple friezes.31
The Adonis festival described by Theocritus in Idyll 15 also falls into
this pattern. This was a Syrian cult that had been imported into the
Greek world as early as the seventh century b.c.e. and had been cele-
brated in Athens from at least the fifth century; both Aristophanes and
Menander mention it.32 The cult in Athens was celebrated exclusively
by women, but the Ptolemies make it a central feature of palace life,
though sponsored by the queen in honor of her mother. At this “Greek”
festival, however, the lamentations for Adonis33 were remarkably like
the lamentations for Osiris, celebrated by Egyptians annually,34 a cir-
cumstance that must have influenced their preference. Idyll 15 allows a
glimpse of how at least one contemporary poet saw such events. The
Adonia attracted a large and heterogeneous crowd (43: “ants, uncount-
able and unmeasurable”) whose unruly behavior is tamed by the palace
spectacle. Despite the crush, the festival is presented as a source of great
delight for the two “average” Greek ladies who attend. The dynamic of
the narrative is to move the reader from the confusion of an ethnically
heterogeneous populace into the tranquillity and opulence of the
palace, ruled over by the one king—Ptolemy.35 He wins the ladies’ ad-
miration not only for the splendid tableau but, earlier in the poem, for
the more prosaic reason that under his authority the mean streets of
Alexandria have been made safer.36
Similarly, the importation of traditional Greek cults connected to
Demeter37 and the designing of the cult of Sarapis as well as the numer-
ous cults linked to the royal family38 served to provide an emotional
focus for the populace while emphasizing the central role played by the
court. Once again syncretism seems to have been at work, most obvi-
ously in the Sarapis cult, but also in the Eleusinian mysteries. Fraser re-
marks:
Though we may reject the notion that the Alexandrian festival produced
the Eleusinian Mysteries, it is quite likely that the festival contained
recitations, perhaps even dramatic scenes, concerning the Eleusinian
story. Egyptian traditions preserved by Greek writers, which derived im-
portant elements of the Attic worship of Demeter from Egypt, may have
played a significant role here. Not only did Herodotus record that the
Thesmophoria were introduced into Attica by the daughters of Danaus
[2.171]; more significantly for our immediate context, Hecataeus of Ab-
dera . . . reported ‘the Egyptians’ as claiming that the Athenians derived
most of the major items of Athenian life from Egypt, including the
Eleusinian Mysteries [Diodorus Siculus 1.29]; and, in particular, that the
Eumolpidae were of Egyptian priestly origin. The circulation of such the-
35. 15.94–95: mb fAh . . . f% cmpn karterb% eGh | plbn Cna%, “May there not be any-
one more powerful over us than one.”
36. The anti-Egyptian sentiment of Idyll 15 does not affect the argument. Negative or
otherwise it reveals Greek awareness of Egyptian presence.
37. Whether or not the Mysteries were actually imported into Egypt, Demeter cults
were among the most prominent, doubtless because of their connection with Isis. See
Fraser 1972, 1: 199–201, and below. See also D. Thompson, “Demeter in Graeco-Roman
Egypt,” in Egyptian Religion: The Last Thousand Years, Studies Dedicated to the Mem-
ory of Jan Quaegebeur, pt. 1, ed. W. Clarysse, A. Schoors, and H. Willems (Leuven, 1998)
699–708.
38. The Ptolemies operated within two different cultic frameworks: the dynastic cult
was developed primarily for Greeks, while a divinized ruler cult was introduced into
Egyptian temples. See, for example, Thompson 1990, 110–12.
248 The Two Lands
The Ptolemies were sufficiently cultured to appreciate the role that lit-
erature had consistently played for Greeks in shaping public opinion
and historical memory.40 Arrian’s anecdote about Alexander crowning
the tomb of Achilles because Achilles had possessed a Homer to hymn
his praises is not without force.41 Traditional Greek performative gen-
res—epic, lyric, tragedy—served to perpetuate the memory of individu-
als as well as to contribute to the greater glory of a state or a reign.
39. Fraser 1972, 1: 201 (footnotes omitted). See above, page 142.
40. Soter wrote a history of Alexander and had his son educated by leading intellec-
tuals Zenodotus, Philitas, and Strato. Royal tutors were always distinguished literary fig-
ures; their ranks include Philitas, Apollonius, and Eratosthenes. Ptolemy II and Euergetes
were responsible for building the Library.
41. Anabasis 1.12.1. See Vasunia 2001, 253–55.
The Two Lands 249
While Athens had no epic poets to commemorate it, its dramatic pro-
ductions and its philosophers had been courted by Macedon as well as
by other imperial regimes. Therefore, the Ptolemies were behaving no
differently than previous Greek kings and tyrants by importing literati
and subventing the arts, and poets attracted to the court inevitably par-
ticipated in constructing the image of the new monarchy. Since poetry
belongs to the realm of the imagination, the creation of the image of a
king who conforms to Greek as well as non-Greek imperial behaviors
may operate subliminally to facilitate acceptance of what might other-
wise be unacceptable or idiosyncratic. Through poetry the choice of
suitable mythological parallels and allusions can create a context in
which the foreign and the familiar seem to coalesce, with the result that
what a Ptolemy does as an Egyptian pharaoh may appear as no differ-
ent from the actions of various Greek gods and heroes, and conversely
what appears exotic or outré in the Egyptian can, by alignment with fa-
miliar Greek mythological behaviors, be regularized. I would empha-
size that in the early Ptolemaic court this poetry was not written as con-
scious propaganda to justify or celebrate imperial behavior, but as a
series of thought experiments that configured the emerging monarchy
in various ways and that may or may not have intersected with reality.
