Seeing Double

HELLENISTIC CULTURE AND SOCIETY

General Editors: Anthony W. Bulloch, Erich S. Gruen, A. A. Long, and
Andrew F. Stewart
Seeing Double
Intercultural Poetics in Ptolemaic
Alexandria

Susan A. Stephens

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley . Los Angeles . London
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2003 by the Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stephens, Susan A., 1945–

Seeing double : intercultural poetics in Ptolemaic
Alexandria / Susan A. Stephens.
p. cm. — (Hellenistic culture and society ; 37)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-520-22973-8 (alk. paper).
1. Greek poetry, Hellenistic—Egypt—Alexandria—
History and criticism. 2. Egyptian poetry—Egypt—
Alexandria—History and criticism. 3. Literature,
Comparative—Greek and Egyptian. 4. Literature,
Comparative—Egyptian and Greek. 5. Language
and culture—Egypt—Alexandria. 6. Alexandria
(Egypt)—Intellectual life. 7. Ptolemaic dynasty,
305–30 b.c. 8. Poetics I. Title. II. Series.
pa3081 .s74 2003
881'.09932—dc21 2002007570

Manufactured in the United States of America

12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper used in this publication is both acid-free

and totally chlorine-free (TCF). It meets the mini-
mum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R
1997) (Permanence of Paper).
To the memory of
Jack Winkler
Contents

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

Select Bibliography 259

Passages Cited 269

Index 277
Illustrations

(Illustrations follow p. 146)

1. Cartouche of Ptolemy I (Tuna el-Gebel), with sedge
and bee
2. Cartouche of Ptolemy V Epiphanes (Rosettana), with
sedge and bee
3. Horus throttling snakes
4. Nakht spearing a snake and a pig (The Book of
the Dead)
5. The solar boat being towed through a snake
(The Amduat)
6. The Sun emerging from a hill at dawn (The Amduat)

ix
Preface

I began to think about the relationship of Alexandrian writers to their

contemporary Greco-Egyptian milieu at least twenty years ago, but I
was unable to provide answers that satisfied myself or colleagues and
students. In the interim I learned a great deal about Egypt and the con-
struction of pharaonic kingship. Some of this material provided intrigu-
ing parallels and overlaps with what I understood of Hellenistic poetic
practice. The question of whether there was a relationship between the
two—which a few scholars had already articulated and others had de-
nied, with varying degrees of vehemence or disdain—gradually evolved
into conviction that one did exist, but this in turn led to other ques-
tions. Why was there a connection? How important was it? Could par-
allels with Egyptian culture tell us anything about the poetry that we
did not already know? This study sketches an answer, in the belief that
grounding a selection of poems of Callimachus and Theocritus and the
epic of Apollonius in their contemporary social and political context
opens up the poetry in a number of ways, not the least of which is to re-
move it from the ivory tower and locate it more centrally within con-
temporary intellectual debates and within the political life of the city. I
have characterized my reading as “seeing double.” This capitalizes on
what has become a standard formulation for the twin aspects of Ptole-
maic culture: in 1987, for example, W. Peremans wrote about the “bi-
cephalous” nature of Ptolemaic administration, and in 1993 L. Koenen
wrote of “The Janus Head of Ptolemaic Kingship.” This is more than a

xi
xii Preface

convenient metaphor: it describes the reality of existence in a world

that was essentially different from that of the classical polis. It was a
world both Greek and Egyptian, in which the cultural codes of each
were important and recognizable.
I have been encouraged by a number of people in this endeavor, and
it is a pleasure to be able to thank them. The Groningen Hellenistic
workshops provided an invaluable venue for testing my ideas. I am in-
debted to the other participants and especially to Annette Harder, who
organizes the workshops, for her support. Similarly, a series of seminars
on the interaction of Greece and Egypt held at Stanford and the Uni-
versity of Chicago offered an opportunity to discuss various parts of my
argument with an audience of classicists and Egyptologists, many of
whose observations are acknowledged in my notes. A number of schol-
ars—Mary Depew, Marco Fantuzzi, Richard Jasnow, Csaba La’da,
Scott Noegel, Jay Reed, Ian Rutherford, Phiroze Vasunia, and Stephen
White—have allowed me to see their work in advance of publication,
and this has enabled me both to refine my own arguments and to cor-
rect errors. My colleague, Joe Manning, helped me in numerous ways
with Hellenistic history, and just by being there to exchange ideas. Lud-
wig Koenen generously provided copious commentary and bibliogra-
phy that I would otherwise have missed. Phiroze Vasunia’s advice about
my opening chapter proved extremely helpful. I am indebted to Peter
Bing for his thorough and insightful comments. Richard Hunter’s
knowledge and occasional scepticism were equally valuable. I thank
both for their willingness to read an earlier version of this manuscript.
Benjamin Acosta-Hughes kindly read several versions of my manu-
script and helped me structure my arguments for classical readers. Dan
Selden provided endless hours of discussion and debate on the potential
relationships of Egyptian and Greek material as well as his insights on
poetry. While I have not agreed with each person’s comments and ad-
vice in every particular, I have unquestionably profited from their will-
ingness to engage with these questions and to stimulate me constantly
to refine my arguments. For the form in which these ideas now appear,
they are not to be held responsible. I would also like to express my
thanks to Erich Gruen, who solicited the manuscript, and to Kate Toll
for her help in easing it through the editorial process as well as for her
sensible advice on technical problems.
Finally, a word about my editorial decisions. I have used Latinized
Greek spellings throughout when they are in common use. For Egypt-
ian names I have preferred the Hellenized spelling (if it exists) over con-
Preface xiii

ventional Egyptian transliterations (e.g., Sesostris vs. Senwosret or Sn-

ws-rt), on the principle that the former will be more familiar to most
readers. I include Greek text only in cases where the exact meaning of
the Greek could affect the argument. In other cases, where I focus on
the contour of a narrative or event, I provide translations only. Transla-
tions are my own unless otherwise noted. In footnoting Egyptian ideas
I have adopted the following practice: whenever possible I provide re-
cent, scholarly treatments easily accessible to those without a back-
ground in Egyptology. In many cases these include handbooks and gen-
eral discussions, which also serve to reinforce a basic point: the ideas I
discuss are pervasive in Egyptian culture. I have tried consistently to
limit my Egyptian evidence to material contemporary with the produc-
tion of Hellenistic poetry or the centuries immediately before. I cite
later sources such as Plutarch, or earlier pharaonic material only to cre-
ate a continuum of ideas from the pharaonic period to the contempo-
rary world of the Ptolemies and beyond.

Parts of chapters 2 and 4 of the present work appeared earlier in “Cal-

limachus at Court,” Hellenistica Groningana 3 (1998) 167–85, and
“Writing Epic in the Ptolemaic Court,” Hellenistica Groningana 4
(2000) 195–215, and are used here with kind permission of the series
editors, M. A. Harder, R. F. Regtuit, and G. C. Wakker.

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

Lasserre F. Lasserre, ed. Die Fragmente des Eudoxos von

Knidos. Berlin, 1966.
LIMC Lexicon iconographicum mythologiae classicae.
Zurich and Munich, 1981–97.
Livrea E. Livrea, ed. Apollonii Rhodii Argonauticon, Liber
quartus. Florence, 1973.
LSJ H. G. Liddell, R. Scott, and H. S. Jones, eds. A
Greek-English Lexicon, with a Revised Supple-
ment. 9th rev. ed. Oxford, 1996.
M-W R. Merkelbach and M. L. West, eds. Hesiodi frag-
menta selecta. 3d ed. Oxford, 1990.
Pf. R. Pfeiffer, ed. Callimachus. 2 vols. Oxford, 1949–51.
PGM K. Preisendanz, ed. Papyri Graecae magicae. Vols.
1–2. 2d ed. Stuttgart, 1973–74.
PMG D. Page, ed. Poetae melici Graeci. Oxford, 1962.
RE A. Pauly, G. Wissowa, and W. Kroll, eds. Real-En-
cyclopädie der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft.
Stuttgart, 1893–1978.
SH H. Lloyd-Jones and P. Parsons, eds. Supplementum
Hellenisticum. Berlin and New York, 1983.
Snell-Maehler B. Snell and H. Maehler, eds. Pindari carmina cum
fragmentis. Parts 1–2. Leipzig, 1971–75.
Wendel C. Wendel, ed. Scholia in Apollonium Rhodium vet-
era. Berlin, 1935.
Introduction

On returning from Egypt in 1799 Napoleon introduced a sweeping

heraldic reform: he replaced the enduring symbol of the old monarchy,
the fleur-de-lis, with the device of a bee. The bee was ubiquitous in its use
by the royal house, appearing on the coronation robes, state furniture,
and occasionally even on Napoleon’s coat of arms. But Napoleon’s rea-
son for making this change was by no means obvious, even to his con-
temporaries. The explanation of his choice lies outside of a symbolic
repertory familiar from French culture or traditional western iconogra-
phy. Napoleon borrowed his new royal insignia from Egypt. For over
two thousand years, the bee had been used in hieroglyphic writing to in-
dicate the king of Lower Egypt or the Delta region, and a bee, often elab-
orately carved and painted, always preceded the cartouche of the
pharaoh’s name, with the result that the Egyptian word for bee (bit) came
by metonymy also to mean “king” (see plates 1 and 2). Napoleon must
have been aware of this, because Edmé Jomard, who was the secretary of
the editorial committee for the Déscription de l’Égypte, the comprehen-
sive survey of Egyptian monuments and natural history commissioned as
part of Napoleon’s military expedition, was an ardent student of hiero-
glyphics, and on the title page of the first volume of the Déscription he
made creative use of the bee as a marker of imperial power.1

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

Although the decipherment of hieroglyphics was several years in the

future, European interest in a writing system that was thought to en-
code philosophical and theological secrets was intense,2 and at least two
ancient sources, Ammianus Marcellinus and Horapollo, in which the
meaning of the bee hieroglyphic was explained, were widely consulted
by Jomard and others. Napoleon’s adaptation via Jomard followed
Ammianus Marcellinus (17.4.11), for whom “bee” illustrated the
larger principle that in hieroglyphic writing one character often stood
for whole words or concepts: Ammianus says that “through the figure
of a bee making honey [Egyptians] indicate a king, showing that for a
ruler the sting should be tempered with benevolence.”3 Napoleon could
have chosen the Egyptian royal device for its antiquity and for the
metaphysical cachet that Egyptian hieroglyphs held at the beginning of
the nineteenth century. But because the monarchic associations of the
bee would not have been apparent to all of Napoleon’s contemporaries,
a modern scholar suggests that he had a more subtle political motive
for the choice of the bee symbol and its elaboration in the frontispiece
to the Déscription de l’Égypte:

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

Napoleon’s ploy was successful. Today, consulting a standard encyclo-

pedia of French culture about the meaning of the bee device, we are

2. See Volkmann 1957.

3. “perque speciem apis mella conficientis, indicant regem, moderatori cum iucundi-
tate aculeos quoque innasci debere . . . ostendentes” (17.4.11). For a similar linking of
the king with the image of a bee, see Seneca De clementia 1.19.1 and Dio Chrysostom
4.62. The ancient writers were not consistent on the sex of bees. In his History of Ani-
mals, Aristotle, for example, records the theory that the bees had a queen (553a21–33),
but in a later passage describes the hive as led by a king (623b7–627b22).
4. Iversen 1993, 133 and pl. XXIII.
Introduction 3

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

Pope Urban VIII also entered this game of heraldic one-upmanship by

displaying bees on his arms accompanied with the Latin verses Gallis
mella dabunt, Hispanis spicula figent ([The bees] will provide honey for
the French, they will sting the Spanish). To which the Spaniards replied:
spicula si figent, emorientur apes (If they sting, the bees will die).8
These two historical anecdotes provide relatively transparent models
for the Greek receptions of Egypt that are set out in this book: Louis

5. Grand dictionnaire encyclopédique Larousse (1982) s.v. abeille. Vergil’s Georgics

and the figure of Aristaeus stand behind this interpretation. See below on Childéric, and
note 12.
6. “Rex non utitur aculo.” Volkmann 1957, 42; Iversen 1993, 167 n. 29.
7. The Hieroglyphica is usually attributed to Horapollo the Younger, who was a
member of a prominent Greco-Egyptian intellectual family of the fifth century c.e. See G.
Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind (Prince-
ton, 1986) 183–86; G. Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity (Ann Arbor, 1990)
55–61. Only the Greek version survives. The work contains a curious blend of accurate
information and allegorizing speculation characteristic of later European writing on the
subject.
Labn prbß basilAa peiuanion dhloPnteß, mAlissan zvgrafoPsi. kaB gbr manon tmn
gllvn zAvn basilAa Gxei, Q tb loipbn tpn melissmn Epetai plpuoß, kaub kaB oC gn-
urvpoi peAuontai basileM¢ aDnAttontai dB Dk tpß toP mAlitoß <xrhstathß kaB> Dk toß
toM kAntroy toM zAoy dynamevß <tbn basilAa> xrhstbn eRnai ema kaB eGtonon prbß
<dikaiathta> kaB dioAkhsin (1.62 Sbordone). Neither Ammianus nor Horapollo is en-
tirely correct in his explanation of why the Egyptians used the bee to mean king. The bee
was chosen not because of its behavior but most likely because Lower Egypt or the Delta
region was particularly rich in apiculture. The bee seems initially to have been a regional
designation for Lower Egypt and, in combination with a reed plant that designated Upper
Egypt, served in the royal titulature to indicate that the pharaoh was king of a unified
Upper and Lower Egypt. See Schneider 1993, 175–81.
8. Grand dictionnaire universal du XIXe siècle (1990) s.v. abeille.
4 Introduction

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-

9. Baltrušaitis 1985, 89–94. The treasure was stolen in 1831.

10. Baltrušaitis 1985, 93.
11. Antigonus of Carystus Paradoxa 19 (23) for evidence of the bougonia in Egypt;
see also Vergil Georgics 4.281–314; Varro De re rustica 2.5.5; Ovid Metamorphoses
15.364–67. See A. B. Cook, “Bees in Greek Mythology,” JHS 15 (1895) 19, on Childéric’s
bees.
12. Baltrušaitis 1985, 91–92 (with illustration). The claim is unlikely to be histori-
cally accurate, but rather an attempt to connect early local kings with the later French
monarchy. I am indebted to my colleague Philippe Buc for this observation.
Introduction 5

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.”

Napoleon’s bees provide a cautionary tale for our standard approach to

Alexandrian poetry. We strive to acquaint ourselves with as much as
possible of the ancient world in order to recreate a reception that we
hope is similar to that of an ancient reader. Inevitably we fall short—we
always know too little—and inevitably we differ, since each of us, like
each ancient reader, experiences a poem or a play uniquely. Within that
unique experience, however, there must be certain shared parameters or
overlapping areas of understanding that allow us to agree about the
meaning of texts. But what happens when elements relevant to our un-

13. So Larousse (1982); see above, note 5.

6 Introduction

derstanding of a text or historical circumstance are absent? Texts may

still be legible, but some dimension will be lost. Historically in our re-
ception of Alexandrian poetry we have read only through the filter of
ancient Greek literature, occasionally adjusted by recourse to a subse-
quent Latin reading. What we unconsciously exclude from our ap-
proach is the possibility that the writers of Alexandria might have been
fascinated by the Egyptian culture that surrounded them; that they, like
Napoleon, might have deliberately incorporated Egyptian motifs and
allusions into their own work. If they were to do so in a random or ca-
sual way, the noting of such occasions would perhaps be interesting,
but of minimal importance for an adequate understanding of the po-
etry. My claim is broader. I argue in this book that the Alexandrians
systematically incorporated Egyptian ideas and narrative motifs in a set
of poems constructed to explore the dimensions of Ptolemaic kingship.
Our inability to see an Egyptian allusion in their works results not
from their failure to make such allusions, but from our own lack of fa-
miliarity with their frames of reference. To a modern classical scholar
educated in the northern European tradition of Germany or England,
information about Egypt contained within Greek writing is irrelevant
to the study of Greek culture and Greek literature proper and has either
been dismissed or categorized as generically oriental. Rarely is it stud-
ied in terms of its own, non-Greek, origins. But this is not to say that
such material did not exist or that it would not have formed part of the
conceptual world of Greeks themselves, particularly those Greeks who
had immigrated to Egypt. From Herodotus, for example, it is obvious
that Greeks living in Egypt were familiar with local versions of Egypt-
ian stories, and to imagine that the Alexandrian poets and their edu-
cated audience were not equally so informed is illogical if we simulta-
neously insist upon their acquaintance with every detail of a Greek
world that is both geographically and temporally remote. It is my con-
tention in what follows that Egypt and Egyptian motifs enter the poems
on various levels, as casual allusions, linguistic play, and, more perva-
sively, as subtexts that underlie or complement the Greek. I wish to ex-
plore the possibilty that the Alexandrians deliberately composed poems
to match Egyptian narratives in their general contours by highlighting
certain details, often marginal in the Greek stories, but significant in the
Egyptian, and that their Alexandrian audience would have been able to
appreciate this aspect of their poetry.
It is possible to object to my thesis on the grounds that in their work
these poets only rarely refer to Egypt, that their poems are entirely ex-
Introduction 7

plicable within Greek terms, and, therefore, to seek an Egyptian expla-

nation for events or details is unnecessary or overly imaginative.14 But
what does explicable in Greek terms really mean? Often it means no
more than pointing to a string of verbal allusions to Homer or Hesiod
without providing an integrated account of the dynamics of the text as
a whole; hence a poetics is sometimes reduced to arbitrariness or, on oc-
casion, banality. Even within a wholly Greek framework, much in these
poets remains obscure. For example, to whom (if anyone) does Calli-
machus refer with his attack on the Telchines? Critics have assumed a
priori that the obscurity of the reference is a result of lost context that
would have been clear to his contemporaries, though perhaps not to
subsequent Roman readers. Within the parameters of Greek poetry we
are prepared to accept the limits of our knowledge. Why then should it
be so difficult to imagine that we might also be lacking an Egyptian
frame of reference? As contemporary scholars surely we have moved
beyond the Hellenocentrism of our own scholarly past. Rather, it is the
profound lack of familiarity with Egyptian culture that impedes us.
This is not meant to deny that the Alexandrians were writing for
Greeks, not Egyptians. These poets and their audience were operating
within the mimetic framework of Greek generic structures, and al-
though they experimented with the boundaries of the inherited genres,
they could not have abandoned them even if they had wished to and
still have expected to be understood by a Greek audience. However, the
fact that they do not specifically name Egypt when, as I will argue, they
are selecting a Greek myth that in its contours resembles an Egyptian
story is both a function of their own reception of Egypt from previous
Greek writings and a means of exerting a measure of control over an
alien space. Previous cultural assimilation meant that for an Alexan-
drian Greek Horus was Apollo (and vice versa), just as Osiris was
Dionysus and Isis was Demeter. Divinities that in other parts of the
Mediterranean had distinct and separable mythologies, in Egypt were