In addition to acquiring poets the Ptolemies also set out to acquire
previous Greek literature, the repository of the memory of the past, and
to provide for its analysis, cataloguing, and storage for themselves and
future generations.42 This decision to acquire had far-reaching conse-
quences. The act of accumulation and organization has the de facto ef-
fect of canonization, of reifying the literary production of the past and
creating a psychological gulf between it and the contemporary or living
literary event. Texts became objects for study, to be catalogued and la-
beled, the vagaries of their particular circumstances of creation sub-
sumed under the generic (hymn, epinician, epic), their status guaran-
teed, enhanced, or demoted by being attached to an “author” (Homer,
Hesiod, Pindar). In this way Greek literature was now on display, avail-
able in the aggregate for admiration and adulation; to control and
order it conferred status. But if we can believe the sources, the
Ptolemies did not limit their acquisitions to Greek literature. It looks as
if theirs was a more heterogeneous scheme, mirroring their inclusion of
42. Whatever the precursors to the Library or whatever the extent of Peripatetic in-
fluence on collecting, the scale and the aggressive acquisition of the Alexandrian Library
was unprecedented. See Blum 1991, 95–123.
250 The Two Lands
43. No single source exists, but Manetho and other less familiar writings on Egypt
must have been included (see Fraser 1972, 1: 505–10, 521). Hermippus mentions
Zoroasterian writings (Fraser 1: 280), and the Letter to Aristeas claims that Ptolemy com-
missioned a group of Jewish scholars to translate the Septuagint into Greek. The probable
date of the letter is 100 b.c.e., but it presents itself as a document contemporary with
Ptolemy II (Fraser 1: 696–704).
44. Cameron 1995, 63–103.
The Two Lands 251
identity, but it also intensified the break between the old world of the
collected literature and contemporary events. Who Greeks now were
was open to negotiation, just as who the Ptolemies were—Macedonian
kings or Egyptian pharaohs—was not yet very clear. One thing was
clear: contemporary Greeks were not heroes in the mold of Achilles or
Diomedes, nor was their nascent state predicated on the elevation of the
virtues of the citizen-soldier or the statesman, as was so much of the in-
herited literary past. The task then would have been not to succumb to
ineluctible nostalgia for their loss (as so many modern scholars do
when writing about the Hellenistic world), but to find ways of rede-
ploying that past to express the values and cultural experience of the
present.
This is not a novel poetic task. It is what Greek tragedians did with
Homer: they retrofitted him for the city-state.45 But for the Alexandri-
ans it would have been a more difficult task. Homer and fifth-century
Athens were still connected by a viable Panhellenism emanating from
mainland Greece and its colonies, in which worth could be measured in
terms of valor in warfare, athletics, and politics. The conquest of
Alexander made this world obsolete. Soldiers were now mercenaries,46
and mercantile skills were more useful to the crown than public speak-
ing was. These men were now struggling to be Greek in quintessentially
non-Greek worlds, in Babylon, Jerusalem, or Memphis, the values of
which were alien and pervasive. Callimachus, Theocritus, Apollonius,
and their contemporaries helped to form as well as portray this new
world for Greeks. But, as I have been arguing throughout, theirs was
not the monocularity (or, in Bakhtinian terms, the monoglossia) of the
classical past, but a world in which it was not possible either for the
poets themselves or for their audiences to catch a glimpse of “Greek”
without simultaneously taking in an impression of “non-Greek.” The
two were bound together, and extricating one from another would have
become more difficult over time. What made Hellenistic life in cities
like Alexandria qualitatively different from the experience of the
“other” in the classical Greek past was living in an alien culture, sur-
rounded by alien people, without the defining structures of Greek civic
identity. New foci for that identity were necessary, hence the interest in
cultic formations and in cultic behavior (central in both Callimachus
and Apollonius), but also the interest in reshaping the past. On one
level these new Alexandrian Greeks must have experienced the past as
coherent and whole—certainly as represented in the assembled litera-
ture of the Library—in contrast to the fragmented cultural experience
of the present.47 But equally this (seemingly) definitive break with the
past, the new multicultural reality, and an emerging monarchy still
defining itself would have provided a rare opportunity for experiment
and creativity.
In writing poetry for these Two Lands, the Alexandrian poets had to
define their own work in some fashion vis-à-vis their poetic predeces-
sors, to effect a liaison between past and present. In writing about
kings, Callimachus and Theocritus turn to Hesiod and Pindar and the
hymnic tradition, and even Apollonius frames his epic by beginning
and ending it with elements patently borrowed from Pythian 4. This
should come as no surprise. The encomiastic and theogonic traditions
provide the best paradigms for writing for royals, offering as they do
not simply models for praising, but models for positioning the poets
themselves as responsible and necessary interpreters of the cultural
norms that monitor and identify imperial excellence. But Homer pre-
sented a different challenge. Homer, particularly the Iliad, provided the
template not simply for heroic behavior, but for the values of bravery,
competitiveness, and physical excellence (arete) essential for the world
of the citizen-soldier. Moreover, Homer was the basic text in primary
education, and everyone who read would have been exposed to it even
if they had not assimilated its value system.48 The extent to which this
aspect of Homer dominated literary production can be seen even in the
remains of two of the Alexander historians: Callisthenes conforms
many of the details in Alexander’s campaigns to events and locations in
the Iliad, while Nearchus’s account of Alexander’s return from the east
seems to have favored images from the Odyssey.49 Homer could not be
dismissed as a text shrouded in the mists of antiquity but was experi-
enced directly when even a near contemporary figure like Alexander
was made to behave like a Homeric hero. But as scholars have been
quick to point out, what may have worked for Alexander would have
47. The best recent discussion of this sense of cultural fragmentation is Selden 1998
(his article is restricted to Callimachus).
48. See Thompson 1992a, 49–50, on Egyptian education.
49. See Pearson’s discussion in The Lost Histories of Alexander the Great, American
Philological Association Monographs (New York, 1960) 40–46, 131–39.
The Two Lands 253
been fatal not only for the Ptolemies, but for their contemporary world
in general. Even if kings could be imagined as Homeric warriors,
Homeric values were of increasingly limited application in the new civic
environment. Hence all three poets go to some length to circumvent the
Iliadic baggage of Homer.
Callimachus and Theocritus do this by privileging Hesiod in their
referentiality, at least in the poems attached to royalty, or by focusing
on the ordinary in Homer and making it central, Apollonius by deliber-
ately avoiding the Trojan War and its heroes. This results not from de-
bates about how to write epic, but from the shift from the value system
of the classical city-state to the system of cultural plurality of Alexan-
drian Egypt. Which is not to say that Homer was not present in their
writing or their culture. But Homer is not present in situational or nar-
rative terms familiar from classical writers so much as in the peripheral,
or in linguistic and trace elements. Homeric intertextuality operates dif-
ferently in all three poets, but what can be extrapolated from all is the
distancing from the epic values inscribed in Homer. Apollonius’s epic is
situated in the pre-Iliadic world of Heracles and the Argonauts, but also
in the post-Iliadic world of the Odyssey. Even there he avoids the return
to the heroic world of Ithaca in his allusiveness, borrowing rather from
the fantastical books of Odysseus’s adventures. When Iliadic battles
occur, like the encounter with the Doliones, they are often indecisive or
failures. (In this incident, the Argonauts slaughter guest-friends in a
case of mistaken identity.) Theocritus too self-consciously distances
himself from a Homeric system of values. He begins the first Idyll
provocatively with an ecphrasis of an object that occurs in the Odyssey.
The rare word kissybion describes a cup used by Eumaeus, a pedes-
trian, non-heroic item that is promoted to programmatic status and lo-
cated at the opening of the poem.50 Theocritus’s gesture imitates that of
the Homeric shield of Achilles, a weapon of war that depicts on its sur-
face the macrocosm of which war is only a subset. For a brief moment
in the Iliad, the shield reorients the reader to a world in which love,
laughter, fecundity, and governance take precedence over battle and
arete. Theocritus inverts this relationship of text to artifact—the cup is
enlarged to fill the whole field of vision, crowding out epic behavior.
(The two men quarreling over a woman provide a mundane equivalent
of the conflict over Helen.) Like Theocritus, Callimachus selects the or-
51. This has been discussed by a number of scholars, who attribute the phenomenon
to a range of things from antiquarianism to realism. See Cameron 1995, 441–45, though
I would disagree with Cameron that the purpose of all this is “to write a new sort of epic,
antiquarian rather than heroic” (p. 445).
52. See Bing 1988, 129–33, for the former; Selden 1998, 326–54, for the latter. See
also Koenen 1993, 81–84 (Hymn to Delos) and 89–113 (Lock of Berenice).
The Two Lands 255
the role of the poet in creating the optical illusion. He turns to the Hes-
iodic world of good kings and bad kings and, like Hesiod, constructs
origin myths to suit his new world order, all the while presenting him-
self as the creator of these more plausible fictions.
Theocritus’s relationship to the new Alexandrian environment is
commensurately different. In Idyll 15 and to a lesser extent in Idyll 14,
he brings the diverse Greek population of contemporary Alexandria
alive; in Idyll 17 he experiments with royal encomium and treats the
emerging myths of the royal house in several others: Idylls 18 (Helen),
22 (Dioscuri), 24 (Heracles) and 26 (Bacchae).53 While Theocritus, par-
ticularly in the Heraclisus and the Ptolemy, experiments with Egyptian
themes, he does so far less consistently than do Callimachus and Apol-
lonius. Rather, his poems filter Egyptian ideology through the models of
good governance and its attendant rewards that appear to have been al-
ready articulated in writers like Hecataeus of Abdera. Theocritus, too,
favors Hesiod when he wants to talk about kings, not one suspects be-
cause of an undue fondness for the querulous old Boeotian, but because
Hesiod alone of the poets of the past addresses the question of kingly
behavior. The most distinctive feature of Theocritus’s court poetry, in
contrast to Callimachus’s, is his choice of the heroic figures from
myth—Heracles, Helen, the Dioscuri—to correspond to Ptolemaic be-
havior, rather than the divine figures of kingship—Zeus and Apollo—
favored by Callimachus.