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

15. For discussion of the AR, see below, chapter 2.

16. SH fr. 254.4 (8): DanaoP gpß dpb boygenAoß. See the editors’ remarks ad loc.
Introduction 9

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

17. SH fr. 254.16 (30): eDdyPai falibn taPron DhlemAsai.

18. Selden (1998, 353) in discussing the Lock of Berenice puts it as follows: “The
Hellenic reader, compelled to make sense of the diverse data of the poem yet unable to fall
back on a figurative negation, finds himself drawn more and more into an Egyptian order
of ideas. To comprehend the piece in full, he can no longer remain securely within the
horizons of Hellenic culture, but must make the transposition from one discursive system
to the other.”
10 Introduction

visual and dramatic component.19 But just as generic traditions within

which an individual text was produced function as background white
noise that inevitably leaves traces within that text, so too does the con-
temporary environment—the physical environment as well as the polit-
ical and social milieu—in which that text is produced. Despite the con-
structed literariness of the Alexandrians, their often one-to-one
specificity of allusion that simulates annotation or commentary on po-
etic predecessors, these poets devote considerable textual energy to the
object, and they display a sense of the pictorial in their poetic formula-
tion that seems to set them apart from their predecessors.20 Given their
stated interests in cult formation, statutes of the gods, and attendant ac-
tivities, the expectation that visual uniqueness of Egyptian artistic rep-
resentation would also have come to their notice is not unwarranted.
There is enough specific information in Callimachus, for example, to
justify this assumption: the dedicatory epigram to Sarapis (37 Pf. = AP
13.7); another to Isis, identified as the daughter of Inachus ( = Io; 57 Pf.
= AP 6.150); and, most interestingly, a one-line fragment quoted in
Strabo (17.1.28 = fr. 715 Pf.) that mentions “the dromos of Anubis.”
Though the context of Callimachus’s poem is missing, the fact that he
knows the temple at all confirms the familiarity with Egyptian monu-
ments that I am presupposing.21
Further, it is my assumption that coordinates of similarity or differ-
ence may operate one way within an inherited textual tradition in one
political and social environment, but quite differently in another set-
ting. Thus it is important to consider what lies behind an accretion of
intertexts: often it is the topos or literary cliché that is our best source
of information about commonly held ideas; however, these common-
places may be thrown into relief or take on new meanings when relo-
cated in a cross-cultural milieu. For example, does the familiar expres-
sion of doubt about how to hymn the god operate in the same way in
the world of Zeus Ammon as it does in fifth-century Athens?22 As a fur-
ther strategy of reading, a marked difference from predecessors within
a traditional Greek milieu requires some account in narrative terms

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

within a text. Rather than dismissing as playful or subversive what has

to critics often seemed strange or eccentric, it is worthwhile to read
these moments with some care. Within a different cultural formation
(namely Egypt) it is now similarity that becomes significant. However,
incidents, events, or narratives from two different cultures that appear
to be structurally similar may be in fact folkloric; they may possess a
pancultural kinship that results from the fundamental desire to organ-
ize human experience, and not necessarily be indicative of a specific se-
lection of circumstances that invites the reader to think of Egypt.23 A
unique set of circumstances in the Greek tradition that yields a narra-
tive logic that operates more fundamentally in Egyptian culture than
Greek then is what is significant. An example: within Greek poetry the
rise of an island from the watery void at the moment of sunrise is an
event without obvious parallel or mythological baggage. Yet in Egypt-
ian thought it is heavily freighted: emerging islands and sunrise signal
the moment of creation—new beginnings—as well as the ascension of
the new pharaoh to the throne. Yet one incident of (apparently) marked
similarity between the two cultural logics hardly constitutes proof. This
is not the end of the argument, but the beginning. It is rather the sum of
such elements throughout the course of a poem, elements that cannot
be accounted for in more straightforward ways, through recourse to
Greek models, by folk tradition, or even sheer chance. Even at this
point, however, unless the two cultural logics add up to more than the
sum of their parts, unless an Egyptian order of ideas allows a more
complete comprehension and a more consistent reading, the argument
cannot be persuasive.
Because the purpose of this book is not merely to demonstrate the
presence of allusions to Egyptian myth or to excavate an Egyptian stra-
tum in Alexandrian poetry, I focus on Egyptian material within selected
poems that not only locates them within but defines the parameters of a
wider dialogue about kingship. For the Ptolemaic court to rule effec-
tively it could not construct itself entirely in the mode of a traditional
Greek kingship, but as a Macedonian Greek line occupying and ruling
over pharaonic Egypt it strove necessarily to position itself in both cul-
tures.24 The poets are similarly situated: Callimachus and Apollonius

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

are natives of North Africa, of Cyrene and Alexandria respectively, and

a third, Theocritus, was probably resident in Alexandria for some
years. Most scholars date the earliest poems of Callimachus and The-
ocritus to the beginning of Philadelphus’s reign, around 284 b.c.e., or
within a generation of the foundation of the city. Callimachus and
Apollonius, certainly, were men with a stake in the establishment and
were prominent scholars in the newly created Museum. It is my con-
tention that far from being ivory-towered intellectuals indulging in ob-
scurantist aesthetics as a reaction to or withdrawal from unsympathetic
imperial practices, these poets were the image makers for the Ptolemaic
court.25 Moreover, their poems were political in the broadest sense,
serving neither to support nor to subvert the status quo, but to open up
a space in which social and political values could be imaginatively
recreated, examined, and critiqued. Within this space these three poets
experiment by selectively adapting previous Greek mythological and
historical models to articulate a novel kind of kingship, and it is within
this context that their generic experiments should be understood. The
inherited genres of Greek poetry came encrusted with meanings not al-
ways applicable or relevant to the new world of the Ptolemies. Refash-
ioning these past thought worlds to signify in the present was central to
their role in court—and it is essential to remember that this court was
in Egypt.

At the time that Ptolemy I assumed control of Egypt, he would have

been dependent upon an Egyptian administrative and scribal hierarchy
firmly entrenched in native priesthoods. The temples they controlled,
thanks to a century of a weakened central government, owned as much
as a third of the arable land and supported an elaborate ideology of
kingship to enhance the status not only of a particular ruler but their
own as well. Egyptian kingship, in marked contrast to Greek, was a
complex theocracy in which the king symbolically linked the human
and divine spheres and regularly appeared in the company of the native
gods in ceremony to guarantee the continued well-being of Egypt. To
neglect the rituals, to eliminate or ignore the priesthoods, to undermine
native belief, would have been to court social and economic fragmenta-
tion, since the smooth operation of the country depended on these na-
tive administrative and priestly elites continuing to acquiesce in the ap-

25. Cameron 1995, 1–70.

Introduction 13

paratus of state. Hence the new rulers needed to accommodate them-

selves to the native ceremonials of kingship, while (presumably) resist-
ing the temptation of complete assimilation. This was not an abstract
problem. Soter began his rule in Memphis, the religious center of old
Egypt, and only moved to Alexandria some years after taking power.26
The received wisdom that Alexandria was never conceived as part of
Egypt proper but was always, in the words of Tacitus, considered “ad
Aegyptum” is not correct. This was a Roman not a Ptolemaic formula-
tion.27 The Egyptians themselves called the city Rhacotis. The country
was initially administered in Demotic Egyptian, and only when a suit-
able administrative cadre of bilingual native Egyptians had been cre-
ated did the transformation into a fully Greek bureaucracy take place,
and this could not have happened much before the reign of Ptolemy II.28
Inscriptions from the early part of Ptolemaic rule, like the Satrap decree
(311 b.c.e.), were written only in hieroglyphics—in contrast to the later
bi-or trilingual decrees, like the Rosetta stone (196 b.c.e.).29 The former
stele provides valuable insight into Ptolemaic practice vis-à-vis native
protocols. It records that Soter, in the name of the “pharaoh” Alexan-
der IV, restored the Egyptian temples to their former state and reversed
the depredations of the previous invaders, the Persians. This statement
inserts Soter into pharaonic tradition, and similar claims made by sub-
sequent Ptolemies testify to an active collaboration with their Egyptian
priesthoods in constructing a civic ideology that positioned them as
continuers of the true pharaonic practice, in contrast to their predeces-
sors, the Persians, whom they portray as little more than thieves.30 It is
significant that Soter began to so position himself in Egyptian ideology
even before he assumed the role of king to a Greek population.31 Simi-

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

and Soter, following him, were aiming to create a monarchy in which

the traditional barriers between Greek and non-Greek might be soft-
ened or even eliminated. Eratosthenes, for example, is said to have
praised Alexander for ignoring the advice of those who counseled him
to treat Greeks alone as friends, but barbarians as enemies, rather pre-
ferring to accept men on the basis of their good or bad qualities (Strabo
1.4.9).39
An obvious example of Soter’s attempt to bridge the gap between
Egyptian and Greek is the introduction of the cult of Sarapis. The Apis
bull was mummified and worshipped in death as Osiris-Apis, or Oso-
rapis by Egyptians. The Ptolemies humanized this cult by introducing
statues to represent the god in human form, but they did not uncouple it
from the original animal worship of the Egyptian cult. The choice of Os-
orapis was not random: for the Greeks, Osiris was the equivalent of
Dionysus, and the sculptures that lined the dromos of the Memphite
Sarapeum offer a clear-cut example of the use of dual Greek and Egypt-
ian symbolism: they included two peacocks, each ridden by a young
Dionysus as well as a falcon with the head of a bearded man and a
sphinx.40 Certainly, the temple to Sarapis erected in Alexandria, while hu-
manizing the form of the god, also included Egyptian architectural ele-
ments as well as freestanding pieces like obelisks, sphinxes, and cult stat-
ues executed in the Egyptian style and inscribed in hieroglyphics. Here,
too, the thoroughly Egyptian deity, Isis, was worshipped as Sarapis’s con-
sort,41 and, by the fourth Ptolemy, her son, Horus-the-Child, whom the
Greeks called Harpocrates, joined them in cult.42 From inscriptions and
archaeological evidence, it is clear that the royal family associated them-
selves with the Egyptian gods in cult from a very early period.43 The
Mendes stele of 264, for example, commemorates the visit of Ptolemy II

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

to the shrine of the newly enthroned ram of Mendes (Banebdjed) to ven-

erate the god and oversee the progress of work on his temples.44
Scholarly consensus holds that in the later part of his reign, Soter,
followed by Philadelphus and Euergetes, retreated from a position that
tended to engage with or include elements of both Egyptian and Greek
cultures to one of isolationism and of relative cultural purity for
Greeks.45 It is wise to be cautious here, since a now fully bilingual bu-
reaucracy would serve to mask the degree of participation by assimi-
lated Egyptians. However, even if the early Ptolemies did retreat from
attempts at cultural integration, their rule continued to be dual—
basileus to the Greek population, pharaoh to the Egyptian. And even if
the necessary pharaonic practices were performed by royal surrogates
at the periphery of an Alexandrian Greek’s consciousness, the dynamic
interplay of the two competing styles of kingship could not have been
ignored, especially in light of the fact that over time the Egyptianization
of the Ptolemies certainly continued. Brother-sister marriage, after all,
appears as early as Philadelphus, and these early monarchs carried on
major building programs of Egyptian monuments, many of which were
erected in Alexandria itself, and within which certain deities, particu-
larly Horus and Isis, and their attendant iconographies were especially
favored.46 Over time, the Greek population of both Alexandria and the
rest of Egypt grew more assimiliated, coming to resemble the Hel-
lenomemphites of an earlier period, with frequent intermarriage, dual
Greek-Egyptian names, and burial practices that included mummifica-
tion and use of the distinctively Egyptian iconography. In this environ-
ment, total assimilation to or complete rejection of Egypt would have
been extreme responses. For most of Mediterranean Greek heritage
who lived in Ptolemaic Alexandria daily accommodation in some form
to the reality of Egypt—climate, monuments, religious practices, lan-
guage and writing systems, court ceremonies—was inevitable. It is not
within the context of a Greek culture, separate from and ignorant of
Egyptian culture, that Alexandrian poetry should be positioned, but as
part of the cultural dynamic in which these two distinct and at times di-
ametrically opposed modes of cultural behavior were bound to interact
and out of which a successful political style needed to evolve.

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

temporary world of “real” political and philosophical debate as evi-

denced in Hecataeus of Abdera. The approachs of these two chapters
differ: in the first I provide a rather long and detailed reading of the
Zeus hymn to demonstrate as clearly as possible the ways in which the
reader is led from an ostensibly Greek mythological milieu into a con-
flated Greco-Egyptian universe that converges in the person of the
human king, Ptolemy. This is followed by a shorter, thematic discussion
of the Delos hymn. Theocritus’s two poems are read in more general
terms, against Callimachus and against each other. In both of these
chapters I try to extend the allusive matrix of Greek material that
would have been available to an Alexandrian audience beyond the
canonical texts of Greek poetry. Because of its length the treatment of
Apollonius’s epic is commensurately different. I first situate the poem in
its Ptolemaic context on the basis of Greek material, then I adapt a
model from postcolonial discourse to establish the narrative framework
for a series of Egyptian themes. The final section of the chapter reads
Apollonius’s fourth book as a journey though the Egyptian under-
world. In the last chapter I contextualize the various readings of the
earlier chapters in terms of the political and social redefinition of Egypt
as “Two Lands,” no longer the lands of Upper and Lower Egypt, but of
Greek and Egyptian culture, locating aetiology as a necessary habit of
the poetic mind in redefining Egypt as Greek.
Fundamentally, this book is about reading—my own, that of other
scholars, and that of ancient poets themselves, though not necessarily in
that order. As a scholar trained within the western classical tradition I
bring to my reading of Alexandrian poetry the same familiarity with the
standard works of archaic and classical Greece that critics of this mate-
rial normally possess. But to my act of reading in this book I bring a
specific type of knowledge that classical critics only rarely have access
to—that of the Egyptian literary and cultural environment contempo-
rary with the poets whom I am discussing. To know these things is to
read differently—to see double. Inevitably as I read this poetry, I read it
through dual lenses—Greek and Egyptian.47 I cannot do otherwise; my
particular construction of the ancient world will not allow it. Initially
my way of reading will seem alien to readers familar with only Greek
literature; therefore, I conceive it my task to present my audience with

47. My perspective is not entirely solipsistic: R. Merkelbach, L. Koenen, P. Bing, and

most recently (and extensively) D. Selden have all read Alexandrian poetry through dual
lenses, and in what follows I am much indebted to their earlier observations.
Introduction 19

the kind of material that allows them to repeat my experience as a

reader, and to come closer to what I believe would have been the expe-
rience of the original audiences of these poets. The ultimate goal is to
remove Alexandrian poetry from the ivory tower and locate it more
centrally in the social and political life of the city.
chapter 1

Conceptualizing Egypt

Greek immigration to Ptolemaic Egypt entailed not only physical relo-

cation to a foreign landscape, but encounter with a culture produced by
alien habits of mind. However, immigration was preceded by a process
of domestication of this alien world that had begun at least as early as
the sixth century b.c.e.,1 with Greek writers alternately demonizing or
romanticizing Egypt and its cultural institutions, inventorying, and fi-
nally appropriating them. Therefore, before turning to a consideration
of what the poets of Alexandria could have known about purely Egypt-
ian systems of thought in the third century b.c.e., we need to take cog-
nizance not only of the contents of previous Greek writings on Egypt
but also of the intellectual Tendenz of earlier writers like Herodotus
who interpret or refract Egyptian culture for Greeks, because much that
is central to this study is already visible in earlier Greek writers, though
considerably altered in form. The significance of this earlier material
should not be underestimated. For Greek scholars the identification of
Apollo with Egyptian Horus is of no particular importance in under-
standing the role of Apollo in Greek religion during the archaic and
classical periods, nor is it relevant for Egyptologists in understanding
the role of Horus in Egyptian cult. But for Greeks newly imported into

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.

greek views of egypt

Greeks had a long connection with Egypt from at least the Bronze Age,
though it was the continuous contact with the Delta region of Lower
Egypt from the archaic period that conditioned Greek writing on the
subject, in part because the long-term stability of the Saite government
during this period will have provided a more favorable climate for eco-
nomic and political exchange as well as for tourists such as Hecataeus
of Miletus and Herodotus.4 Certainly, there is ample evidence for
Egyptian influence on archaic Greek art, from the kouros to vase paint-
ing.5 Greek mercenaries served in Psammetichus I’s armies in the sev-
enth century b.c.e., and, even earlier, a trading colony that housed a
population of Greek merchants was founded at Naucratis.6 Greeks had
settled in other parts of Egypt as well, and our information about these

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

pre-Ptolemaic populations continues to grow. For example, in 575

b.c.e. a petition written in Demotic mentions a local official named
Ariston, who prima facie would have been bilingual. Also, a typically
Egyptian form of dedicatory art, the block statue, which was found in
Priene in Turkey, commemorates one Pedon, the son of Amphinoos,
who claims to have served Psammetichus I.7 These circumstances sug-
gest a certain amount of mobility among the military and administra-
tive classes that would have created opportunities for cross-cultural ex-
change. In Egypt itself, from at least the fifth century the so-called
Hellenomemphites were identifiable as an assimilated Greek population
resident in Memphis.8 Herodotus explicitly mentions at least one group
of Greco-Egyptians, the Chemmitae of Upper Egypt.9 Several other re-
gions like Buto in the Delta must have had similarly intermixed popula-
tions.10 A visual example of assimilation is provided by the tomb of Sia-
mun from the Siwah oasis dating from the late Saite period. A painting
within the tomb features a seated man in an Egyptian pose and in
Egyptian costume, but with a Greek hairstyle and beard. Facing him is
a child wearing a chlamys and looking no different from any Attic rep-
resentation of a Greek boy.11 Whether or not Greeks in Egypt assimi-
lated, the population in some areas even in Herodotus’s day was large
enough to constitute a visible economic group. Herodotus remarks, for
example, that Egyptians did not eat the heads of sacrificial animals, but
when they could, sold them to the local Greek traders (2.39.1–2).
Sustained expressions of interest in Egypt culture began to appear in
Greek literature as early as the Ionian logographer Hecataeus of Mile-
tus, an interest that is familiar to us in the fifth century from
Herodotus’s Histories and probably reached its peak in the fourth with
writers like Eudoxus of Cnidus (who actually lived among Egyptian
priests), Plato, and Isocrates. Two general trends shape their writings—

7. On the former, see El Hussein Omar M. Zaghloul, Frühdemotische Urkunden aus

Hermupolis, Bulletin of the Center for Papyrological Studies 2 (Cairo, 1985) 23–31. On
the latter, see O. Masson and J. Yoyotte, “Une inscription ionienne mentionnant Psam-
métique Ier,” Epigraphica Anatolica 11 (1988) 171–79. I am indebted to Stanley Burstein
for these references.
8. Thompson 1988, 83–84, 95–97; Borgeaud and Volokhine 2000, 65–69.
9. There are two Egyptian towns known to the Greeks as Chemmis, both of which I
discuss in this chapter. One is this city of Achmim in Upper Egypt (Herodotus 2.91); the
other is in the Delta (Herodotus 2.156).
10. See, for example, D. Redford, “Notes on the History of Ancient Buto,” Bulletin
of the Egyptological Seminar 5 (1983) 67–101; Lloyd 1976, 114–20.
11. A. Fakhry, The Egyptian Deserts: Siwa Oasis (Cairo, 1944) 132–39; Braun 1982,
48, with illustration; and Koenen 1983, 144–45.
24 Conceptualizing Egypt