Even though Apollonius appears to avoid the issue of imperial
mythology by writing epic, he may be the most ambitious of the three
by constructing an entirely new thought world for the Ptolemies to
enter. Apollonius situates his narrative in the pre-Homeric world of
magic and monsters, when the created order was young, and the forces
of civilization struggling to emerge. He employs Greek cosmogonic ma-
terial that corresponds to Egyptian to fashion a world situated in two
discrete cultural spheres: in Greek philosophical terms his text has been
read as the transformation of neikos into philia,54 terms that almost lit-
erally translate into the dominant paradigm of Egyptian thought, the
emergence of order (maat) from chaos. As we saw, his poem ends with
the double birth of islands—Apollo the Gleamer’s island of appearance
(Anaphe) and Euphemus’s Thera. Thus his text ends with two images.
53. Although the court poetry is usually treated as marginal in Theocritean scholar-
ship, it does account for a substantial portion of his poetic output.
54. So Hunter 1993, 163–59, and see the discussion in chapter 4 above.
256 The Two Lands
In the first we find the most potent symbols of Egyptian ideology, the il-
lumination of the land by the sun-god at dawn, which is the harbinger
of new creation as well as a symbol of pharaonic kingship. In the other
is the gift of a clod of Libyan earth to Euphemus, which adumbrates
Greece’s subsequent hereditary entitlement to North Africa. The
Ptolemies wait offstage: it is through their presence in Egypt that the
two independent myths of kingship and cultural interaction will finally
be drawn together in one king for the Two Lands.
55. 1991, 321. Not the least is Goldhill, who concludes that “aetiology may offer a
paradigm of how the past may be seen in the present—but it is a paradigm that is subject
to Apollonius’ ceaseless irony and constant testing of the connections between events in a
narrative” (p. 333).
56. The exception is Zanker, for whom “realism” pervades both texts and the society
that produced them.
The Two Lands 257
We can see each of these three constructing a poetic itinerary that be-
gins with earlier writers but always ends in the present with the poet
himself. Each begins by establishing a conceptual link with the past (via
Homer, Hesiod, or Pindar) only to differentiate himself and his poetic
achievement from the procession of texts now being encased in the li-
brary.59 In their poetic imaginary the literary past is not only trans-
formed to embrace new beginnings but to create an impression of their
own uniqueness for contemporary and future readers.
57. The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven,
1982) 17–18.
58. Odyssey 23.296, on which see Livrea ad loc.
59. A number of scholars have discussed this feature with respect to Callimachus; see,
for example, Bing 1988, 56–71; Hunter 1997, 57; and Selden 1998, 407–8.
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Index of Passages Cited
269
270 Index of Passages Cited
277
278 Index
quest in, 183–237; —, romantic en- of, 218; Libyan journey of, 186,
counters in, 184, 191, 192–93; —, 223, 231; magic skills of, 197, 205,
serpents in, 187, 194, 210–12, 222, 225
216–17, 225, 231; —, Sesoösis in, Argos: aridity of, 117n124; connection
177, 189–90, 207; —, socio-political with Egypt, 8–9; irrigation of, 25,
context of, xi, 237; —, sources of, 96–102
220, 223, 227; —, time in, 228; —, Ariadne, 192n50
transculturation in, 191, 231n172; Aristaeus, 3n5
—, Triton in, 194, 207, 208; —, Ty- Aristotle: advice to kings, 31; on Epi-
phon in, 216; —, unity of, 171n1; —, menides, 88; influence of Eudoxus
use of Hecataeus of Miletus in, 223; on, 30n29
—, use of Hymn to Zeus in, 198, Arrian, 15n39, 248; on Alexander’s an-
204n82; —, use of myth in, 185; —, cestry, 69
use of Pherecydes of Syrus in, 198, Arsinoe (mother of Ptolemy I), 129
199, 201; —, use of Pindar in, Arsinoe I (wife of Ptolemy I), 118n125
178–80, 181, 195, 208, 223, 224; —, Arsinoe II (wife of Ptolemy II), 118n125,
use of underworld books in, 223, 126, 162, 168; death of, 147,
225; —, Zeus in, 178n18, 200. See 182n27; divinity of, 153n93; identi-