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-

15. Vasunia 2001, 33–58.

16. 2.41.2: “For the image of Isis is female with cow’s horns, as indeed the Greeks
represent Io (kata per ·Ellhne% tbn \IoPn grafoysi.” According to the Suda, Calli-
machus wrote a poem called The Arrival of Io, and in Epigrammata 57.1 Pf. ( = AP
6.150) he identifies Isis as the daughter of Inachus ( = Io).
17. Fr. 128 M-W. The drought resulted from an earlier contretemps between Hera
and Poseidon. When Inachus, the son of Ocean and Tethys, the earliest king of Argos and
its eponymous river, decided in favor of Hera as the local deity, Poseidon retaliated by
drying up the rivers in the region (Apollodorus 2.1.4). A common epithet of Argos seems
to have been “thirsty,” presumably an allusion to this story; cf. Davies, EGF Thebais, fr.
1 = Kinkel fr. 1. Herodotus (2.171) increases Greek indebtedness to this line by claiming
that it was the Danaids who brought the Eleusinian mysteries from Egypt.
26 Conceptualizing Egypt

shipped as a god in Chemmis (ancient Achmim) in Upper Egypt. Details

in Herodotus suggest that the local Greek population, his source for the
information, identified Perseus with Horus because of his winged san-
dals,18 but they also cited his lineage as the reason for his importance
there. The locals say that
Danaus and Lyncaeus, who were Chemmites, sailed away to Greece. . . .
[Subsequently, Perseus] came to Egypt . . . in order to bring the Gorgon
head from Libya, and they say he came among them and acknowledged
all his kinsmen . . . and he knew the name of Chemmis, having learned it
from his mother. He arrived in Egypt, and he instructed them to celebrate
games in his honor. (2.91.5–6)

The identification of Perseus with Horus may have depended on more

than a sandal—Zeus’s impregnation of Danae by miraculous means,
when she was locked within her chamber, as well as his impregnation of
Io by a touch, are conceptual doublets, and virtually identical to the
myth of divine insemination that leads to the birth of the pharaoh.
Given the similarities, upon hearing about the Egyptian theogamy
Greeks could easily have mistaken it for or assimilated it to their own
stories about Io or Danae. This anecdote also reveals the dynamics of
cultural interaction that seem to have taken place already by the fifth
century. The Chemmitae celebrate games, which are presumably a
Greek cultural practice, but the games are held in honor of what must
be an Egyptian god.19 Greeks have Hellenized this god by assimilating
him on the basis of iconography and previous association with Egypt to
Perseus, a heroic figure from their own mythic past.
Significantly, the Danaid legend as early as Aeschylus is bound up
with questions of kingship. The arrogant and tyrannical behavior of the
sons of Aegyptus is consistently opposed to the democratic monarchy
of Pelasgus, who is, not coincidentally, an autochthonous king of
Argos.20 This association of Egypt with tyranny begins with the figure
of Busiris, who serves as a foil for Heracles in Greek art from at least
the sixth century. Busiris, like Thoas in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris,

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

him a nomothete, or lawgiver, and connects his accomplishments with

those of Solon in Athens or Lycurgus in Sparta. Busiris, we are told,
moved his Egyptians out of the realm of nature and into culture by giv-
ing them laws, religious institutions, and an exemplary political sys-
tem.25 A similar valuation of Egyptian political systems was also a com-
ponent of Plato’s writing. When discussing the proper musical
education in the Laws (656c–657b), the Athenian stranger praises the
Egyptians as a society that had, with respect to its musical arts, deter-
mined what constituted the “natural correctness” (657b) and had guar-
anteed its unity and stability through law in order to prevent degener-
ating innovation. Plato’s discussion of Egyptian canonicity in the Laws
was not restricted to music in its application. He goes on to claim that
“democracy” in musical arts is but a precursor to “refusal to be subject
to rulers,” “to be submissive to parents and elders,” and finally to “dis-
regard of the city’s laws” (700a–701b). This same argument occurs at
Republic 424b2–c6 in a slightly altered form. There Socrates says:

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.

The solution that Socrates proposes to guarantee order and stability is

of course a rigid class system and the philosopher-king, whose own
proper understanding of the nature of reality both assures his own
moral behavior and makes him the fittest to govern. This same class
system appears again in the Timaeus, where it is now that of Egyptian
Sais. While the connection between Egypt and kingship is admittedly
less direct in Plato than in Isocrates’ Busiris, both would seem to be
writing against an earlier identification of Egyptian political forms with
tyranny and barbarism and investing them with positive qualities. A re-
mark of Isocrates suggests that he and Plato may not be alone in doing
so—at Busiris 17–18 he comments: “With respect to political institu-
tions in general, the Egyptians have been so successful that philosophers
who undertake to discuss such topics and who are highly esteemed pre-

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

fer the Egyptian form of government.”26 In other words, Egyptian polit-

ical forms appear to have become a literary and philosophical topos in
the fifth and fourth centuries, which was capable of being enlisted on ei-
ther side in the debate about democratic political institutions.27
The writings of Eudoxus of Cnidus are mostly lost to us, so his posi-
tion and influence in the Greek construction of Egypt is not entirely
clear, though it was likely to have been substantial.28 From his brief bi-
ography Diogenes Laertius gives us a glimpse of the circumstances in
which philosophy, kingship, and Egypt tended to converge within the
Greek imagination, if not in reality (8.86–91). Eudoxus was said to
have been a geometer, astronomer, doctor, and legislator. He may have
been a pupil of Plato, or connected at least tangentially with the Acad-
emy. He was said to have traveled to Egypt accompanied by the doctor
Chrysippus and armed with letters of introduction from Agesilaus, the
Spartan king, to Nectanebo, the last native pharaoh of Egypt. Whether
or not the story was literally true, the details convey a world in which
intellectual exchange between Greece and Egypt was not only possible,
but facilitated by the ruling classes themselves. Eudoxus’s particular in-
terests—geometry, astronomy, and medicine—are subjects in which the
Egyptians supposedly excelled, hence they serve both as a motive for
the journey, and subsequently as a confirmation of his learning, after it
had been suitably enhanced by an Egyptian sojourn.29 The second book
of Eudoxus’s geographical work, the Periodos Ges, was entirely de-
voted to Egypt, and from its fragments it seems that he reversed
Herodotus’s chronological priority of Egypt over Greece. Further, he
seems to have been the first to treat Egyptian priests as the repository of

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

philosophical and religious wisdom instead of merely sources for the

historical data that they are in Herodotus.30 It is clear from the way in
which Plutarch cites him, for example, that he recounted a version of
the myth of Osiris, Isis, and Horus but framed it in terms of Greek nat-
ural philosophy.31 Plato may have taken his cue from Eudoxus in his
own location of wisdom within the Saite priesthood. In addition to his
other accomplishments, Diogenes Laertius claims that Eudoxus became
famous as a legislator throughout Greece, writing on the divine, the
cosmos, and heavenly phenomena. Diogenes even provides some evi-
dence that Eudoxus knew Egyptian:
Eratosthenes . . . says that he [Eudoxus] composed (synuePnai) the “Dia-
logues of the Dogs” (Kynpn dialogoi); others say that Egyptians wrote
them in their own language and that he translated and published them
for the Greeks (meuermhneAsanta DkdoPnai toP% ·Ellhsi). (8.89)32

In other words, Eudoxus is represented as not having restricted his at-

tainment of alien wisdom to the natural sciences, but to have then dis-
seminated what he learned from the priests in the form of laws for
Greeks. Again, whatever evaluation we choose to make of the accuracy
of this biography, its significance is the trajectory of Eudoxus’s career as
an instrument for the translation of Egyptian wisdom and knowledge
into Greek political realities.
This particular cluster—theogonic or cosmogonic speculation com-
bined with an interest in human conduct—marks virtually all Greek
philosophical inquiry from Democritus to Aristotle. Nor is this inquiry
confined to the theoretical. Isocrates, Plato, and Aristotle were all ac-
tively involved in offering advice—usually in the form of philosophical
education—to real kings.33 Since in the fourth century Plato and Aris-
totle were scarcely exempt from intruding their ideas into contempo-
rary politics, it should hardly be surprising to find subsequent practi-
tioners of the philosophical arts attempting to propose models for
Alexander’s successors. After Alexander, philosophers turned even

30. Burstein 1996, 594.

31. Frr. 290–97 F. Lasserre.
32. Fr. 374 Lasserre ( = Diogenes Laertius 8.89). Gwyn Griffiths (“A Translation
from the Egyptian by Eudoxus,” CQ 59 [1965] 75–78) thinks this may have been a text
of Egyptian wisdom literature. Lasserre (1966, 268–69) discusses the other suggestions
that have been made.
33. Isocrates’ Evagoras and Nicocles are instructions on how to govern for the young
king of Cypriot Salamis; Plato’s Letter 7 defends his participation in Sicilian politics; and
Aristotle was the tutor of Alexander.
32 Conceptualizing Egypt

greater attention to the question of kingship, and the court of every

epigonid housed occasional or permanent guests who had written or
were writing on the question. From one perspective court philosophers
could be considered royal propagandists, but from another their intel-
lectual activities were the logical extension of inquiries begun in earlier
periods, though with perhaps more immediate consequence. The Hel-
lenistic monarchies were not simply the old Macedonian monarchies in
new locations, they were in many respects new experiments in kingship,
combining as they did Greek cultural models with elements inherited
from their non-Greek resident populations. As the editors of a recent
study describe it,
every king and dynasty had to legitimate their claim to monarchy accord-
ing to specific local needs and traditions. Therefore, no single formula ex-
isted for a Hellenistic king. Basileus had different connotations in the
various parts of the ancient world and the clever ruler knew how to ac-
commodate himself to the specific traditions of his territory.34

Hellenistic monarchies must have provided fertile ground for uniting

theoretical and practical ideas about kingship, while the habits of na-
tive monarchies lent themselves as evidence to confirm Greek practice
or to justify innovation.

hecataeus, euhemerus, and

dionysius scytobrachion
Since Egyptian kingship had already figured in Greek theorizing about
forms of government, it should not be surprising to find writings on this
subject within Alexandria itself. For our purposes the most important
of them was by Hecataeus of Abdera, who worked within the Skeptic
intellectual tradition of Democritus.35 Hecataeus wrote an Aegyptiaca
at the court of Soter that was probably completed by 305 b.c.e.36 In

34. Bilde 1994, 11.

35. Hecataeus’s fragments are to be found in FGrH 264. Virtually all that remains
comes from book 1 of Diodorus Siculus, though Hecataeus is explicitly mentioned as a
source only once (1.47–49). As a consequence, there has been considerable debate about
how much of the book is directly or indirectly dependent on Hecataeus. In general, I am
following Jacoby and Murray. Spoerri (1959) takes a very skeptical position, which has
failed to convince the majority; while A. Burton in her commentary (1972) follows him,
she accepts more material than he as genuinely Hecataean.
36. For a discussion of the chronology see Jacoby, RE 7, 2750–69; Murray 1970;
Fraser 1972, 1: 496–505; and M. Stern and O. Murray, “Hecataeus of Abdera and
Theophrastus on Jews and Egyptians,” JEA 59 (1973) 159–68. For a general appraisal of
Conceptualizing Egypt 33

previous Greek historical writing Egypt was always marginal to the

central dynamic of world history, which figured the Greeks as succes-
sors to the Persians. Egypt was of interest for its antiquity and its mar-
vels, and for its conspicuous religiosity (as in Herodotus). In contrast,
Hecataeus made Egypt a central player in world history by claiming
that in fact civilization began in Egypt and was subsequently transmit-
ted to Greece and other parts of North Africa and the eastern Mediter-
ranean through the familiar instruments of military campaigns and col-
onization. The Danaid line is pressed into service here. We are told that
Egyptian Danaus “settled what is nearly the oldest of Greek cities,
Argos”; that Colchis was founded by Egyptian colonists (oDkAsai tinb%
crmhuAnta% par› Caytpn = Egyptians); and that Athenians are
colonists from Sais.37 Hecataeus also made Egypt the educator of
Greece by virtue of the sojourns of various Greek wise men.38
Thus, his writing falls within the earlier discourse on the nature of
polities that Plato and Isocrates engage in, though it differs in impor-
tant ways: while the basic patterns of thought are obviously Greek, his
work is Egyptocentric. The origins of culture and idealized kingship are
now presented as authentically Egyptian and connected in a causal
way: it is the behavior of the originary king and lawgiver, Osiris, who
acts as a model for earthly Egyptian kings, who are held accountable
for their unjust acts:
First of all, their kings led a life that was not at all like others who have
monarchic powers and the opportunities to do anything that they want
with impunity, but everything is regulated by rules of law, not only busi-
ness affairs, but also daily behavior and diet. With respect to their atten-
dants, for example, none of them was a purchased or a house-born slave,
but all were sons of the most distinguished priests, at least twenty years
old, best educated of their fellow countrymen, in order that the king, pro-
vided with body servants and attendants both day and night, might in-
dulge in no bad behavior, since no ruler proceeds very far in wickedness
if he does not have those who will pander to his desires. The hours of day
and night were arranged, in accordance with which it was absolutely
stipulated that the king do what was enjoined upon him, not what he de-

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

Moreover, the reason for this distinctive education was a dream in

which Hephaestus (that is, Egyptian Ptah) appeared to Sesoösis’s father
and prophesied that his son was destined to rule the world.44 In this,
Hecataeus seems to be adapting a peculiar feature of Egyptian kingship,
a prophecy about the greatness of a new king, which was packaged—
after the fact—as a dream at the time of conception, birth, or ascension
to the throne.45 Sesoösis lived up to his prenatal billing, going on to con-
quer more of the known world than anyone except Alexander,46 but re-
turned to rule wisely and well. On the domestic front, he granted
amnesty, enriched the temples, improved the irrigation system, and

42. See, for example, F. Pfister, “Studien zur Alexanderroman,” Würzburger

Jahrbücher für die Altertumswissenschaft 1 (1946) 56–58.
43. Diodorus Siculus 1.53.2–4 = FGrH 264 F25.53.2–4.
44. Diodorus Siculus 1.53.9 = FGrH 264 F25.53.9.
45. See below and chapter 3.
46. Strabo 15.686; Arrian Indica 5.4.
36 Conceptualizing Egypt

built great monuments. His foreign policy included building a navy,

strengthening Egypt’s defenses against her enemies, treating the con-
quered with respect, and settling his veterans on plots of land. In the
majority of these undertakings as well as in the peculiar mode of edu-
cation with a cohort of his peers, Sesoösis is following known Egyptian
practice, but a practice, at least in matters of policy, that both Alexan-
der and the Ptolemies continue, for example, granting amnesty, enrich-
ing the temples, and settling veterans.47
To so construct the past as an exemplum for the future was very
much in keeping with an Egyptian ideal of kingship in which each
king—insofar as he was a good king—acted not only to replicate but to
exceed the distinguished behavior and moral excellence of his pre-
cedessors. Thus, by employing the past as a model for current and fu-
ture rulers, Hecataeus may have been following an Egyptian habit of
mind rather than writing as an apologist for or in defense of kingship as
an institution.48 By drawing upon an historicized Egypt as a model for
ethical and moral behavior, Hecataeus elevates Egyptian culture to
equal (or superior) status with Greek and sets it up as a paradigm for
aspiring Greek kings. If, in this latter aspect, he hoped to influence the
Ptolemies, his paradigms ran counter to prevailing Greek notions of the
powers and behavioral limits of kings. As O. Murray points out,
the paradoxical fact that Egyptian kingship does not conform to the usual
Greek definition of basileAa as dnypeAuyno% drxa, is made to produce
an example for the Greek debate, whether the king is or should be above
or below the laws. Here is one point where Hecataeus may have intended
his description to be directly relevant to contemporary Ptolemaic Egypt.49

Hecataeus’s work cannot be dismissed as marginal: it had consid-

erable impact, not only on contemporary Greek philosophical writers
like Theophrastus and Crantor and other Hellenistic historians like
Berossus and Megasthenes, but within the circle of the Alexandrian
poets themselves.50 One writer who seems to have been especially influ-
enced by Hecataeus was his contemporary, Euhemerus of Messene, who
was famous (or infamous) for generating an alternative explanation to

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

51. West 1966, 13.

52. His fragments have most recently been collected by Winiarczyk (1991) with ex-
tensive bibliography.
53. For the relationship of Euhemerus to Hecataeus and Democritus, see Cole 1990,
153–63. See also Rusten’s discussion of this division in relationship to Prodicus (1982,
102–6).
38 Conceptualizing Egypt

culture hero—one might compare Minos of Plato’s Laws, Isocrates’

Busiris, or Hecataeus’s Osiris—who eventually returns to Crete, where
he dies. His tomb is located there according to Lactantius:
Then Jupiter [sc. Zeus], after he had gone around the earth five times and
had divided authority among all his friends and relatives and bequeathed
laws and customs to men and provided corn and devised many other
goods, having attained immortal glory and renown, left everlasting mon-
uments to his friends. When he was sunk in old age he departed from life
in Crete and went to the gods, and the Curetes, his sons, cared for him
and adorned him (in death) and his tomb is said to be in Crete in the
town of Cnossus . . . and on his tomb is inscribed in ancient Greek letters
ZAN KRONOU; that is in Latin: Jupiter, son of Saturn.54

It is difficult to gauge the tone of Euhemerus’s work,55 but the fact

that kingship and divinity coalesce in his writing suggests that allusion
to or appropriation of Euhemerus by subsequent writers like Calli-
machus could not have been value-neutral. Callimachus’s reference to
Euhemerus in the opening of the first Iambus,56 while ostensibly nega-
tive, does employ the Aristophanic language used of Socrates in the
Clouds, thus conveying an impression, at least implicitly, of a writer
both serious and ironic.57 Peter Fraser supposes that Euhemerus’s
rationalization of Olympian religion—reducing gods to culture heros,
who were apotheosized at death and worshipped in cult because of
their services to mankind—provided a rationale for the introduction of
ruler cult by the Ptolemies.58 Ruler cult, however, is a more complex
phenomenon, with antecedents in the treatment of Alexander on the
Greek side as well as clear models of divinized kingship in the newly
conquered countries like Babylon and Egypt, and Euhemerus is more
likely to have been rationalizing Greek myth in the context of such na-

54. 1.11.44–48 = fr. 69A Winiarczyk.

55. It may have been intended ironically or as a parody, or, more likely, it was a
utopian fantasy with serious philosophical intent; in the event, it seems often to have been
misunderstood. Strabo, for example, stigmatizes his work as “falsehoods,” placing him in
the same category as Pytheas of Marseilles and Antiphanes of Berga and remarking: “But
we pardon them just as we do conjurors, since falsehoods are their stock-in-trade” (2.3.5
= C 102).
56. Fr. 191 Pf. Tarn (1933, 165) thinks this refers not to Euhemerus himself but to his
statue. This is unlikely, however, given the context of the allusion within the Iambi; see
the discussion below, in chapter 2.
57. C. Meillier, Callimaque et son temps: Recherches sur la carrière et la condition
d’un écrivain à l’époque des primiers Lagides (Lille, 1979) 202–4.
58. 1972, 1: 294
Conceptualizing Egypt 39

tive traditions than to have been constructing new organizational tem-

plates for the Ptolemies. If his work was seriously conceived to address
the phenomenon of divinized kingship, its intent was more likely to
have been, as was Hecataeus’s work, to identify proper kingly behavior
and to construct models of beneficence to which current rulers should
aspire if they wished to achieve “divinity.”

An intriguing figure to add to this mix is the mythographer Dionysius

of Miletus (so-called Scytobrachion), whose work may now be located
with some security in the period between 270 and 220 b.c.e. An allu-
sion to the cult of the Theoi adelphoi, which must have been estab-
lished about 270, provides a terminus post quem, while the later termi-
nus depends upon a papyrus fragment of Dionysius’s work datable
from handwriting and from the context of the find to about 250–220
b.c.e.59 What, if any, relationship Dionysius had with the Alexandrian
court is moot,60 but it is clear that he was a rationalizing mythographer
in the tradition of Euhemerus, and his subject matter—Dionysus, the
Amazons (both of whom he located in Libya), and the Argonauts—in
topic and treatment bears close resemblance to that of the Hellenistic
prose writers we have been discussing. Whether these mythological
subjects fell into one, two, or three separate works is not important for
our purposes, but rather the way in which Dionysius conceptualizes his
material.61 Hence for convenience I have retained Rusten’s division into
an Argonautica and Libyan Stories.
In his Argonautica,62 Dionysius consistently rationalizes the inherited
tales of myth and magic. For example, the fire-breathing bulls (tauroi)
become Taurian guards (Tauroi), and the golden fleece is the skin of an

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

Dionysius’s treatment of the Amazons and Dionysus repeats the pat-

tern of world conquest and benefaction that we have already seen.
There are apparently three layers to his Libyan material as it is epito-
mized in Diodorus: the Amazons, whose home is located near Lake Tri-
tonis in Libya, first conquer the local regions and then move out to con-
quer the known world. Upon reaching Egypt, the Amazon queen signs
a treaty with Horus, the son of Isis, who is king of that land, before
pressing on to further conquests. The Amazons push as far north as the
Taurus region, where they are ultimately held in check, then return to
Libya after founding many cities (Diodorus Siculus 3.52–55). (Thus
their path of conquest is similar to that of Sesoösis.) When their power
wanes, that of their neighbors, the Atlantioi, begins (Diodorus Siculus
3.56–57 = F6 Rusten). These people are ruled by Uranus, who like his
counterpart in Euhemerus is both culture hero and lawgiver who re-
ceives divine honors after his death. Uranus and his wife, Titaea, pro-
duce the Titans, as well as two daughters, Rhea and Basileia. Basileia
subsequently marries one of her brothers, Hyperion, and bears two
children, Helios (sun) and Selene (moon). However, Hyperion and He-
lios are killed by their jealous kin, and in grief the brother-loving
(philadelphos) Selene commits suicide. Both—as their names indicate—
subsequently become celestial phenomena. Basileia in her grief lapses
into madness and wanders throughout the world; she is subsequently
worshipped as Cybele or the Great Mother. Rhea, meanwhile, has mar-
ried Ammon, a local Libyan king, who was less than faithful. In an in-
cident reiminiscent of Apollo’s encounter with the nymph Cyrene,66
Ammon was smitten by a beautiful girl named Amaltheia, had inter-
course with her, and fathered a marvelous child, Dionysus. Ammon hid
the child away from Rhea’s jealousy in Nysa, which is located on an is-
land in Lake Tritonis, and has him raised by Aristaeus, his daughter,
Nysa, and Athena, who was herself born by the waters of the river Tri-
ton. Rhea subsequently leaves Ammon to marry her brother, Cronus,
who had received the eastern parts of Libya as his kingdom on the
death of his father Uranus. Their brothers, the Titans, are stirred up by
Rhea to take vengeance on Dionysus. They attack Ammon, who flees to
Crete, then mount an attack against Nysa. At this point Dionysus gath-
ers an army that includes the Amazons, Sileni (who are a local people),
and Athena. He successfully fights off the Titans and then goes on, like

66. See, for example, Pindar Pythian 9.

42 Conceptualizing Egypt

Alexander, to conquer the known world, moving from Egypt to India.

Like the exemplary kings in Hecataeus, Dionysus is a model of
clemency: he educates Rhea and Cronus’s son, Zeus, and makes him
king of Egypt, “while still a youth,”67 then establishes the shrine at the
Siwah oasis in honor of his own father, Ammon. Dionysius’s rationaliz-
ing impulse thus served to link Ammon and Horus to traditional Greek
myths and Olympian genealogy. In doing so he incorporates North
Africa into the old mythology, where Dionysus and the Amazons now
find themselves at home in contrast to their former haunts of Thrace
and South Russia.
While the story is rather convoluted, its Euhemeristic flavor is obvi-
ous, and its ideals of kingship conform closely to Hecataean norms. But
Dionysius goes even further than these earlier writers. He refigures
members of the divine pantheon—Zeus, Dionysus—as originally
human and elevated to divinity because they functioned as culture he-
roes. For example, because Zeus punished the wicked and supported
the masses (eDergesAan dB tpn gxlvn) men “named him Zēn because
he was the reason for men living well” (dnomasupnai mBn Zpna dib tb
dokePn toP kalp% zpn aGtion genAsuai toP% dnurapoisin).68 Further, he
alters this earlier pattern by modeling the activities of his divinities
(Dionysus, Zeus) and mythological subjects (Amazons) rather transpar-
ently on the human figure of Alexander.69 Then, to address the double
tradition about Zeus he simply postulates two. One was the son of
Rhea and Cronus; the other, as in Euhemerus, was a Cretan king who
engenders the Curetes; it is this Zeus who is buried in the famous
“tomb of Zeus” on Crete. In addition, there are obvious points of con-
tact with Egyptian mythology. Rusten in his discussion of the Libyan
stories suggests that the names of Basileia’s children, Helios and Selene,
might be equated with Horus and Isis, who may “already have been
identified with the Ptolemaic royal pair in the third century B.C.”70 The
deaths of Hyperion and Helios as well as the conflict between Dionysus
and the Titans bear a close resemblance to the Egyptian succession
myth—to the sibling murder (Seth killing Osiris) and later the contest

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

between uncle and nephew (Seth-Horus) for legitimate succession.

Dionysus making the youthful Zeus king of Egypt parallels the succes-
sion of the young Horus from Osiris. The prominence of the two sis-
ters, Rhea and Basileia, recalls the closeness of Isis and her sister, Neph-
thys, both of whom rear the Horus child.
Finally, the overlap between material in Scytobrachion and two
major Alexandrian poets—Callimachus and Apollonius—cannot be
fortuitous. Both Scytobrachion and Apollonius treat the adventures of
the Argonauts, and much that appears in Scytobrachion is to be found
also in Apollonius’s fourth book, where his Argonauts traverse the
Libyan desert. While Callimachus probably produced his hymn before
Scytobrachion, the hiding and rearing of Dionysus on the island of
Nysa coincides is some detail with Callimachus’s Hymn to Zeus. All of
this indicates rather more intimacy between themes found in the poets
and prose writers than is usually supposed. It also suggests that atti-
tudes towards the traditional Olympic pantheon might differ consider-
ably from those of the archaic and classical periods. These connections
will be explored in subsequent chapters.

To summarize: so far we have been looking at the ways in which Greeks

from the fifth to the early third century b.c.e. chose to write about
Egypt, and have identified two trends—genealogical and political.
Egypt could be figured either as ancestor or descendant of Greece, and
usually the dynamic of this genealogy was connected to views about the
nature of kingship, with Egypt—as constructed by Greeks—serving as
either a good or a bad model. We have also seen how increasingly in the
fourth century the ideal king was characterized in the philosophers as a
lawgiver and bearer of civilization, a trend that culminated in early Hel-
lenistic writers like Hecataeus and Euhemerus who tended to blur or
collapse the distinction between divine and human behavior, since in
their writing they portray gods as well as human kings similarly acting
out this idealized kingship. While certainly these latter writers were
Greek and writing for Greek audiences, and their language of benefac-
tion (eDergesAa) is inherited from Greek tradition, the views of king-
ship they articulate consciously or otherwise come very close to the
pharaonic ideal as manifested in Egyptian writing and art. Moreover,
they often appear familiar with and even seem to appropriate elements
from Egyptian myth, which they recast as or assimilate to Greek. At
this point, therefore, I would like to reverse perspectives to sketch out
the fundamental elements of this pharaonic ideal and to consider the
44 Conceptualizing Egypt

ways in which they would have been available to Greeks within

Alexandria, either directly or filtered through earlier Greek writing.

what herodotus knew

What earlier Greek observers like Herodotus and Hecataeus of Abdera
reported seeing or hearing in Egypt can serve as a useful touchstone to
understand how Greeks in the third century would have been able to
absorb their new Egyptian environment. Herodotus was able to ob-
serve a variety of monuments firsthand, and, significantly for the
themes in this book, he saw a number of religious events. He was able
to get information from local priests, especially those in Heliopolis, and
to find informants among contemporary Greeks and non-Egyptians res-
ident in Egypt and elsewhere. As we will see, these four broad cate-
gories correspond to sources Greeks actually resident in the country
could have availed themselves of without necessarily having access to
Egyptian writing.71

1. Herodotus seems to have visited the Pyramids and the complex in

the Fayum, which he identifies as the Labyrinth, as well as a number of
temples. To judge from the graffiti, Egyptian monuments were popular
sights for Greeks—whether independent travelers like Herodotus or
soldiers stationed in the country—for several centuries before as well as
throughout the period of Ptolemaic rule. While the inner courts of tem-
ple precincts would have been off-limits, André Bernand’s map indicat-
ing the distribution of Greek inscriptions at Philae is good evidence that
other parts of the temple complex—perimeter walls, forecourts, por-
tions of adjunct temples like mammisi, statuary lining the dromos—
would have been accessible to the public.72 Hecataeus of Abdera gives
us an account of what he saw when visiting the Ramesseum in Thebes:
he lists reliefs of the king attacking an enemy city, portraits of captives,
the king performing sacrifices, and celebrating a victory, the king offer-
ing to the gods.73 These were standards of the iconographic repertory,
and similar reliefs could be seen at numerous locations throughout the

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

country. There was widespread building of Egyptian temples under the

early Ptolemies that inserted the Ptolemies into this same iconographic
framework. Although the Delta temples, which would have been clos-
est to Alexandria, are now almost completely destroyed, Philae in
southern Egypt suggests the kind of complex that visitors might have
seen.74 At Philae, the Ptolemies, beginning with Philadelphus, were por-
trayed in cult worship along with members of the Egyptian pantheon.
Here, the cult of the Theoi adelphoi was introduced by Euergetes, and
it was thoroughly Egyptian in its visual representation. Add to this the
temples of Isis and of Sarapis in Alexandria as well as the Egyptian
monuments that appear to have been moved into the city from else-
where,75 with their consistent representation of kingship, and it is obvi-
ous that Greeks resident in Alexandria and the Delta would have had
abundant opportunities to become familiar with these ideas.

2. Although Egyptian daily temple rituals were conducted within

the sanctuary of the temple and only priests could be present, Egyptians
celebrated a wide variety of religious festivals throughout the year that
took place in public spaces. Many texts have survived that provide evi-
dence of the foundational or cosmogonic myths that underpin the tem-
ple’s ritual purpose and activities. The most important of these is from
the temple at Edfu, a late Hellenistic construction whose wall friezes
contain a detailed dramatic reenactment of the significant events in the
mythology of Horus, the divine king of Egypt, events that were crucial
in the rituals of kingship.76 Although later than the period we are con-
sidering, this material is scarcely innovative, and it allows us a glimpse
of the complex annual ceremonials that a Ptolemy would be expected
to participate in either personally or (more likely) through a priestly
surrogate.77 The other important celebrations of kingship, the festivals
of Opet and of the Valley,78 as well as New Year festivals and the Heb
Sed, or Jubilee, continued under the Ptolemies. In addition to the enact-
ment of the rituals of divine kingship, a large number of festivals staged

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

3. Herodotus mentions the priests as a source of information. Obvi-

ously any such exchange would have involved either bilingual priests or
translators, both of whose populations must have increased consider-
ably by the third century in Alexandria, because of the demand for a
bilingual bureaucracy. The Egyptian priest Manetho, who was active in
the court of Ptolemy I, is the best example of such exchange within
Alexandrian circles. Although better known for his history of Egypt, in
which he corrected Herodotus’s chronology of the pharaohs,82 Manetho
also wrote several books on Egyptian religion. From the few remaining
testimonia to these works it is clear that he provided accounts of Isis,
Osiris, Apis, Serapis, and other Egyptian gods, including Seth, whom he
apparently called by his Greek name, Typhon. Like Hecataeus of Ab-
dera, Manetho appears to have made an attempt to align various ele-
ments of Egyptian religious thought with a Greek natural philosophy;
for example, one fragment links the divine pantheon with the principles
of air, earth, fire, and water (fr. 83 Waddell). He also seems to have pro-
vided an account of animal worship. Although nothing survives, it is
impossible to imagine that Manetho could have written such a work
without discussing the central rituals of kingship, such as those that ap-
pear at Edfu or in the Philae hymns, and their attendant mythologies,
which are outlined below. Manetho’s writings seem very close in con-
cept to those of Hecataeus of Abdera and Euhemerus;83 hence they are
likely to reflect the ethos of the court. For the literate circles of Alexan-
dria, Manetho’s writings on religion in tandem with those of Hecataeus
of Abdera would have provided a baseline for understanding, serving as
a Baedeker for Greeks who either wished or needed to explore their
new symbolic environment.

79. Lichtheim 1980, 116–24.

80. Dunand 1973, 207–44.
81. 2.59–63; and see Lloyd 1976, 267–87. F. Perpillou-Thomas (Fêtes d’ Égypte
ptolémaïque et romaine d’après la documentation papyrologique grecque, Studia Hel-
lenistica 31 [Louvain, 1993]) provides an up-to-date list of known festivals.
82. Burstein 1992; Dillery 1999.
83. Burstein 1996, 600. See Fraser 1972, 1: 521, for other writers about Egypt.
Conceptualizing Egypt 47

4. Much of what Herodotus actually learned in Egypt must have

come from Greek populations already resident there. Greek merchants
and soldiers had been located in Egypt for centuries, and over time
many, like the Hellenomemphites, had adopted Egyptian customs.
Herodotus mentions one such group, the Chemmitae, and his source of
information on the Buto temple of Artemis is equally likely to have
been an assimilated Greek population. Wherever these groups were
found, they would have served as sources of general information for
newcomers. For example, Herodotus provides a lengthy and more or
less accurate description of the process of mummification (2.86–90).
The practice was characteristically Egyptian, and although he gives no
source for his information, it must have come from the Egyptians them-
selves, either priests or local residents. Hecataeus of Abdera included
similar information on burial practice but added further details about a
judgment of kings,84 much of which is repeated in a later section on the
judgment of the individual after death.85 Diodorus mentions forty-two
judges. These are kin of the dead person who catalogue his just behav-
ior during life and call out to the gods of the underworld to receive the
dead as justified. Although presented as occurring in real time, the
events described are known today only from the Book of the Dead,
which was a collection of magic spells designed to facilitate the en-
trance of the dead person into the afterlife. Each individual who could
afford it could have a standard or customized copy, often lavishly illus-
trated, of one or more series of spells prepared to be placed in the
tomb.86 The period we are concerned with, the fourth and third cen-
turies b.c.e., not only saw a revival in the use of these funerary papyri,
but also considerable standardization in the sequence of incidents and
incantations that occurred.87 Thus the hundreds of such texts that have
survived allow scholars to reconstruct the operative mythologies about
the afterlife, its geography, and its relationship to the Egyptian pan-
theon. The vignette recounted in Diodorus may have confused the tex-
tual event with real life, but it is also possible that it reflects elements of

84. Diodorus Siculus 1.72 = FGrH 264 F25.72.

85. Diodorus Siculus 1.91–92 = FGrH 264 F25.91–92.
86. Greeks were certainly familiar with this practice; there has even been speculation
that the occasional burial of Greek papyri along with the dead owner was intended to
replicate Egyptian behavior. See E. G. Turner, Greek Papyri: An Introduction, 2d ed. (Ox-
ford, 1980) 76–77. The most famous such text is Timotheus’s Persae, which had been
buried in a fourth-century Hellenomemphite tomb.
87. Quirke 1992, 150–70; Hornung 1999, 13–22.
48 Conceptualizing Egypt

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.

the ideology of egyptian kingship

A difficulty for any discussion about the interrelatedness of Greek and
Egyptian myths within the Alexandrian context stems from the lack of
systematization of belief systems by the Egyptians themselves. Although
a series of prose narratives (anachronistically labeled “short stories”)
survive, and provide the first extended narratives of Egyptian myths,93
the Egyptians had no tradition of mythography. There are no hand-
books or epitomes to which we can turn, no rationalizing historians
and philosophers. Rather, the situation is analogous to that of the ar-
chaic or classical period in Greece, where a variety of sources—poems,
plays, ceramics, friezes—allow us to reconstruct the story of Heracles
or Jason and the Argonauts, but always with inconsistencies and
caveats. Commentators remind us that Homer, for example, reflects a
“different” tradition about the daughter of Agamemnon (Iphianassa)
than Euripides.94 Even within the same time period, there are alterna-
tives: in Euripides’ lost version of an Oedipus play, for example, Oedi-
pus continues to rule Thebes after the discovery of his incestuous mar-

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

as “correctness” in the sense of an immanent lawfulness not only in the

natural and social order, but also in the sacred order, since the . . . motif
epitomizes all worship activities. . . . R. Anthes writes about maat . . .
“Maat holds this small world together and makes it into a constitutive
part of world order. She [maat] is the bringing home of the harvest; she is
human integrity in thought, word, and deed; she is the loyal leadership of
government; she is the prayer and offering of the king to the god. Maat
encompasses all creation, human beings, the king, the god; she permeates
the economy, the administration, religious services, the law. All flows to-
gether in a single point of convergence: the king. He lives in Maat and
passes her on, not only to the sun god above, but also to his subjects
below.”100