also Apsyrtus (Argonautica); Argo; fication with Isis, 153n93, 155; pre-
Argonauts; Jason (Argonautica); vious marriage of, 163; temple at
Medea (Argonautica) Zephyrion, 181
Apophis (serpent), 60–61, 199, 210; bat- Assmann, J., 234
tle with Horus, 216n119, 217; as Asteria (island), 115–16, 117–18
chaos, 225; defeat by Horus, 119; Athena: in Callimachus, 75; in Dionysius
mutilation of, 228; and voyage of Scytobrachion, 41, 207n88; identifi-
Re, 219, 232 cation with Neith, 51; Tritonian,
Apotheosis, 37, 38 206, 207, 208
Apsyrtus (Argonautica): murder of, Athenaeus, 246
215–16, 218, 222, 226–29, 230; Athens: drama of, 249, 251; Egyptian in-
mutilation of, 193, 216n118, 229 fluence in, 247
Aratus, 82n27, 88n46, 110n108; constel- Azania, 98, 99
lations in, 126; use of Eudoxus,
30n29 Bakhtin, M. M., 171n2
Arcadia: as birthplace of Zeus, 79, 80, Barbarians: in Argonautica, 175–76, 179;
81, 84, 91–96, 103, 108, 200, 257; identity of, 183. See also Non-
irrigation of, 91, 95–98, 116, 164, Greeks
203; as primordial place, 81, 108, Barbarism: association with Egypt, 29;
113 Greek triumph over, 174–75, 187
Arcadians (Argonautica), 190 Basileia (festival), 78, 125
Architecture, Egyptian, 15. See also Basileia (goddess), 41, 42, 43
Monuments, Egyptian Battiads, 108n101, 179, 180
Ares, 118n125 Bees: and baby Zeus, 107; on cartouches,
Arete: of Apollo, 117; cultural values of, plates 1-2; Euhemerus on, 107n95;
150n86; Homeric, 253; in Hymn to in hieroglyphic writing, 1–3; in Pin-
Zeus, 109; of Ptolemy II, 150 dar, 108n101; royal symbolism of,
Argo: as constellation, 221–22; solar 1–4, 107–8; spontaneous creation
journey of, 221n136 of, 4; as symbol of rebirth, 4, 5
Argo (Argonautica): on Lake of Fire, Berenice I (wife of Ptolemy I), 118n125,
229, 231; night voyage of, 229, 137; benefactions of, 167; co-
233–34; return voyage of, 182n29, templing with Aphrodite, 153–54;
224–37; serpent imagery of, 194, cult of, 147n79; deification of,
231 153–55, 157; in Encomium for
Argonauts: Dionysius Scytobrachion on, Ptolemy, 152–53; marriage of, 155;
40, 174n6, 175; early accounts of, offerings to, 153n95
174; in Pindar, 179 Berenice II (wife of Ptolemy III), 182n29
Argonauts (Argonautica): ancestors of, Berenice’s Lock (constellation), 228
209; as civilizers, 187; ephebic status Bes (dwarf god), 134n42
280 Index
Hesperides (Argonautica), 186–87, 194 Horus-the-Child: birth of, 237; and birth
Hieroglyphic writing, 176n12; bees in, of Zeus, 104–5; Callimachus’s famil-
1–3; Egyptians’ knowledge of, 48; iarity with, 102; and Eros, 82n27; as
European interest in, 2; Ptolemies’ Harpocrates, 15; pharaohs as, 55,
use of, 13, 14 104, 156, 236; Ptolemies’ use of,
Hill, primeval, 58; in Argonautica, 209; 237
in Egyptian cosmogony, 100–101; in H’r nbw (Golden Horus), 138
Hymn to Zeus, 91, 100; pyramids Hu (god), 219, 225
as, 58; sunrise on, 234 Human life, stages of, 219
Hipponax, 254 Human sacrifice, 27, 62, 138, 227
Homer: Alexandrian poets’ use of, 256; Humor, in court poetry, 75, 170
Callimachus’s use of, 76, 95, 252, Hunter, Richard, 140n49, 147n82,
253–54; heroic behavior in, 252; 154n95, 161, 173n5; on new order,
Theocritus’s use of, 163; tragedians’ 209
use of, 251; Works: Iliad, 80, 252; Hymns: and encomia, 148n82; from Na-
Odyssey: Argonauts in, 173n5; —, pata, 120; of Philae, 46, 56, 101,
Callimachus’s use of, 95, 233n177; 112n114, 120; solar, 60, 234
—, marriage in, 155; —, narrative Hypsipyle (Argonautica), 186, 215n117
reality of, 185n37; —, romantic en-
counters in, 185, 192; —, supernatu- Inachus, myth of, 25n17
ral light in, 136; —, Theocritus’s use Insemination, divine, 26, 128
of, 151 Intermarriage: with non-Greeks, 191–92;
Homeric Hymn to Apollo: and Hymn to in Cyrene, 191n49; Greek and
Delos, 115, 116; Pytho in, 118, 165; Egyptian, 241n11
Theocritus’s use of, 152, 158, 164 Io: identification with Isis, 25, 211n101;
Homeric Hymn to Demeter, 136; Eleusin- myth of, 8–9, 25, 26, 174
ian mysteries in, 141–42; use in Her- Iphicles, 133
acliscus, 124, 127, 140–41, 146 Irrigation: of Arcadia, 91, 95–98, 116,
Homeric Hymn to Dionysus, 80, 82–84 164, 200, 203; in Argonautica, 203;