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

100. Hornung 1992, 136–38.

Conceptualizing Egypt 53

divine conception. In earlier dynastic times, the king was identified as

the “Son of the Sun, Re,” and continued to mark himself in this way
with a specific name, taken at the time of coronation.101 But by the time
of the Ptolemies the pharaoh was also identified with Horus, the divine
“first” king of Egypt. Over time his identification with both deities, Re
and Horus, in fact led to a conceptual trinity in Egyptian mythmak-
ing—Re the god in heaven, Horus the king and the instantiation of the
god on earth, and finally Osiris the dead king, now lord of the under-
world, or night world.102 The fact that all three of these deities may be
thought of as one yet simultaneously existing in discrete places and
with differentiated functions points to an essential difference between
Greek and Egyptian modes of religious thought. For Greeks, Zeus,
Apollo, and Hades are conceptually separate in identity as well as in
function, and kinship lines are clearly drawn—Zeus and Hades are
brothers; Apollo is the son of Zeus, never Hades, who is always and
only his uncle. The identification of the king with the sun-god, Re, as
well as with Horus, the first divine king of Egypt, generated a series of
myths that proved fundamental within the religious imaginary—cre-
ation, royal succession, and the maintainance of maat, that is, the tri-
umph of order over chaos. While each of these three is conceptually dis-
tinct and could be treated in this way, more often their iconographic
and mythic formulations come to function in all three realms simulta-
neously, so that the successful passing of rule from one king to another
could be seen also as an act of creation or of order triumphing over the
threat of chaos or both.
The centrality of the pharaoh’s relationship to the divine order was
thus often perceived as one of kinship, a kinship that over time came to
be elaborated in a myth of the insemination of the mother of the
pharaoh by a god, not by his human father. In the New Kingdom the
god in question was Amun-Re, the chief deity and patron of the capital
city, Thebes, who generally takes on the appearance of the human fa-
ther (though the visual representations are discrete about the actual
coupling). The best-preserved example is that of Hatshepsut, a women
who chose to rule not as regent, but as pharaoh in the Eighteenth Dy-
nasty. In the Hathor chapel of her mortuary temple at Deir-el-Bahari,

101. Beckerath 1999, 21–26.

102. The similarity to the Christian concept of Trinity has not gone unnoticed. See,
for instance, S. Morenz, Egyptian Religion, trans. Ann Keep (1973; reprint, Ithaca, N.Y.,
1992) 255–57.
54 Conceptualizing Egypt

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

This narrative of divine insemination was probably used by every

pharaoh, though the majority of extant examples are from monarchs
whose accession is irregular.104 For Hatshepsut, obviously, as a woman
undertaking the particularly male role of pharaoh, or Amenhotep III,
who was the son, not of the pharaoh’s principal wife, but of a concu-
bine, the narrative functioned to identify each as the specially chosen
(though perhaps not obvious) new leader. Such birth stories could only
have been produced with the support of the priesthoods who controlled
the apparatus of ceremonial display. For Egyptians, any new ruler,
whether the legitimate son of the previous pharaoh or a usurper who
succeeded in maintaining power, would as a matter of course appear as
the son of Amun-Re in art and ritual, as the divinely conceived product
of a union between Amun and the pharaoh’s actual mother. In the cos-
mic context in which Egyptian religious and political rituals operate,
every pharaoh functioned in symbolic sameness, as a guarantor of the
order and stability of the world. On those occasions where a usurper
succeeded in retaining power, over time he too would be absorbed into
the life of the society and represented with the traditional iconography.
If he chose to accept the role and act as pharaoh, as conquerors were in-

103. Kemp 1989, 198–200, with an excellent illustration.

104. For a discussion of the birth myth, see H. Brunner, Die Geburt des Gottkönigs:
Studien zur Überlieferung eines altägyptischen Mythos, Ägyptologische Abhandlungen
10 (Wiesbaden, 1964); and J. Assman, “Die Zeugung des Sohnes: Bild, Erzählung und
das Problem des ägyptischen Mythos,” in Funktion und Leistungen des Mythos: Drei al-
torientalische Beispiele, ed. J. Assman et al., Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 48 (Göttingen,
1982) 13–61. For a recent discussion, see O’Connor and Silverman 1995, 71–73.
Conceptualizing Egypt 55

clined to do, he would ultimately become indistinguishable from his

predecessors. Barry Kemp describes the process in this way:
The merging of the king with the god Amun and all his pageants had the
important consequence of drawing a line between politics and myth. The
royal succession could go badly wrong, some could even plot to kill the
king and replace him with another. . . . But behind visible reality lay an
immensely weighty edifice of myth, festival, and grand architectural set-
ting that could absorb the petty vagaries of history and smooth out the
irregularities. It guaranteed the continuity of proper rule that was so im-
portant an element in the Egyptians’ thinking. In particular it could con-
vert usurpers (or new blood, depending on one’s point of reference) into
models of legitimacy and tradition.105

The pharaoh himself, at the time of the Ptolemaic takeover, was

linked in cult not only to the sun-god, Re, but to Horus-in-Chemmis (or
Horus-the-Child), who is, mythologically speaking, the first king of
Egypt, and whose defining act of kingship in mythological time was to
unite “the Two Lands,” the term that Egyptians used to designate the
north (or Lower Egypt) and the south (or Upper Egypt). Horus also has
a dual iconography and conflated mythology. Originally he appears to
have been a sky-god and was represented as either a falcon or a winged
disk. By the Late Period and especially in the Ptolemaic period, he is
merged with a “younger” Horus, the son of Isis and Osiris. One of the
few myths that has survived in the form of an extended narrative simi-
lar to Greek myth accounts for the struggle between order and chaos in
anthropomorphic terms, that is, as a struggle between Horus and Seth.
Allusions to this struggle and its cosmic ramifications are as old as the
Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom, but a Ramessid papyrus provides a
series of episodes in which the two wound, mutilate, and trick each
other until their rivalry is finally settled by the gods who sit in judg-
ment. The tone often appears to be satirical; there is one homosexual
interlude, for example, which might have lost Horus the kingdom, but
his mother Isis intervenes to save the day.106 The story of Horus is best
known to Greek scholars from Plutarch’s On Isis and Osiris, which was
written some five centuries after the period of our attention and has al-
most certainly been shaped into a coherent (in western terms) narrative
by Plutarch and his numerous Greek sources (among whom are

105. Kemp 1989, 208.

106. Gwyn Griffiths 1960, 41–46.
56 Conceptualizing Egypt

Hecataeus of Abdera and Eudoxus). The discrete particulars of the tale,

however, can be seen in far older Egyptian material, like the “Lamenta-
tions of Isis,”107 the friezes in the Edfu temple, or the hymns from the
Philae temple, as well as the “mysteries” celebrated at Papremis that
Herodotus mentions so discretely (2.59–63).
The story is as follows: Isis and Osiris—like Zeus and Hera—were
siblings as well as husband and wife. Their brother, Seth, in jealousy,
cut up Osiris’s body into several pieces and hid the parts in separate lo-
cations from the Delta to Byblos. Isis sailed through these regions and
patiently reassembled the body parts, binding them with linen wrap-
pings that produced Osiris’s characteristic mummylike shape. Isis con-
ceived Horus after Osiris’s death by means of Osiris’s reanimated male
member, gave birth to Horus in secret, hid him in a papyrus thicket in
the area of Chemmis,108 an island in the Delta populated only by poi-
sonous snakes and insects, by means of which Seth bites and nearly kills
the infant god. Horus is often represented being nursed by the goddess
Hathor in the form of a cow. Details of Isis’s birth often stress her
“lamentations” when Horus is attacked, attendant goddesses who pro-
tect the newborn, and the loud noises that they make to distract anyone
intent on harm. In later versions of the myth, Horus is explicitly the son
of Osiris, who recognizes him and prepares him to fight his uncle, Seth,
to avenge his father’s death. There are many episodes to the struggle—
in one, Seth steals Horus’s eye; in another, Horus hunts and kills Seth,
who has turned himself into a hippopotamus, and then makes a pair of
sandals from his hide.109 After a number of encounters, Horus is finally
recognized as the legitimate heir of his father, and the kingdom is given
into his keeping by the Ogdoad, or older cosmic deities. At maturity
Horus becomes the first king of Egypt and the avenger of his father.110
We saw in the New Kingdom that a theogamy of the sun-god (as
Amun-Re) with the pharaoh’s queen was sometimes represented on
temple walls. By the Late Period, this divine birth story was celebrated
in separate shrines built within larger temple complexes, called mam-

107. Lichtheim 1980, 116–24.

108. In some versions Horus is born in Chemmis; in others he is brought there after
birth to be hidden. Elements of the story can be traced as far back as the Old Kingdom.
See A. H. Gardiner, “Horus the Beh.detite,” JEA 40 (1944) 23–60; Goyon 1988, 29–40,
for its prominence in the Ptolemaic period.
109. This incident takes place near Achmim in Upper Egypt and is probably why san-
dals led the Chemmitae to identify Perseus with Horus. See Lloyd 1976, 368–69; 1969,
79–86.
110. Gwyn Griffiths 1960, 7–10.
Conceptualizing Egypt 57

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)

Equally important as the occurrence of a myth central to pharaonic

kingship in Greek material is what it reveals about the process of recep-
tion, namely, the ways in which Greek and Egyptian myths were under-
going a degree of interpenetration. Gwyn Griffiths’s commentary on
this passage is instructive: he observes that a floating island specifically
associated with the concealing of Horus is unknown in extant Egyptian
texts and suspects that what Herodotus reports was really the Egyptian
story of the birth of Horus-in-Chemmis contaminated with the Greek
legend of Apollo born on the island of Delos. He remarks that Ionian
Greek settlers of the fifth century in Naucratis and Daphne, which is
near the supposed location of the island, were sure to have been famil-
iar with both legends, and in all likelihood they served up this conflated
version for Herodotus.116 Indeed, it is possible that the proliferation of
Horus temples in the Delta region under the Ptolemies was the direct
result of the Ptolemies capitalizing on the fact that Greeks could easily
identify this Egyptian legend with one of their own.
For Egyptians creation was imagined in terms of the inundating wa-
ters of the Nile as they receded each year to reveal hillocks of mud that
quickly teemed with life under a tropical sun. The moment when exis-
tence differentiated itself from nonexistence was termed the “first time”
and was represented as a mound or hill emerging from the watery void.
On this hill the creator first manifested himself—an event that could be
represented iconographically as a child emerging from an egg or from
an opening bud of a lotus flower, or as a bird perched upon the
mound—then he created the world as well as the divine pantheon. The
place where creation began was given various names—“primeval hill,”
“sacred mound,” “place of coming forth,”—and its symbolism was po-
tent and ubiquitous in Egyptian writing as well as in artistic representa-

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

117. See, for example, Shafer 1997, 1–8.

118. See, for instance, Frankfort 1978, 151–54; Lloyd 1976, 318–19.
119. See Kemp 1989, 85–88, for a discussion of the function of wordplay in the cre-
ation of religious ideology.
120. 2.73. Hecataeus of Miletus, too, apparently mentioned the phoenix; see FGrH 1
F324. See also Lloyd’s very full discussion of Herodotus 2.73 (1976, 317–23).
60 Conceptualizing Egypt

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

The serpent then, who is called Apep or Apop (Apophis in Greek),

comes to represent chaos, darkness, the absence of light, and nonbeing.
While defeated daily by the sun and his retinue, he also renews his
threats and must continue to be defeated for the natural, social, and

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

moral order to continue to exist and flourish. The relationship of chaos

to order, of being to nonbeing, is occasionally represented by the
ourobouros or a snake with its tail in its mouth surrounding a small
child, the symbol of birth or the newness of creation. From this it is an
easy step to the story of Horus the child in Chemmis. When Horus is
threatened by poisonous serpents, he either throttles or tramples on the
snakes. This event becomes, however, not simply the narrative of a
childish act, nor even of the triumph over Seth, who is responsible for
the attack of the serpents, but another instantiation of the victory of
order over chaos, or being over nonbeing.
The oldest and most enduring formula for representing the king’s re-
lationship to maat in graphic art in Egypt is that known as “smiting the
foe.” The pharaoh, always larger than his surrounding attendants or
the enemy, strides forward, with one hand grasping the enemy by the
hair and with a club raised in the other as if to beat him upon the head.
The image is first found in the predynastic period on the so-called
Narmer Palette and is ubiquitous throughout the dynastic period: py-
lons in Theban temples depict this event on a large scale, while jewelry
makers have even adopted the theme in small scale for royal pectorals.
The motif is so quintessentially Egyptian that the Nubian kings borrow
it and employ it on their own monuments well into the common era.
Within the symbolic realm, the iconography, of course, functions as
more than a reminder of the pharaoh’s prowess in war or even the dom-
inance of Egypt over its enemies. It marks rather the pharaoh as the
bringer of cosmic order out of chaos. Each individual pharaoh’s tri-
umph over a particular enemy replicates similar ordering acts in the
past and prefigures those of the future, and thus the repetitiveness of
the iconography throughout history results not from lack of imagina-
tion or cultural stasis but is a deliberate attempt to express the belief
that each separate event partakes of a cosmic sameness, in a continuing
effort to maintain cosmic balance or maat.123 A more explicit variation
of this theme portrays the pharaoh accompanied by tidy ranks of
Egyptian soldiers while the enemy ranks are represented as broken and
fleeing, often trampled under the feet of the striding king. This order-
chaos theme, like the smiting of the foe, achieves the status of a cliché in
Egyptian art—hence as early as the Eighteenth Dynasty, a golden fan
base adapts the motif to a royal ostrich hunt, where the pharaoh now

123. See Ritner’s discussion of symbolic reenactments (1993, 119–42).

62 Conceptualizing Egypt

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

monstrous form (diakosmoymAnoy% teratvdb%) on their temples and

were being beaten (typtomAnoy%) by Osiris. Now some say that they
were earth-born (ghgeneP%) when the genesis of life from the earth was
new, while others say that they were superior by virtue of their physical
strength and had accomplished many deeds, and from this circumstance
legend described them as many-bodied (polysvmatvn). But it is gener-
ally agreed that when they made war against Zeus and Osiris they were
all destroyed.129

The phrase “beaten by Osiris” is the key to understanding the pas-

sage, as B. G. Gunn saw. In a verbal communication to J. Gwyn Grif-
fiths,130 Gunn suggested that Diodorus was referring to “delineations of
the King in a form like Osiris smiting a group of enemies . . . who are
so closely packed together as to appear as monstrous multicorpores.”
This has the ring of truth about it. On the great pylons of the Rames-
seum in Thebes and at Medinet Habu the enemy are superimposed
upon each other in such a way that they appear with only one body, but
with multiple arms and legs. At Medinet Habu and other later temples,
the king wears the white crown of Upper Egypt, which is also worn by
the mummiform Osiris and hence may have led to the identification of
the king with Osiris.
The Greek writer—whether Diodorus or one of his sources—in a
sense reads the monument correctly by ignoring its historical particu-
larity and reproducing its underlying meaning, namely, that the act de-
picted represents the cosmic struggle of Osiris (and/or Horus) against
Seth. Whatever the exact nature of these multiform, earth-born crea-
tures, in a process similar to that of Herodotus’s interpretation of the
Horus-in-the-Delta myth, Diodorus assimilates the Egyptian motif to a
Greek story, and one that occupies an analogous place in Greek art and
writing. The defeat of the Giants first appears in a frieze on the temple
of Apollo at Delphi131 and was the required subject for the peplos of

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

Athena for the festival of the Panathenaea.132 It became very popular in

the Hellenistic period and was a notable element on the Pergamene
Altar. The defeat of the Giants, like the defeat of the Amazons, signaled
iconographically the civilizing influence of the Greek city-states and
their individual or collective defeat of the irrational, uncivilized worlds
that preceded them. In myth too, the defeat of the Giants by Zeus and
his siblings signaled the coming of the orderly rule of the Ouranids.
Thus Greek and Egyptian symbolic realms intersect in this passage of
Diodorus, and whether or not it comes originally from Hecataeus or
some other Greco-Egyptian source, Diodorus’s reading of the Egyptian
monument operates, I believe, in a manner analogous to that of the
court poets of the Ptolemies in matching Greek concept to Egyptian
within the framework of pharaonic kingship.

the alexander romance

So far we have been considering various ways in which the Egyptian
motifs of kingship might have been available to Greeks in Egypt and
how Greeks assimilated what they saw or heard. At this juncture, how-
ever, I would like to consider the ways in which the Egyptian succession
myth was explicitly appropriated and how it functioned within a Greek
symbolic system in the Alexander Romance. No author’s name sur-
vives. The Alexander Romance seems to have been assembled from a
variety of narrative sources ranging from historical biography to a cycle
of letters allegedly from (among others) Alexander to Olympias and Ar-
istotle, to a series of romantic and marvelous adventures.133 The Greek
text has come down to us in several recensions, the earliest of which is
now from the third century c.e. The most important and complete of
these are known as A and B.134 Given its current low literary status the
Alexander Romance might seem to be a frail vehicle on which to base a

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

upper strata of the bureaucratic elite.145 The purpose or intent of the

Nectanebo story must therefore be bound up with this circumstance.
Elements of this story appear also in later Greek sources that are
generally taken to be more reputable than the Alexander Romance,
which suggests that the Egyptian story was at an early period rather
closely linked to Alexander. Plutarch, in his Life of Alexander, mentions
that Alexander is descended from Heracles on his father’s side and Aea-
cus on his mother’s, but he also slips in the detail that Olympias’s habit
of being found in the company of serpents cooled Philip’s ardor to-
wards his wife: “Whether he feared her as an enchantress or thought
she had commerce with some god, and so looked upon himself as ex-
cluded, he was ever after less fond of her company.”146 Further, Plutarch
tells us that when Philip consulted the Delphic oracle about the pater-
nity of his child (about whom he had some doubts), he was informed
“henceforth to pay particular honor, above all other gods, to Ammon;
and was told he should one day lose the eye with which he had pre-
sumed to peep through that chink in the door, when he saw the god,
under the form of a serpent, sleeping with (syneynazamenon) his
wife.”147 Although Arrian is more restrained in book 3 of the Anabasis
of Alexander, he, too, mentions that Alexander traces his lineage from
Perseus and Heracles on the Greek side, and also Ammon.148
In Greek terms the problem with the fatherhood of Alexander as it is
portrayed in the Alexander Romance, unlike the versions found in
Plutarch or Arrian, is that it is overdetermined. To have a divine as well
as a human father has some precedent—one thinks of the examples of
Helen or Heracles; to have a human father who is not your mother’s
husband has also been known to occur; but to have a human father
who is not your mother’s husband, pretending to be the god who then
acknowledges you as truly his son risks undermining the very edifice it
seems to be erecting. Certainly it is possible to explain away this
plethora of fathers by attributing them to imperfections in the stitching
together of the Alexander Romance from its constituent parts, but this

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

binocularity of which allows readers to see one event simultaneously

through two different cultural lenses.