Homonoia, 164, 178; in Argonautica, of Argos, 25, 96–102; introduction
211n97 of, 99
Horapollo, 2, 3, 3n7, 140 Isis: as consort of Sarapis, 15; cults of, 4,
Hornung, Eric: on Apophis, 217; on 15n41; and Delos myth, 116; Eu-
maat, 51–52, 120; on pleonasm, 50; doxus on, 31; festivals of, 46; in
on voyage of Re, 220, 234 flooding of Nile, 101; identification
Horus: and the Amazons, 41; attack of with Arsinoe II, 153n93, 155;
serpents on, 126n17; beauty of, identification with Demeter, 7; iden-
212–13; birth of, 98; birthplace of, tification with Hathor, 50, 56; iden-
59, 100; in Book of the Dead, 213; tification with Io, 25, 211n101;
on cippi, 134, 136; defeat of identification with Selene, 42; magic
Apophis, 119; defeat of serpents, of, 218; and Osiris, 56, 57, 155,
119, 126n17, 165, 211, plate 3; in 168; temples of, 45; tricking of Seth,
Dionysius Scytobrachion, 42, 175; 214
Eudoxus on, 31; festivals of, 46; Islands: Calypso’s, 96, 126, 233n177;
Golden, 138–39; as good son, 213; Circe’s, 204, 222, 230; emerging,
Herodotus on, 59; iconography of, 209, 219, 223, 224, 234–35, 237,
55; identification with Apollo, 7, 20, 255; floating, 57–58, 115–16,
104, 114, 209, 236, 237; identifica- 117–18; primeval, 126n17; speak-
tion with Helios, 42; identification ing, 165. See also Anaphe; Asteria;
with Perseus, 26, 56n109; as morn- Cos; Thera
ing star, 216n119; nurses of, 116; as Isocrates, 21, 22, 23, 27; advice to kings,
order, 51; pharaohs as, 53; revival 31; Busiris, 28–30, 38; encomia of,
of, 134–35; struggle with Seth, 55, 147, 148; Evagoras, 31n32;
56; succession of, 42 Nicocles, 31n32
Horus falcon, 159
Horus-in-Chemmis, 107; and Apollo, 58, Jason (Argonautica), 184, 191; as civi-
104, 114; birth of, 117 lizer, 212; cloak of, 200–202,
286 Index
Osiris: boat of, 222; as dying god, 89; visitors to, 45; hymns of, 46, 56,
Eudoxus on, 31; festivals of, 46, 101, 112n114, 120
246n34; as god of regeneration, Philia, and neikos, 197, 200, 202, 205,
213n105; identification of Dionysus 209, 219, 255
with, 7, 15, 84, 230, 245–46; and Philip of Macedon, in Alexander Ro-
Isis, 56, 57, 168; judgment before, mance, 65, 66, 69, 130, 143
48; as Lord of the Dead, 230; as Philitas, 230n167, 248n40
model of kingship, 33, 34; murder Philosophers, court, 31–32
of, 42; mutilation of, 229n164; sac- Phoenix, myth of, 59–60
rifices to, 62; struggle with Seth, 63; Pietch, C., 171n1, 178n18
tombs of, 113; union of sun with, Pindar: Alexandrian poets’ use of, 252;
230 Apollonius’s use of, 178–80, 181,
Osorkon, 156; victory stele of, 154n99, 195, 208, 223, 224; bees in,
213, 216n119 108n101; Callimachus’s use of, 115;
Ouranids, defeat of, 109–10 encomia of, 74; on infant Heracles,
Ouranioi (primal gods), 37, 54, 169 124, 132, 140; Jason in, 179, 201,
212n104; Libya in, 179–80; on mar-
Panathenaea (festival), 64 riage of Heracles, 126n18; Medea
Panchaea (imaginary island), 37, 107n95 in, 179; Theocritus’s use of, 124; on
Papremis, mysteries at, 56 Typhoeus, 102, 134
Paul, Epistle to Titus, 83n28 Pithom stele, 14, 236n185
Pausanius, 93, 94, 97; on Ptolemy I, Plato: advice to kings, 31; construction of
129n25; on Rhea’s cave, 101n85 Egypt, 21, 22, 23, 176n12; on cul-
Pelagus (king), 26 tural priority, 24, 33n38; on Egypt
Perseus, 25; ancestor of Alexander, 70; government, 28, 29; on Eros, 81; idea
conception of, 128; identification of justice, 52; influence of Eudoxus
with Horus, 26, 56n109; as precur- on, 24n14, 30n29, 31; philosopher-
sor of Heracles, 133; in Simonides, kings of, 29; on Zeus, 97
133, 135; veneration in Achmim, 26, Pleonasm, in Egyptian myth, 50
133 Plutarch: on Alexandria, 181n26; on
Persians: in Alexander’s army, 15n39; Eros, 82n27; On Isis and Osiris,
Greeks as successors to, 33; restora- 55–56; Life of Alexander, 69, 70;
tion of temples by, 13n30; war with, The Obsolescence of Oracles, 88; on
174 Osiris, 222; use of Eudoxus, 31
Pharaohs: accountability of, 33, 34; as Poetry, Alexandrian: cross-cultural read-
antipalon huperteros, 138–39; birth ings in, 9–12; kingship in, 11, 12,
stories of, 53–54, 56–57, 67, 130, 17; modern reception of, 5–6; past
141; as bringers of order, 61, 62, and present in, 252, 256, 257; per-