To sum up the significance of Alexander’s overdetermined paternity:

both Nectanebo and Ammon are essential to the story. Separately each
father contributes a necessary piece to Alexander’s complex mythol-
ogy—by virtue of the one father (Nectanebo) Alexander is really Egypt-
ian, or Greco-Egyptian, on the human and political level; by virtue of
the other (Ammon), he is really divine on the mythical and ceremonial
level. Moreover, the tale of Alexander’s fathers would seem to occupy a
central and originary place in the forming of the city of Alexandria it-
self. It is as the “son of Nectanebo” that Alexander addresses the Mem-
phites, and it is by Ammon, who proclaims him his son, that he is in-
structed to found the new city. In fact, the Nectanebo story bears an
uncanny resemblance to that staple of Alexandrian literary production,
the aition, or foundation myth. A significant aspect of the aition in the
context of new foundations or earlier Greek colonization was the ways
in which such stories functioned as an epistemological category that re-
configured foreign places imaginatively in Greek terms. The logic of the
aition is to connect the new place with Greek myth, in a way that serves
to efface the native and give the intruding Greek population (or colo-
nizers) continuous claim to the place, to create the illusion in other
words not of intrusion, but of return.153 As the son of Nectanebo, then,
Alexander claims Egypt as legitimate heir, his is not a conquest, but a
return. But if the story functions as an aition for the new city, it suggests
an agenda that has ramifications in the political or cultural sphere. By
combining Egyptian sources with a Greek tale—Alexander’s founda-
tion of the city—the author of the Nectanebo story has devised a potent
instrument that operates on multiple levels, human and divine, political
and mythical, historical and romantic, comic and serious, and has pro-
duced a narrative that Egyptians and Greeks could recognize as pos-
sessing features not only of their own culture but of both cultures. This
act of narration is not simply a literary tour de force, but a space cre-
ated in which the two separate cultures are given a shared prominence
and value. Hence the resulting act of foundation is presented as avoid-
ing the hierarchies of dominance and submission, conqueror and con-
quered; the enterprise is cast as a cooperative cultural activity. What it

153. See Dougherty 1991; and especially chapter 4 below.

Conceptualizing Egypt 73

claims is a fiction projected by the dominant class (Greeks), but in its

very proclamation is a tacit admission of the existence of a heteroge-
neous culture, and this goes some way towards constructing the space
in which greater cultural exchange might take place. It is in this world
that the Alexandrian poets found themselves, and it is its potential for
symbolic reciprocity that, I believe, they chose to exploit.
chapter 2

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.

1. The best example of this reading is Schwinge 1986, 76.

74
Callimachean Theogonies 75

These elements do not affect Callimachus’s ability to write imperial po-

etry, but because we require sincerity of tone from praise poetry, we
imagine that his use of humor must be intended to undercut its appar-
ent subject. Humor, however, is more complex than this, and Calli-
machus’s humor, in particular, seems intended less to debunk imperial
pretensions than to foreground the improbabilities of the inherited
mythologies, unless we are to assume that the exigencies of Rhea’s af-
terbirth or the genial if somewhat malodorous Athena of the fifth
hymn, disdaining a bath until she has curried her horses, encode a sub-
tle put-down of Ptolemaic queens. The creative role that humor can
play in the context of imperial poetry is almost always ignored. For ex-
ample, humor can be the medium for expressing outrageous or danger-
ous ideas—that the king is a god—because humor serves to deflect or
undercut potentially destabilizing messages while simultanously creat-
ing the narrative space in which such ideas are permitted to exist and in
which their parameters may be explored.2 In the previous chapter, I
tried to demonstrate that the early Ptolemaic court, that of Soter and
Philadelphus, was a world in which debates about the nature of king-
ship were a significant feature of the intellectual climate, and that more
than one writer within contemporary philosophical and historical dis-
course experimented with idealizing models, often based on or elabo-
rating on the career of Alexander. Callimachus was certainly aware of
this intellectual climate, and it is my contention that however artificial
or “literary” his mode of expression, he was an active participant in
these ongoing debates, and his poetry was a locus for the interplay of
inherited as well experimental notions of kingship and their attendant
mythologies.
In this chapter, in order to test this hypothesis, I would like to con-
sider two of Callimachus’s hymns: the first, addressed to Zeus, and the
fourth, addressed to Delos, the birthplace of Apollo. Callimachus wrote
six hymns addressed to the traditional Olympian deities Zeus, Apollo,
Artemis, Athena, and Demeter. If—as most scholars believe3—the trans-
mitted manuscript order of the hymns reflects the author’s own
arrangement, we should expect, with an author as conscious of a poetic
agenda as Callimachus obviously was, that the placement of the Zeus
hymn was not random and that it will have assumed some program-

2. See, for example, Selden’s formulation (1998, 411).

3. See, for example, Bornmann 1988, 113; Bulloch 1985, 77–78; Hopkinson 1984a,
147–48.
76 Callimachean Theogonies

matic importance. The shortest of the six and deceptively simple in

form, this hymn has received relatively little critical attention. In fact,
its potential as a programmatic piece has been almost entirely neg-
lected. For these reasons, I have undertaken to examine it in consid-
erable detail, while confining myself to more general observations
about the structure of the Delos hymn. My analysis proceeds from the
assumption that Callimachus’s poetics is by design a complex intertex-
tual dialogue with his predecessors, which he signals by lexical distinc-
tiveness and striking detail.4 This may seem uncontroversial or to be
stating the obvious, but the implications cannot be overemphasized.
While many critics pay lip service to this principle, in practice they
often confine themselves to scrutinizing the surface of the narrative,
treating allusion as ornament or as scholarly display, not as an element
that has the potential to alter the apparent meanings of the text. But if
the context of Callimachus’s evocation of a poetic predecessor cannot
be neglected, this has implications for our reading. The loss of many of
the works that he would have known frustrates our attempts to inter-
pret and tempts us to overstate his engagement with those texts that
have survived, particularly Homer and Hesiod, in order to maintain a
semblance of critical control. Reading Callimachus then requires us to
assimilate the narrative and rhetorical levels of his intertexts to Calli-
machus’s own, while conceding the limitations in our own current abil-
ity to access them fully.5 With this in mind, my reading is intended to
open up the intertextual field to include or emphasize contemporary
writings that are often overlooked in reading Callimachus and to reread
the familiar intertexts in order to situate their cultural frames of refer-
ence more precisely in third-century Alexandria. In addition, Calli-
machus’s poetic style exploits sometimes radical shifts between past and

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

present or future, the geographically near and distant, traditional

mythological topics and eccentric detail.6 These shifts often rupture the
narrative fabric or collapse discrete or opposed elements and hence
have generated a descriptive language—“disconcerting,” “piquant,”
“playful,” “pedantic,” “realistic”—that offers little in the way of a co-
herent strategy of reading, though it does capture our own critical apo-
ria. I wish to look closely at these many moments of rupture, since it is
my contention that such moments often indicate an event that is legible
within two discrete discursive systems and that Egypt and Egyptian mo-
tifs behave as subtexts that coexist with and complement the Greek.

the hymn to zeus

The Hymn to Zeus can be divided formally into an invocation to Zeus
(1–3), the birth ( ganh) of the god (4–54), his accomplishments (dretaA)
(55–90), and the concluding prayer (91–96). The vivid language of the
opening creates the impression of a specific occasion:7
Zhnb% Goi tA ken gllo parb spondusin deAdein
laion h uebn aDtan, deA mAgan, aDBn gnakta,
Phlaganvn Dlatpra, dikaspalon ODranAdisi;
Zeus—could there be anything better at the pouring of libations to sing
of than the god himself, always great, always lord, Smiter of the Mud-
born, Lawgiver to the Ouranians?

It is generally agreed that the poem belongs early in the reign of

Ptolemy II Philadelphus, who began his rule as coregent with his father
Soter in 285/4 b.c.e. and continued as sole ruler from 283/2 until his
death in 246, because lines 58–59, which allude to the amicable acces-
sion of Zeus over his older brothers, look like a pointed reference to

6. See Selden 1998 for a discussion of the phenomenon of displacement in Calli-

machus’s poetry. Selden’s discussion of the Lock of Berenice and the Hymn to Apollo in-
cludes a lengthy consideration of the Egyptian intertexts.
7. parb spondusin would seem to indicate a symposium, since the first and third
toasts at a symposium were apparently addressed to Zeus (see E. Maass, Commentario-
rum in Aratum reliquiae [Berlin, 1898; reprint, 1958] 81, lines 26–29), although it does
not guarantee it. See Depew 1993 for the ways in which Callimachus creates the fiction of
performance in his hymns through the use of his models. Clauss (1986, 159 n. 13) lists
the various conjectures that have been made about the circumstances of performance of
this hymn. Cameron (1995, 63–70) has recently restated the case for the symposium as a
viable social occasion for Hellenistic poets to perform their works, emphasizing that the
erudition of their pieces did not necessarily restrict them to transmission exclusively in
written form.
78 Callimachean Theogonies

Philadelphus’s position as the youngest of Soter’s sons, and amicable re-

lations among the half brothers scarcely survived Soter’s death. The
most cogent suggestion of a more specific occasion was first made by O.
Richter8 and strengthened by J. J. Clauss,9 who argues that the poem was
written for Philadelphus at the time he became coregent with his father,
Soter, an event that coincided with the celebration of Philadelphus’s
birthday as well as the festival of Zeus Basileus. The details are as fol-
lows: (1) an inscription published in 1977 provides evidence that
Philadelphus celebrated his birthday to coincide with the Basileia, a fes-
tival of Zeus Basileus that took place each year;10 (2) it is likely that
Philadelphus was crowned as coregent with his father on the occasion of
this joint celebration in 284 b.c.e.,11 though after he became sole ruler in
282 b.c.e. the anniversary of his coronation was celebrated some two
weeks later than the Basileia.12 If the poem was written for the combined
celebration of the Basileia and the royal birthday, either at the time of
the coronation or shortly before, then the topics Zeus, his birth, and his
accession to the throne would have been especially suitable.
If scholars approach consensus on an early date, debate about the real
subject of the poem—Zeus or Ptolemy or both—continues.13 Callimachus’s
introduction of the example of “our king” (cmetAri medAonti) in line
85, in language that echoes the accomplishments of Zeus a few lines be-
fore, has provoked questions about the exact nature of the poem: is it a
hymn produced for a cultic occasion or an encomium or an example of
Wilhelm Kroll’s generic Kreuzung? Answers have run a predictable
gamut: Peter Fraser, at one extreme, claimed that “the hymns of Calli-
machus have . . . a significant religious content which corresponds to a
genuine religious feeling of the author.”14 At the other extreme, scholars
like A. Rostagni and B. Gentili15 saw an implicit identification of Zeus
and Ptolemy and thought the poem, like Theocritus’s Idyll 17, was in

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

reality an encomium of the current ruler. A. Bulloch typifies the the

middle ground: “But next to the Childhood of Zeus the King the poet
places, by means of an apparent ‘example’, Ptolemy Philadelphus, and
the poem turns into a hymn to the poet’s own patron, subtly con-
structed to please without suggesting any actual identification of the
god and Ptolemy (though a Ptolemy eager for flattery may have as-
sumed this to be implied).”16 Many readers may be inclined to dismiss
these debates as modern scruples irrelevant to actual ancient practice,
considering the recently published Simonides fragment in which a hym-
nic proemium begins a narrative elegy on the battle of Plataea.17 But
Callimachus’s poem is not as clearly delimited as Simonides’ elegy, per-
haps deliberately so. Callimachus’s inclusion or intrusion of “our king”
as an exemplum within the hymnic framework is surrounded by re-
peated remarks about poetic doubt, about truth-telling and lying. As a
result, the poet himself seems to have induced the reader’s aporia by set-
ting up an imaginative field in which fiction, Zeus, Ptolemy, and king-
ship are effectively intertwined.18

“ 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

16. 1985, 552.

17. POxy. 59.3965 + 22.2327; and “The New Simonides,” Arethusa 29.2 (Spring
1996), devoted to the new Simonides fragment. See Cameron (1995, 313–15) for the sig-
nificance of this fragment for Callimachus’s poetry.
18. See Haslam 1993, 116.
80 Callimachean Theogonies

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.

Callimachus replaces Antagoras’s dmfAbohton (“widely celebrated”)

with dmfariston, a rare word that occurs only twice, both times in
Iliad 23. In Iliad 23.382 we find a situation similar to the one Calli-
machus presents at the opening of the poem: two competitors in a char-
iot race would have finished dmfariston (“in a dead heat”) had it not
been for the intervention of Apollo, who decided matters by causing
one of the drivers to lose. Here, it seems, the two locations with com-
peting claims to be the birthplace of Zeus are also “in a dead heat,”
when an external voice (the god?) exclaiming Krpte% deB cePstai re-
solves the issue.
The terms of the contested birth in Antagoras are worth considering
more closely. Antagoras feigns doubt about whether Eros was the first
of the primordial deities whose births are specifically located in the wa-

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

ters of Ocean or one of a later generation of divinities, the winged child

of Aphrodite—in other words, whether Eros is to be identified with the
originary generative force of the universe or as a literary or mythologi-
cal trope. There is nothing novel about this. In Plato’s Symposium, for
example, Phaedrus claims that Eros is the oldest of gods, and Agathon,
that he is the youngest—an opposition that is well attested.21 A babyish
Eros, often depicted with wings, is a common motif in Hellenistic vase
painting, while Eros as an elemental force occurs in Hesiod’s Theogony
(120) and in cosmogonic poetry like that of Pherecydes of Syrus, for ex-
ample, as well as in Orphic texts. Antagoras’s choice of language (spma
dAfyion) alludes to the bisexual Eros that came to occupy a distinctive
position in Orphic theology.22 H. Schibli explains:

Chronos fashions an egg of aDuar from which the first-born (prv-

tageno%), bi-sexual god Phanes springs forth; Phanes is identical with
Eros. Phanes-Eros enters with a burst of creative activity that includes
planets, gods, and men. Phanes is thereupon swallowed by Zeus who,
having thus assimilated the nature of Eros, in turn creates all things anew.
In this way Orphic theology accounts for the status of Zeus as both cre-
ator and ruler of the world.23

Orphic material circulated freely in the Hellenistic period, so there can

be no question that either Antagoras or Callimachus was unaware of
the ramifications of these competing mythologies of Eros.24 In fact, a
more or less contemporary epigram of Simias of Rhodes externalizes
the issue by depicting Eros as a bearded child, the offspring of Aether
and Chaos, as against the son of Aphrodite and Ares.25
Prima facie, the imitation of Antagoras is appropriate for Calli-
machus’s dilemma because Arcadia is often regarded as the originary
Greek landscape occupied by autochthonous peoples before the rest of
Greece. The depiction of Zeus’s birth in a primeval landscape where
waters originate is akin to the birth of Eros “under the waves of broad
Ocean,” and the juxtaposition of an address to “Father Zeus” in the

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

context of the god’s own infancy story may—like Simias’s bearded

child—be an ironic enactment of the dilemma of the age of Eros. A mo-
ment later Callimachus situates his own hymn within cosmogonic and
theogonic discourse with his quotation of Epimenides of Crete in line 8.
In this context Zeus is a divinity whose ancestry is very similar to
Eros’s. Within Pherecydes and the Orphic theogonies (as Schibli’s re-
marks above make clear) he is not only king of the gods but assimilated
to the divine creator as well. Eros’s disputed parentage may have been
one of the oldest clichés of the hymnic repertory, but it also encapsu-
lated a religious and philosophical debate about the nature of divinity
that was not exclusive to Eros. In the Hellenistic period it surfaces for
many gods, and particularly Zeus. An excellent contemporary example
is Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus, in which Zeus is praised as the Stoic first
cause of nature. Cleanthes’ hymn is usually opposed to Callimachus’s,
the former regarded as having adapted traditional hymnic features to
philosophical discourse, the latter for “a self-consciously literary ef-
fect.”26 But however artificial Callimachus’s poem, it could not have
been written in ignorance of the various notions of divinity being ex-
pressed in contemporary intellectual circles.27
If Antagoras’s hymn presented Callimachus with a choice of two differ-
ent theogonic chronologies (however overworked), the Homeric Hymn to
Dionysus displays two features in common with Callimachus’s hymn: the
newborn (or in Dionysus’s case the almost born) child is transported from
one location to another—Zeus conveys the embryonic Dionysus snatched
from Semele’s ruined body sewn up in his own thigh to act as a surrogate
womb. The poem’s language—eDrafipta and Gtikte used of Zeus—con-
veys this mythological information. The second feature of the hymnic tra-
dition is various geographic options available to the poet:
oC mBn gbr Drakani s, oC d’ \Ikari dnemoAssi
fas’, oC d’ Dn Naji dPon gAno% eDrafipta.
oC dA s' Dp' \AlfePi potamu bauydinaenti

26. See, for example, Hopkinson 1989, 132.

27. Another contemporary poet, Aratus, in the opening of his Phaenomena also as-
similates Zeus to the all-pervasive creator. In addition to similarities between Eros and
Zeus, Plutarch (DIO 57) finds that the Hesiodic Eros “calls to mind” (proskalePtai)
Osiris, and likens the Eros of Socrates’ narrative in the Symposium to Horus, who is for-
ever young. This is not to suggest that Plutarch is describing views held by Callimachus or
Antagoras so much as to illustrate the ease with which analogies between Eros and Egypt-
ian deities could be made once a context had been established. By the Roman period, the
identification of Eros with Horus-the-Child is well attested. See R. Merkelbach, Isis
Regina-Zeus Sarapis (Stuttgart, 1995), 87–93 and pls. 122–24 (pp. 595–97).
Callimachean Theogonies 83

kysamAnhn SemAlhn tekAein DiB terpikeraAni,

5 glloi d' Dn Qabisin gnaj se lAgoysi genAsuai
ceydamenoi¢28 sB d' Gtikte patbr dndrpn te uepn te
pollbn dp' dnurapvn krAptvn leykalenon ˜Hrhn.
Gsti dA ti% NAsh Epaton gro% dnuAon Eli
thloP FoinAkh% sxedbn ADgAptoio r\ oavn. . . .
Some say at Dracanum, some say at windy Icarus, and some say in
Naxos, divinely born Insewn, and some say by Alpheus, deep-eddying
river, pregnant Semele bore you to thunder-loving Zeus. But others say
you were born in Thebes, Lord—they are mistaken; for the father of men
and gods bore you far from men, hidden from white-armed Hera. There
is a certain Nysa, lofty mountain, luxuriously wooded, far away in
Phoenicia, near to the streams of the Aegyptus. . . .

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

We saw in Dionysius Scytobrachion the phenomenon of relocating

mythological events connected with Dionysus, Athena, and the Ama-
zons from northern regions (Thrace and Scythia) to southern, to Libya
and the northeastern coast of Africa, a phenomenon also to be found in
Apollonius’s Argonautica. The Homeric Hymn to Dionysus appears to
make the same poetic gesture, and it raises a question about Calli-
machus’s constructed aporia. Is the choice between Arcadia and Crete
meant to resemble the choice between Thebes and Nysa, near to the Ae-
gyptus? Although the identification of Nysan Dionysus with Osiris was
common enough in the Hellenistic period, and Zeus himself already
had a Libyan/Egyptian avatar, Zeus Ammon, at this juncture we can
only raise an inquiring eyebrow about the relevance of Zeus’s potential
alter egos to Callimachus’s poem.33

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

Callimachus then resolves his hitherto rather predictable poetic

dilemma: in response to his question “which of them lied, Father?” a
voice returns the answer ‘Cretans are always liars’ (Krpte% deB ceP-
stai). This is a famous line attributed to Epimenides, a Cretan priest or
seer who was credited with a gift for oracular revelation. By Calli-
machus’s time he had acquired almost mythical status and was occa-
sionally included among the Seven Sages.34 Recently, a number of schol-
ars have turned a critical eye to the ambiguity of voice that this
quotation creates—is it Callimachus himself, “Father” Zeus, or Epi-
menides who answers?—and the consequence for our understanding of
the poem as a whole.35 Let us examine more carefully the context of the
remark. The complete line from Epimenides is Krpte% deB cePstai,
kakb uhrAa, gastAre% drgaA (“Cretans, ever liars, evil beasts, idle bel-
lies”),36 which in its turn would seem to have been adapted from the
speech of the Muses in the proem of Hesiod’s Theogony:
aG nA pou’ ÈHsAodon kalbn DdAdajan doidan,
grna% poimaAnonu’ 8likpno% Epo zauAoio.
tande dA me pratista ueaB prb% mPuon Geipon,
25 MoPsai \Olympiade%, koPrai Dib% aDgiaxoio¢
“poimAne% ggrayloi, kak’ DlAgxea, gastAre% oRon
Gdmen feAdea pollb lAgein DtAmoisin dmoPa,
Gdmen d’ eRt’ DuAlvmen dlhuAa ghrAsasuai.”
Now they once taught Hesiod fair song, when he was shepherding lambs
at the foot of sacred Helicon. The goddesses first addressed me thus,
Olympian Muses, daughters of aegis-bearing Zeus: “Shepherds of the
field, evil reproachs, all belly, we know how to say many false things that
can pass for true, we also know how, when we wish, to utter the truth.”

kePtai d\ dmfaristo%, \Auhnauen eGt\ dpb NeAloy

rn gAno%, dpeArvn d\ gjio% dmfotArvn.
gstea kaB d\ gllv% Cnb% aEmato%, c% lago% ·Ellhn,
klarvi d\ c mBn deB Pallado%, c dB Dia%.

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

To state it more crudely, cosmogony reflects political reality: the emer-

gence of the “just” Zeus in the Theogony provides the necessary or log-
ical divine counterpart to the “just” king who rules over the human
condition in the Works and Days. The one guarantees the other.

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

Hesiod’s proem stands first in a long line of encounters between the

aspiring poet and the Muses. But Callimachus, who is himself responsi-
ble for the subsequent spate of imitations (Ennius, Vergil, Propertius),
at the opening of the Zeus hymn recreates the Hesiodic moment only
indirectly, by refracting the event through Epimenides. In contrast, in
the fragmentary Somnium39 at the beginning of the Aetia, a poem that
is also about origins, Callimachus directly recreates the context of the
initiation:
poimAni mpla nAmonti par' Gxnion djAoß Eppoy
\Hsiadi MoysAvn Csmbß et' dntAasen
m]Bn oC Xaeoß genes.[
To the shepherd tending his flock by the track of the swift horse, Hesiod,
when a swarm of Muses met him, . . . to him about the birth of Chaos.
(fr. 2 Pf.)

In this passage Callimachus contextualizes the appearance of the

Muses to Hesiod in terms of theogonies—Xaeo% genes.[—not simply
the birth of the gods, but particularly of Chaos, that is to say, that orig-
inary moment when creation began. As the Aetia progresses, Calli-
machus’s solution to the problem of poetic truth or nontruth is to in-
terrogate the Muses and record their replies. However, the relationship
of the poet to his subject and his consciously invoked antecedents is
markedly more ambiguous in the Zeus hymn. The introduction of a
line of Epimenides indirectly alludes to the problematic of Hesiod’s en-
counter with the Muses while distancing the audience from the au-
thoritative voice of inspiration that the Muses provided in the Hesiod
passage and in the Aetia. In contrast to these two, the opening of the
Zeus hymn is overdetermined: the line itself suggests that it is Epi-
menides who speaks; the Homeric parallel, signaled by dmfariston,
points to Father Zeus as the speaker; while Callimachus, by going on
to gloss the line, would seem to be appropriating it to his own voice.
But let us consider further what Epimenides’ intrusion into the poem
effects.
To judge from the meager remains of his corpus, Epimenides com-

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

posed a poem called “Oracles” that packaged theogonic material as

oracular responses.40 His cosmology was similar to Orphic writing in
that he began with Aer and Night, who produced Tartarus, who in turn
produced two Titans, who produced an egg from which another gene-
sis came forth.41 Further, two of the testimonia suggest that Epimenides’
perceptions about oracular truth tended towards the skeptical: Aris-
totle tells us that Epimenides asserted that he never prophesied about
the future, only about what had already happened, but was obscure;42
in other words, he decoded past events. Plutarch in The Obsolescence
of Oracles records the following anecdote: upon consulting the god
about whether Delphi was the center of the earth and receiving a vague
reply, Epimenides said: “There is no center of the earth or the sea, but if
there is, it is known to the gods, but hidden from mortals.”43 Most sig-
nificantly for our purposes, Epimenides seems actively to have been
using Hesiod’s encounter with the Muses as the driving force for his
own poetry, and the words “Cretans, ever liars, evil beasts, idle bellies”
are plausibly located in the proem of this work, in which Truth and Jus-
tice appear to Epimenides in the cave of Zeus on Crete:44
Once a Cretan man named Epimenides came to Athens bringing a tale
that, as he tells it, is hard to believe: namely, that at <mid>day when he
had lain in a deep sleep for many years in the cave of Dictaian Zeus he
said that in a dream he encountered the goddesses and the words of the
goddesses, Truth and Dike.45

Diodorus claims Epimenides as one of his sources on Cretan divinities

(5.80 = fr. 20 D-K), and Diogenes Laertius tells us he wrote about the
Couretes and Corybantes.46 From even this limited evidence, we may

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

conclude that Epimenides situates himself in a theogonic tradition in

which truth is marked as problematic, and if indeed Truth and Justice
inform him that “Cretans are ever liars,” then we may suspect that this
exchange will have led to the goddesses or Epimenides “explaining’ ” or
debunking some prominent Cretan theogonic narrative; stories at-
tached to Cretan Zeus and the Couretes readily suggest themselves.
Callimachus, in turn, locates himself within the mainstream of theogo-
nic writing (Hesiod via Epimenides) but deliberately complicates the is-
sues of truth or lying in connection with poetic utterance. And he in-
serts himself not in general terms, but into a particular discussion—that
on the tomb of Zeus.
Callimachus elaborates Epimenides’ response by rejecting Crete as
the birthplace of Zeus on the grounds that the Cretan account is
scarcely credible, singling out one specific detail:

kaB gbr tafon, r gna, sePo

Krpte% Dtektananto¢ sB d’ oD uane%, DssB gbr aDeA.
For the Cretans built a tomb for you, Lord, but you have not died, you
are forever. (8–9)

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

originally not the Hellenic Zeus but a pre-Hellenic vegetation or year-

spirit of the same general type as the Semitic Adonis or the Egyptian
Osiris. He was represented as a beardless youth; he was reborn every
year; he also died. This god was identified by the Greeks with their Zeus
long before Hesiod. But he retained his individuality, and his worship in
Crete preserved many of its peculiar features.47

This aspect of Cretan Zeus would have been familiar to Callimachus

and his contemporaries. It appears in a now fragmentary chorus of Eu-
ripides’ Cretans, where Idaean Zeus is linked with Dionysus Zagreus

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

and the Couretes in the context of seasonal and initiatory rites.48 It is a

reasonable guess that the tomb of Zeus figured in Epimenides’ writing.
But the existence of the tomb seems to have posed an intellectual stum-
bling block to the conventional wisdom that Zeus was an immortal.
The scholiast on the Zeus hymn, for example, provides not one but two
rationalizing explanations: in addition to explaining that the tomb was
a construction to deceive Cronus he suggests that the tomb was really
that of Minos, the son of Zeus, and was inscribed MAnvo% toP Dib%
tafo% but over time lost its initial letters and came to read only Dib%
tafo%. Callimachus’s introduction of the tomb of Zeus, then, does not
provide a resolution to the problem of Zeus’s birth so much as intro-
duce another complication—is Zeus a dying god, a Dionysus or Osiris
analogue, or is the tomb to be explained in some other way? Calli-
machus’s introduction of the tomb at least implicitly marks Cretan
Zeus as an oriental deity,49 and this brings his choice of Arcadia or
Crete in line with the choice of Theban or Nysan Dionysus. He then ex-
plicitly rejects this orientalizing option—“you have not died, you are
forever.” But the tomb of Zeus on Crete was notorious and carried with
it considerable intertextual baggage. Its affect within the poem cannot
be limited to one line or so easily dismissed.
The most radical solution to the problem posed by the tomb of Zeus
on Crete was that proposed by Callimachus’s older contemporary, Eu-
hemerus. Euhemerus was labeled an atheist because he demoted the tra-
ditional Olympian gods to the status of culture heroes who achieved
immortal status through their benefactions to humankind. For Euhe-
merus, Zeus was a human who came from Crete, acted as a lawgiver,
and eventually returned to Crete, where he died and was buried. Euhe-
merus’s writing, like that of his contemporary, Hecataeus of Abdera,
belonged to an intellectual world in which the line between human king
and divinity may have been easily crossed, but which also exacted a
price—stipulated in terms of a moral education and righteous behav-
ior—for royals wishing to undertake the journey. Callimachus certainly
knew Euhemerus’s writings, since he refers to them in his first Iambus.50

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

Whether he approved or disapproved of Euhemerus, it is fair to say his

ideas were common intellectual currency within Callimachus’s Alexan-
dran circle, and referring to the tomb of Cretan Zeus was bound to
have reminded his audience of Euhemerus’s notorious solution to the
problem.

Arcadia and Crete

In these opening nine lines, then, Callimachus has introduced his

topic—the birth of Zeus—and situated it within the context of the ear-
lier theogonic discourses of Hesiod, Epimenides, and Orphic and ratio-
nalist traditions. Around the birth of Zeus are clustered several differ-
ent, though ultimately converging, choices, the significance of which
Callimachus has enlarged by his allusive recourse to a variety of discur-
sive styles—poetic, prophetic, Orphic, rationalist—is the god young or
old, a cosmic and originary force for creation or a mythological con-
struct of the poets and vase painters? Is he a king/culture hero or a
dying vegetation spirit? Moreover, as the poet painstakingly makes us
aware, this is a context in which is it easy to speak falsely and it is one
that will increase exponentially in complexity as the question of pre-
cisely who this Zeus is, whether a Greek or a Near Eastern god, be-
comes linked with “our king” (85).
Callimachus’s ostensible solution to his carefully constructed poetic
dilemma is to reject Crete and locate Zeus’s birth in Arcadia. This is the
way he tells the story:

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.

In addition he selects the ethnic designation of “Cydones” as a

metonym for Cretans, but Pausanias tells us that “all the surviving sons
of [the Arcadian] Tegeates, namely, Cydon, Archedius, and Gortys, mi-
grated of their own free will to Crete, and after them were named the
cities Cydonia, Gortyna, and Catreus. But the Cretans disagree with
this.”57 In other words, the ethnic Cydones is contested—it may signify
either Arcadian or Cretan origin. The potential for ambiguity is not re-
solved but compounded by the sentence itself. Not only were there sev-
eral locations throughout Greece purporting to be the “omphalos,” or
center, but at least one—Delphi—was far more prominent. And in this

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

58. See Selden 1998, 321, on the “eccentric center.”

59. 8.38.2. See also 8.36.2; and Verbruggen 1981, 32–37, for the Cretan elements
also claimed for mainland Greece.
60. West 1983, 132.
Callimachean Theogonies 95

elevates Zeus from a parochial into a universal deity. Moreover, this

pattern provides a template of sorts into which he can insert another set
of claims about the birth of a god.

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 second source is Hesiod’s Theogony:

eDnaete% dB uepn dpameAretai aDBn Dantvn,
oydA pot’ D% boylbn DpimAsgetai oDd’ DpB daPta%
DnnAa pant’ Gtea¢ dekati d’ DpimAsgetai aRti%
+eDrAa%64 duanatvn oF \OlAmpia damat’ Gxoysi.

61. See the discussion in Reinsch-Werner 1976, 32–36.

62. \VgygAh is normally treated as a noun, but it might as easily be an adjective here;
so West 1966, 378 ad 806.
63. Odyssey 7.244–47.
64. For details of the textual problem, see West 1966, 377 ad 804. It is not relevant
to the current discussion.
96 Callimachean Theogonies

805 toPon gr’ erkon Guento ueoB Stygb% gfuiton Gdvr,

dgAgion ¢ tb d’ Ehsi katastryfAloy dib xaroy.65
For nine years [a god who forswears his oath] is cut off from the eternal
gods nor yet does he approach the council or the feasts, for nine full
years. But then he approachs in the tenth year . . . of the immortals who
dwell in the houses of Olympus. So serious an oath the gods make the im-
perishable waters of the Styx, primeval, which pours from a rugged place.

The elements common to these passages emphasize the remoteness and

the great antiquity of Zeus’s birthplace. Neither gods nor mortals ap-
proach Calypso’s island, and her very name means “Hidden,” while in
the Hesiodic passage divinities who have broken their oaths may not
approach Mt. Olympus for nine years. Callimachus imitates the un-
usual language—oDdA . . . (Dpi)mAsgetai—but alters the two excluded
categories—gods and men—to a more restricted pairing to which we
will return below. In the Homeric passage it is Calypso’s island that is
“primeval” (dgygAh); in the Hesiodic, it is the waters of the Styx. To-
gether the two provide vivid images of an ancient place—an island sur-
rounded by a vast expanse of water combined with waters not simply
flowing, but gushing forth, both of which Callimachus exploits. In his
account, Rhea causes the first waters to burst from the rocks of the sa-
cred hill where Zeus is born. Further, the Hesiod passage serves as a ge-
ographical marker: the Styx is often located in Arcadia, near Mt. Ly-
caeon, and in mythological terms, Styx was not only the sister of Neda,
but the most famous river in Arcadia and notable in its absence from
Callimachus’s account. Since Callimachus only a few lines later makes a
considerable point about the relationship of Styx and Neda, he high-
lights not only his divergence from the Hesiodic account but also the
new prominence he has given to the hitherto obscure Neda and her role
as Zeus’s nurse.

Water for Argos

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

65. Hesiod Theogony 801–6.

Callimachean Theogonies 97

the poem exploits a folk etymology that as early as Plato’s Cratylus

linked Zeus as the source of life to the verb zpn, “to live.”66 The mother
of Zeus is ^ReAi, whose name is connected with rAv,\ ‘flow.”67 The two
proper names that Callimachus chooses for Arcadia—„zhnA% and „pi-
danpe%—have ancient etymologies that link them with aridity: „zhnA%
with gza (“dryness”) and „pidanpe% with d-pAnein (“without drink”).68
About the former, McLennan remarks: “It is . . . possible that Calli-
machus is thinking of d-Zan (“without Zeus”). The god has certainly
not yet been born; and Callimachus may be hinting at the god’s role as
Zeus CAtio%.”69 F. Bornmann points to the spontaneous behavior of the
waters citing a passage from Herodotus that describes the Nile (2.14).70
J. K. Newman goes even further: “The birth of baby Zeus signalled
abundance of water for Arcadia. Could not the birth of Ptolemy signal
the same for Egypt?”71 All three scholars are attempting to account for
Callimachus’s absorption by the peculiar hydraulics of Arcadia. Arca-
dia was notoriously a dry land, much more dependent on springs than
rivers for local irrigation. Pausanias reports about underground water
sources as well as rivers opened by earthquakes. He also notes a
Messenian tradition that Zeus was reared among the Messenians, and
his nurses were Ithome (a mountain) and Neda, the river in which he
was bathed.72 Being born on a mountain and bathed in a spring were
commonplace mythological activities for Greek gods, but no extant
source connects Rhea’s parturition or Zeus’s birth with the phenomena
described in this poem. In fact, the various ancient sources inevitably
cited (such as Pausanias) are striking for their divergence from Calli-
machus’s story. For his Alexandrian audience, however, there was an
obvious parallel to the behavior of Arcadian waters—the spontaneous
and life-bringing moisture occasioned by the rise of the Nile in an oth-

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.

Callimachus introduces gbroxo%, a word that is rare in Greek before

the Hellenistic period, though it may not be irrelevant that in Euripides’
Helen the Libyan desert is styled gbroxa pedAa.73 However, gbroxo%
appears frequently in Greco-Roman documents from the third century
b.c.e. on as a technical term.74 The entire economy of Egypt was based
on the flooding of the Nile, which leaves a rich silt deposit that fertilizes
the land it covers. Since the height of the inundation differed from year
to year, it was of some importance that accurate records be kept in
order to estimate crop yield. Each year land could be declared to be in-
undated by the Nile (bebregmAnh gp) or uninundated (gbroxo%). If for
most Greeks gbroxo% meant “unwatered” in a nonspecific way, for a
Greek living in a country so dependent upon a unique ecological cir-
cumstance, gbroxo% inserts the behavior of Arcadian rivers into a stan-
dard frame of reference for the Nile. Further, the phrase itself, Gti d’
gbroxo% ren epasa | \AzhnA%¢ mAllen dB mal’ eGydro%, appears to have

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

been modeled on a line from Hesiod’s now fragmentary Catalogue of

Women. Two versions of the line survive: 6rgo% gnydron Dbn DanaaB
uAsan 6rgo% Gnydron75 and 6rgo% gnydron Dbn Danab% poAhsen eG-
ydron.76 Whichever is the correct text, the shape of both versions and
Callimachus’s phrase coincide, locating “unwatered” at the beginning,
transforming it to “well-watered” at the end, with both adjectives pred-
icated of a single place-name (Argos, Azanis). The fragment belongs to
a well-documented legend about Argos: when Hera had dried up the
rivers in anger, Danaus’s daughters either dug or discovered the loca-
tion of underground wells.77 Callimachus includes the account of the
Argive fountains in the Aetia.78 Argos is not Arcadia, but the Argive
subtext provides a reminder of the complicated interrelationship of
Egypt and Greece. Not only are Danaus and his daughters immigrants
from Egypt, but despite the dissimilar ecologies they would appear to
have been long since associated in the Greek imagination with discov-
ering or introducing irrigation.
Callimachus’s selection of detail in describing the aridity of Arcadia
before Zeus’s birth (18–27) also seems calculated to recall the Nile:
But mighty Ladon did not yet flow, nor did Erymanthus, the clearest of
rivers; as yet all Arcadia was uninundated. . . . 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 abun-
dant water lay beneath his feet.

Compare the Victory of Sosibius, in which Callimachus introduces the

Nile as a speaker. He expresses his delight at Sosibius’s victory in this
way:
Mighty though I am, whose source no mortal man knows, in this one
thing at least I was less significant than those rivers that the white ankles
of women cross without difficulty and a child on foot without wetting his
knees (dbrAkti goAnati). (fr. 384.31–34 Pf.)

The Nile’s speech is ironic: he categorizes lesser rivers by a trope found

frequently in Egyptian literature to describe a low Nile. The following
passage, for example, comes from the “Prophecy of Neferti”: “Dry is

75. Strabo 8.6.8 cited in fr. 128 M–W.

76. Eustathius on Homer Iliad 4.171, p. 461.2 cited in fr. 128 M–W. See also Reinsch-
Werner’s remarks (1976, 36–37).
77. Apollodorus 2.1.4; Pausanias 2.37.1.
78. Fr. 66 Pf. See also Hymn to Athena 48.
100 Callimachean Theogonies

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%.