120–21, 138; divine conception of, formative traditions of, 250; socio-
52–54, 70; as divine intermediaries, political aspects of, 19
52–53; falcon symbolism of, 159; Poetry, Hellenistic: aition in, 88, 187; en-
footprint of, 167; as Horus-the- comia, 148n84; at symposia, 77n7
Child, 55, 104, 156; iconography of, Poets, Alexandrian: access to Egyptian
61–62; likeness to divine father, ideas, 10n19; audience of, 140; de-
155–56; maintenance of maat, 61, piction of Hellenic world, 251; dis-
100, 138, 166; monuments of, 166; cursive matrices of, 9; establishment
renewal festivals of, 215, 238, 246; of cultural norms, 252; humor of,
as son of Re, 176; tomb building by, 170; as image makers, 12, 123, 140,
141; as unifiers, 238. See also King- 170, 249; knowledge of Egypt, 20;
ship, pharaonic realism of, 10n20, 256n56; referen-
Pharos (island), 181 tiality of, 76n4; use of Homer, 256
Pherecydes of Athens, 205 Polydeuces (Argonautica), 216n119
Pherecydes of Syrus, 40n63, 81, 82; Poseidippus, 181–82
Apollonius’s use of, 198, 199; Poseidon, 162–63; anger at Inachos,
Chronos in, 199n69; theogony of, 117n124
110n104, 199–200, 201 Postcolonial discourse, 18. See also Cop-
Philae: Greek inscriptions at, 44; Greek resence
Index 289
Pratt, M. L., 184, 191, 195 127, 158, 165; coregency of, 77, 78,
Priesthood, Egyptian: Eudoxos on, 102, 125, 127; in Encomium for
30–31; Herodotus’s knowledge of, Ptolemy, 157–63; expansionist poli-
44, 46; knowledge of Greek, cies of, 162; festivals of, 245; Hor-
69n145; promotion of kingship, 35; nub title of, 138–40; in Hymn to
under Ptolemies, 12–13; Saite, 31 Zeus, 78, 79, 105, 108, 111–14,
Priority, cultural, 24, 33, 183, 241 148–51, 204; immortality of, 114,
“Prophecy of Neferti,” 99–100 157, 167; kingship under, 75; legiti-
Prosperity: under just rulers, 111–12; macy of, 156; marriage to Arsinoe,
under pharaohs, 100, 161 126, 147, 162, 163, 168; on Mendes
Proteus, 27, 28, 101–2, 181 stele, 213n109; military success of,
Psammetichus I (pharaoh), 23 157–58; mutiny of Gauls against,
Ptah, identification with Hephaestus, 35, 114–15, 117, 119, 139, 165, 228,
50, 144 254; parents of, 151, 155; pharaonic
Ptolemaia (festival), 245–46 ideology of, 14; Sarapis cult under,
Ptolemais (daughter of Ptolemy), 14n34 15–16; succession to throne, 109,
Ptolemies: accommodation to Egyptian 163; Theoi Soteres cult of, 162; use
forms, 13–14, 240, 242; assimilation of Horus title, 236n185; wealth of,
of Egyptian culture, 16; brother- 159, 161
sister marriages of, 170, 242; build- Ptolemy III Euergetes: cult of Theoi
ing programs of, 16; burial practices adelphoi, 45; throne names of, 155
of, 154n95; creativity under, 252; Ptolemy IV Philopator, 140, 155–56
cults of, 15–16, 38, 45, 152n91, Ptolemy V Epiphanes, 14n33, 156; car-
162, 247; deployment of past, 251; touche of, plate 2
divine ancestry of, 129, 132, 133, Pyramids: Herodotus’s visit to, 44; as
152; dual role of, 16; eagle symbol- primeval hills, 59
ism of, 129, 158–59; Egyptians Pyramid Texts, 55, 220
under, 244; ethnic identity under, Pyrrhiche (dance), 203
242n15; fictive past for, 173, 182, Pytheas of Marseilles, 38n55, 184n35
257; heterogeneity under, 73, Pytho: Apollo’s defeat of, 117, 118, 119;
242–45, 249–50; Homeric values as chaos, 118, 165; as Typhoeus,
under, 253; identification with 118n125
Horus, 58, 104, 139n53, 237; legal
system of, 243–44; literary patron- Ramesses II, 34; Horus falcon of,
age by, 249; Lower Egypt under, 159n114
239; meritocracy under, 243; patron- Ramesses III, funerary temple of,
age by, 123, 249; religious cere- 215n118
monies of, 45; restoration of tem- Ramesseum, 63; Hecateus’s visit to, 44
ples, 13; royal titles of, 138, 140, Raphia, battle of, 239n5, 240n7
238n1; temple building by, 16, 45, Re: and Ammon, 50; and Apophis, 219;
57, 243; tutors of, 248n40; use of birth of, 234; cattle of, 131; celestial
foundation stories, 188; use of hi- boat of, 60, plate 5; Helios as, 214;
eroglyphs, 13, 14 hieroglyphs of, 59; night voyage of,
Ptolemy I Soter: administrative structure 131, 218–37. See also Amun (Egypt-
of, 12, 13, 14; benefactions of, 167; ian)
cartouche of, plate 1; cult of Sarapis Red hair, in Egyptian myth, 62
under, 15; cult of Theoi Soteres, Religion, Egyptian: cosmos in, 51–52;
152n91; divine protection for, 129, and Greek natural philosophy, 46;
158; Egyptian troops of, 240n7; in Greeks’ familiarity with, 21. See also
Encomium for Ptolemy, 151, 152, Cosmology, Egyptian
156, 157, 164; history of Alexander, Rhacotis (Alexandria), 13
248; immortality of, 156, 157, 170; Rhea: cave of, 101n85; in Dionysius Scy-
kingship under, 75; in Memphis, 13, tobrachion, 41, 43; in Encomium
240, 245; paternity of, 129n25; view for Ptolemy, 162, 163; in Hymn to
of kingship, 15 Zeus, 75, 91–92, 95, 96, 97, 103,
Ptolemy II Philadelphus: arete of, 150; 105, 163–64; in Theogony, 102. See
birth on Cos, 17, 97, 114, 116, 119, also Great Mother
290 Index
eficium for, 162; settings of, 122; Theseus, 119; and Ariadne, 192n50
socio-political context of, xi, 169–70, Thesmophoria (festival), 142n63, 247
255. Works: Adoniazusae, 167–68; Thetis, 154; magic of, 212n103
Encomium for Ptolemy, 147–70, 255; Thompson, Dorothy, 7n14, 13n28,
—, Achilles in, 157, 158, 164; —, 241–42, 244
Alexander in, 152, 156, 157, 164; —, Thonis (priest), 27, 28
Berenice I in, 152–53; —, composi- Timaeus, 230n167
tion of, 123, 147, 164; —, Cos in, Timbarini (Argonautica), 175
158, 159, 162; —, Diomedes in, 157, Timotheus, 47n86, 142
158; —, form of, 147; —, Homeric Titans: defeat of, 109–10, 119; in Diony-
language of, 151; —, and Hymn to sius Scytobrachion, 41
Delos, 147, 164–65; —, and Hymn to Tityos, Apollo’s slaying of, 211n101
Zeus, 148; —, kingship in, 17–18, Travel writing, 184–85
123, 129, 144–45, 160–61, 165; —, Triton, in Argonautica, 194, 207, 208
marriage of Zeus and Hera in, 162, Triton (river), 208
168–69; —, mythic elements in, 150; Trojan War, 27–28, 182
—, political debate in, 18, 165; —, Truth-telling, and lying, 85–86, 113–14
Ptolemy I in, 151, 152, 156, 157, Typhaon: in Homeric Hymn to Apollo,
164; —, Ptolemy II in, 157–63; —, 118; Zeus’s defeat of, 216. See also
Rhea in, 162, 163; —, ruler cult in, Typhoeus; Typhon
166; —, use of Hecataeus in, 144; —, Typhoeus: identification with Seth, 110;
use of Homeric Hymn to Apollo in, Pindar on, 102, 134; Pytho as,
152, 158, 164; —, use of Homer in, 118n125; Zeus’s defeat of, 109–10,
163; —, use of Theogony in, 158, 111
159, 253; —, Zeus in, 148–51; Hera- Typhon: association with Seth, 62, 104,
cliscus, 122, 123–46, 257; —, Al- 138, 210, 216; epithets of, 139; in
cmena in, 128–29, 130, 133, 135, Hesiod, 11n23
137, 141, 144, 156, 157; —, Amphit- Typhonians, burning of, 139n55
ryon in, 128, 134, 135, 141, 156, Tyranny, association of Egypt with, 26,
157; —, composition of, 123, 29
125–27; —, constellations in, 126; —,
as court poetry, 125, 143; —, domes- Underworld, Egyptian, 18; Greek knowl-
tic elements in, 128; —, education of edge of, 221; Lake of Fire in, 229,
Heracles in, 123, 137, 142–45, 165; 231; maps of, 226
—, and Encomium for Ptolemy, 165; Underworld books, Egyptian, 216, 217;
—, ending of, 124; —, kingship in, Apollonius’s use of, 223, 225; voy-
17, 18, 123, 127, 129; —, perfor- age of Re in, 220. See also Book of
mance of, 124–25; —, Ptolemy II in, the Dead
123–32; —, purification in, 137; —, Uranus: castration of, 106; in Dionysius
supernatural light in, 136; —, Teire- Scytobrachion, 41
sias’s prophecy in, 123, 127, 137, Urban VIII (pope), use of bee symbolism,
139n54, 144, 145, 165; —, throttling 3
of snakes in, 102, 123, 127, 132–42, Ursa Major (constellation), 126, 228
165; —, use of Homeric Hymn to
Demeter in, 124, 127, 140, 146; —, Vase painting: Busiris in, 27; Eros in, 81;
use of Pindar in, 124, 132, 140; Idyll Heracles on, 62, 131, 132; Jason on,
15, 243, 246–47, 255; Idyll 17, 174n6
78–79 Vasunia, P., 21, 26n20
Theogamy, Egyptian, 56–57, 130 Vergil: bee symbolism of, 3n5, 4; on
Theogeniture, 168n33 Carthage, 182; epic form of, 171,
Theogony, Greek: of Epimenides, 88–89; 172; romantic encounters in, 185,
of Euhemerus, 37; and kingship, 86; 191
Orphic, 82
Theoi adelphoi cult, 39; introduction of, Wennefer (scribe), 14
45 West, M. L., 37, 111n113, 130; on Cre-
Theoi Soteres cult, 152n91, 162 tan Zeus, 89; on Epimenides, 88n40;
Thera (island), 209-10, 223, 255 on solar journey, 221
292 Index