Callimachus’s aition emphasizes the following: (1) Rhea gives birth on

a hill or mountain (gro%); (2) the place is now sacred (c xpro% Cera%);
(3) pregnant women and crawling things (Crpetbn) may not approach;
(4) hence it is called the “primeval place of giving birth.” A mountain
location for birth is not unique to the mythology of Zeus, but it differs
conspiciously from the cave usually associated with the Cretan birth.81
However, these details do coincide with Egyptian cosmogony, as set out
in the previous chapter: Egyptians conceived life as having initially ap-
peared on a mound or hill that emerged from the watery void, and the
place was associated with the birth of divinities. Horus’s birth, like that
of Zeus, was claimed for many locations throughout Egypt, each of

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-

82. Frankfort 1978, 151–54; Lloyd 1988, 143.

83. Žabkar 1988, 51.
84. Burkert 1985, 24–26.
85. McLennan 1977, 42–43. See R. Parker, Miasma: Pollution and Purification in
Early Greek Religion (Oxford, 1983) 32–37. How widespread these prohibitions were is
a matter of debate. Parker offers very little documentary support, and the Zeus hymn is
suspiciously prominent as corroboration for actual cult practices, which may have varied
widely. Pausanias (8.36.3), for example, mentions “Rhea’s cave” on Mt. Lycaeon, which
no one could enter except the holy women of the goddess.
86. See McLennan 1977, 42.
102 Callimachean Theogonies

teus” to turn into all manner of different creatures. In Pindar Pythian

1.25 kePno . . . Crpetan is the Giant Typhoeus, whom the Greeks gener-
ally equated with Horus’s traditional opponent, Seth. In line 25 Calli-
machus introduces another rare word that means “venomous beast”:
kinapeta. Although these creatures are extraneous to the story of
Zeus’s birth, they are quite significant in the mythology of Horus. Seth’s
unleashing of serpents and poisonous creatures like scorpions against
the newborn was an integral part of the Horus saga, and plaques with
the image of the infant Horus throttling snakes were in wide circulation
in Hellenistic Egypt as protective devices. In this context it may also be
relevant that in the Heracliscus Theocritus chooses this same word,
Crpeta, to designate the snakes sent by Hera to attack the infant Hera-
cles (24.57). Heracles’ close connection with the Ptolemies, and Theocri-
tus’s insistence that the infant was born at the very time of Ptolemy II’s
birth, led Ludwig Koenen to make the attractive suggestion that Theocri-
tus’s poem was composed for the accession of Philadelphus as coregent.87
The ramifications of this will be explored in the next chapter. Here it is
sufficient to emphasize that Callimachus includes details in his mythic
narrative that are both jarring and slightly peculiar, as well as language—
Crpetan, kinapeta—that is not easily accounted for in Greek myth. But
these eccentricities do belong to a coherent narrative within the frame-
work of Egyptian culture—the saga of Horus-the-Child.

Hesiodic Callimachus

Lines 28–45 narrate a series of events heavily dependent on Theogony

467–506.88 In Hesiod a pregnant Rhea begs her parents (469) to devise
a plan to keep Cronus from swallowing (as usual) her expected child.
Their solution is to send her to Luktos in Crete when she is ready to de-
liver (477). When the baby is born, her mother, Gaia, receives the new-
born to raise:
tbn mAn oC DdAjato GaAa pelarh
480 Krati Dn eDreAi trefAmen dtitallAmenaA te.
Gnua min Qkto fAroysa uobn dib nAkta mAlainan,
prathn D% LAkton¢ krAcen dA C xersB laboPsa
gntri Dn dlibati, zauAh% Cpb keAuesi gaAh%.

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.

The passage concludes with an aition of the omphalos (491–500). In

the Theogony it is a great stone swaddled and given to Cronus in place
of baby Zeus. When Zeus comes to adulthood he forces Cronus to re-
gurgitate it. Zeus himself places the stone in Delphi as a marvel for
mortals (500), and presumably an index of his power. In Callimachus’s
sequence, Rhea calls upon her mother, Gaia (29), who never appears.
Callimachus provides homely details about the event: after Rhea
strikes the hill with her staff to cause a mighty flood (32), she bathes
the newborn, swaddles him (33), and then hands him over to the
nymph Neda, who carries him to Crete. In Callimachus, Gaia is in-
voked only to have her role as a surrogate preempted by the hitherto
obscure Neda, while Cronus’s hostile behavior—the reason to hide the
baby—is never directly mentioned. The suture between the Arcadian
and the Cretan birth story occurs in line 42 when the nymph leaves
Thenae for Crete, and where Callimachus calls attention to the trans-
fer with an aside about Thenae. Earlier, I suggested that the aside ef-
fected a momentary collapse of the Arcadian and Cretan landscapes.
Hesiod’s lines quoted above behave similarly to Callimachus’s in that
Gaia is already in Luktos when she receives the baby in line 479, to
which—apparently—she then returns (482). As a result scholars have
questioned the text and proposed various solutions to eliminate the
perceived difficulty.89 Callimachus seems to be repeating the inconcin-
nity of the earlier text by matching two Luktoses with two Thenaes—
but in his case the doublet indicates his divergence from Hesiod. Luk-
tos, twice mentioned, is the same place in Crete, while Thenae marked
simultaneously two different locations, thus underscoring the substitu-
tion of Neda for Gaia and the moment of transition from Calli-
machus’s version of Zeus’s birth in Arcadia into the realm of Hesiod’s,
or Crete.90 Finally, in the process of the transfer from Arcadia to Crete,
Zeus’s umbilical cord drops onto the earth, occasioning a brief aition

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

(44–45). The omphalos has shed its earlier mythological improbabil-

ity—a stone ingested by Cronus and retained for decades. It is now an
ordinary umbilical cord. This last divergence from the Theogony, in
combination with the bathing and swaddling, reinforces Zeus’s status
as a baby and humanizes him as he is transferred from one location to
another.91 Further, the location of the omphalos, or center of the world,
now shifts from Hesiod’s Delphi, a Hellenocentric center, to Crete, a
southern Mediterranean location, that is now (almost) midway be-
tween the mainland of old Greece and the new Greek world of Egypt
and North Africa.
Callimachus’s insistence on the differences between his version and
Hesiod’s again implicates us in the realm of Egyptian ideas, specifically
the hiding of Horus in Chemmis. As we saw in the previous chapter,
the story is told in Herodotus (2. 146): after Isis hands her newborn
child Apollo ( = Horus) to Leto to hide from his uncle Typhon ( =
Seth), who was intent on harming him, Leto hides the child on an is-
land that begins to float, presumably to deceive Typhon. Thus it is not
in Greek myth but in Egyptian that we find correspondences with the
discrete elements that Callimachus has chosen to emphasize in his birth
narrative. The pharaoh himself, at the time of the Ptolemaic takeover,
was specifically linked in cult to Horus-the-Child, a connection that
the Ptolemies fostered. Callimachus’s poem exploits this identification.
The foregrounding of the new figure of the nurse and the conveyance
to an island (although not floating) to protect the child is a striking in-
novation in the Greek story; in combination with emphasis on the re-
lationship between the birth of the god and the coming of waters to a
dry land, Callimachus’s narrative can be understood within an Egypt-
ian imaginative framework. Even when we factor out the many ele-
ments that are folkloric—evil relative, precocious childhood—the spe-
cific details and their arrangement in Callimachus’s story and Egyptian
myth coincide: both divine children are born on sacred hills, they are
handed off to nurses to be hidden and reared on an island, venomous
creatures appear in both stories (somewhat gratuitously, we might
think, in Callimachus), both children are in danger from their male rel-
atives (Seth, Cronus), and their births are causally linked to bringing

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.

In these eleven lines Callimachus seems to be referring to a well-known

story, the details of which he is determined to mention, but upon which
he has little time to dwell. This is a careful contrivance for multiple ef-
fects. The breathless pace of the narrative is mimetic of Zeus’s own
rapid growth to maturity. The infant Greek god is now inserted into the
discursive field of a Cretan Zeus with his Near Eastern analogues, and
Callimachus realigns the inherited tradition and figures Zeus as a
human baby by downplaying or eliminating the supernatural, in prepa-
ration for the identification of Zeus with “our king” as the poem con-
tinues.
106 Callimachean Theogonies

There is no extant story of Zeus’s birth on Crete either before or

after Callimachus that includes all of Callimachus’s details, and indeed,
he seems to have intermingled elements from a variety of sources (if he
has not actually invented them). The Dictaean Meliae, for example, are
not elsewhere attested in connection with Zeus. They appear in Hes-
iod’s Theogony (187), having sprung from the blood gushing from
Uranus’s genitals after his son Cronus castrates him. Other elements are
not found in Homer or Hesiod, but in the Orphic cosmologies.92 Here,
also, Callimachus alludes to material that we earlier located in Epi-
menides and Euhemerus. By returning the god to Crete, he inevitably
recalls the rejected birth story and the tomb. As we saw above, Cretan
Zeus was in origin a dying god, whose worship was conducted in caves
and through fertility rites, but who at a later date was assimilated at
least partially to Olympian Zeus. Many of the details Callimachus in-
cludes in this section belong to the Cretan vegetation spirit, rather than
the Olympian god: for example, Adrasteia and the Corybantes were
originally associated with the worship of the Great Mother in Phrygian
Ida, but their cult was connected with Cretan Zeus at least as early as
the fourth century b.c.e.93 Moreover, the poet appears here to be ra-
tionalizing or “Euhemerizing” his material: as the section opens
(42–45) we find that the omphalos is now the divine umbilical cord;
Amaltheia is now a goat, not a nymph; the bees are simply bees; and the
Couretes (KoArhte%), who in the Palaikastro hymn are the attendants
of the Great Kouros (Zeus) and derive their name from being his com-
panions, are here, like the Corybantes, downgraded to the status of
babysitters, with their name linked etymologically with Zeus’s infantile
behavior, that is, koyrAzonto%. The Meliae conform to this euhemeriz-
ing pattern: in Hesiod the by-products of a brutal myth, here they are
punningly linked to nurture. melAa was a manna ash that secreted a
gum (mAli); glykB karion (49) functions both as a gloss and as a tran-
sition from one kind of mAli to another—Grga melAssh%.94 Finally, Cal-
limachus’s insistence upon the rapidity with which Zeus grew a beard
may be intended to call our attention to the fact that Cretan Zeus, like

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

Dionysus, was always represented as a beardless youth, while rejecting

that very tradition.
Callimachus is the earliest poet we have who connects bees with the
baby Zeus, though Euhemerus may also have done so.95 A variant, now
known only from a late source,96 makes Melissa, along with Amalthea,
daughter of one Melisseus, a king of Crete, who introduced the cult of
the Great Mother97 and was said to have made his daughter a priestess
of the Melissae, or Bee Maidens. Like Adrasteia and the Corybantes,
this tale belongs to the tradition of Zeus as a Near Eastern deity. On the
surface, Callimachus rejects this mythological option; his bees suddenly
appear in the region: “For suddenly the work of the Panacrian bee ap-
peared in the Idaean hills, which they call Panacra” (49–50). The pres-
ence of bees in the region where Zeus is hidden particularly strengthens
the connection with the Egyptian story. Horus’s hiding place in the
Delta was Chemmis, which is usually taken to mean “place of bees” in
Egyptian. Moreover, as we saw in the introduction, in Egyptian royal
titulature the bee is the hieroglyphic symbol for the king of Lower
Egypt or the Delta region; hence Chemmis is sometimes called the
“Home of the Bee King.”98 In this context consider the odd word Calli-
machus uses of Zeus—Csspna (66)—in a passage where Grga dB
xeirpn echoes an earlier Grga melAssh% (50).99 Before Callimachus,
Csspn occurs only as a title of the priests of Artemis at Ephesus in a
usage that is presumably analogous to the title Melissai for the priest-
esses at Delphi (see LSJ s.v.). It is glossed by the scholiast on this pas-
sage as “properly the king of bees,” though here, and again in the Aetia
(fr. 178.23 Pf.), it is used of a human king. Both ancient and modern
commentators have puzzled over the word to little avail,100 but given the

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

Note how djB d’ dnabhsa% is echoed by eDrB bAbhken, tAleia by teleP,

and Dfrassao by noasi. In both, conception and accomplishment are
joined, and there is emphasis as well on the swiftness with which goals
are attained. Moreover, in lines 58–59, the historical fact of Ptolemy II’s
succession to the throne over his older brothers serves as the subtext for
the mythological “fact” of Zeus ruling over his.102 In this section and
what follows, ostensibly a Greek hymnic presentation of divine aretai,
Callimachus shows a marked preference for allusion to Hesiod, whom
he actually quotes at line 79. It is via this intense reliance on Hesiod
that Callimachus has inserted himself into the theogonic tradition and
by means of which he now adumbrates the ideological essentials of
Egyptian kingship: the link between the king and the god, the victory
over chaos personified as a cosmic enemy, and the maintainance of cos-
mic harmony or justice. Not surprisingly, Hesiod’s texts exhibit demon-
strable links with the ancient Near East, and particular patterns of
kingship.103
Callimachus begins this section by allying himself with a Hesiodic
view of the relationship of power, hierarchy, and order. He critiques the
standard version of Zeus’s ascension to the throne of the high gods,
namely, that he and his brothers cast lots for the heavens, the ocean,
and the underworld, respectively, and that Zeus won. Rather, Calli-
machus tells us: “Casting lots did not make you king of the gods, but
the strength of your hands” (oG se uepn Csspna paloi uAsan, Grga dB
xeirpn, 66). He thus appears to reject Homer (Iliad 15.186–93), where
this well-known story occurs, evidently preferring Hesiod’s account
from the Theogony (881–85) in which the gods themselves urge Zeus to
become their king. Zeus’s “deeds of strength” are a leitmotif of the
Theogony: they include freeing his brothers (496) and then the Cy-
clopes (501–5), who gave him the thunderbolt, and defeating the Titans
(685–819) and Typhoeus (820–80). In the Theogony itself, the narra-
tive immediately preceding Zeus’s selection recounts at some length
Zeus’s struggle with and victory over Typhoeus. Typhoeus was a son of
Gaia, one of the ghgeneP%, or Earth-Born, and (in a manner of speaking)
Zeus’s uncle. He is characterized by fierce heat and, at least in Hesiod’s
story, is presented as the sole—and serious—competitor to Zeus for
sovereignity. The battle with Typhoeus in Hesiod is clearly a doublet of
the war against the Titans, though it serves a different narrative func-

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.

In terms of the Hesiodic model the defeat of Typhoeus is the decisive

act that confirms Zeus’s right to divine kingship and legitimates his pa-
tronage of earthly kings. Callimachus insists that Zeus’s Grga xeirpn
enable him to rule and that his choice of kings is a natural consequence
of this power, since all other skills and arts come under the sway of the
ruler.110 Thus hierarchy and ordering are the prerogatives of the king,
and the task of maintaining that order falls first to Zeus, and then to
earthly kings whose judgments he watches over. Just kings are re-
warded with prosperity, for which Callimachus coins the word ryhfe-
\
nAh, “flowing wealth,” from a Homeric phrase describing the wealth of
a king of Sidon.111 “Flowing wealth” is the mot juste for the king of the
Nile, who is introduced in the very next lines. The interrelationship of
prosperity of the land and just rule is not unfamiliar to Greeks;112 in-
deed it is to be found in Hesiod’s Works and Days in the very passage
that Callimachus’s linguistic borrowings foreground. But it was by no
means as central or as dominant in Greek thought patterns as it was in
Near Eastern.113
Although the language of this passage is thoroughly Hesiodic, the
rhetorical impact is not. Dk dB Dib% basilpe% belongs to the opening of

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

114. F. Wassermann (“Ägyptisches bei Kallimachos,” PhW 45 [1925]: 1277) com-

pares a New Kingdom text of Ramesses II: “There is no land that you have not trodden
over” and “If you dream something in the night, by daybreak it is quickly accomplished.”
To cite a more contemporary example, an Isis hymn in the Philae temple states:
“What(ever) comes forth from her mouth is accomplished immediately”: and an Isis
hymn at Kyme: “What I decree, that is also accomplished” (Žabkar 1988, 69, 150–51).
Cf. Koenen 1977, 60 n. 123. Of course, a Greek parallel (Homeric Hymn to Hermes
17–19) can also be found for lines 87–88 (Clauss 1986, 161); this is discussed also by
Reinsch-Werner 1976, 53 n. 1.
115. See Reinsch-Werner 1976, 61–63 and 61 n. 1.
Callimachean Theogonies 113

ostensibly expresses no doubts about the relationship between Zeus

and “our king.” If the old poets (dhnaioB . . . doidoB) are mistaken or tell
stories about Zeus and theogonies that are untrue, Callimachus deliber-
ately positions himself against them and asks that he may tell—not true
stories—but more persuasive fictions (65: ceydoAmhn, dAonto% e ken
pepAuoien dkoyan). He presents himself as devising fictions, as experi-
menting with a variety of inherited traditions in order to construct a
lineation for the king of the Nile, who is neither Greek nor Egyptian,
but both. Callimachus is writing for a Greek-speaking audience, obvi-
ously, but an audience that lived in Egypt and could not have been un-
aware of the mythology of Egyptian kingship and its attendant ideol-
ogy, an ideology that explicitly connects the birth of the king with the
birth of the god Horus as well as with the beginning of the cosmos and
the flow of water. Callimachus experiments with constructing a parallel
cosmology for his Greek-Egyptian king in which ostensibly he sets out
to move from a primordial Greek landscape (Arcadia) via traditional
Greek theogonic material to arrive in Egypt and the court of a human
king. But the trajectory is not linear. Callimachus locates Zeus’s birth in
an originary Greek landscape that betrays an uncanny resemblance to
the Nile, but as the newborn approaches Egypt via Crete, he becomes
progressively more human until, at the end of the poem, elements of his
discrete identity pass over to Ptolemy.
Several recent analyses of this hymn have focused on the relationship
of truth-telling and lying. J. Clauss, for example, observes that the
hymn is structured around the poetic resolution of two lies: one about
the birth of Zeus (7–8: DceAsanto . . . cePstai) and the other about
Zeus’s accession to the throne (60: oD pampan dlhuAe%; 65: cey-
doAmhn).116 Now both of these markers of fictionality or lying precede
sections of the text that, I have been arguing, are meant to signify
within both Greek and Egyptian narrative spheres. If this is so, what
constitutes “truth” or “lies” may differ fundamentally with one’s cul-
tural perspective; a Greek “lie” may well contain an Egyptian “truth,”
and vice versa. For example, Cretans are said to be liars because they
built a tomb to Zeus, who, for Greeks, “is forever” (DssB gbr aDeA), but,
in contrast, the Egyptians venerated Osiris precisely because he died,
and his many tombs throughout Egypt were a notable feature of the
landscape. If Callimachus deliberately constructed his poetry to explore

116. 1986, 158.

114 Callimachean Theogonies

the existence of competing truths—that Ptolemy is mortal, that Ptolemy

is a god—if the central tension in the poem is not a contrived “doubt”
concerning whether Zeus was born in Arcadia or Crete, but whether
Ptolemy and his kingship are to be regarded as Greek or Egyptian or
both, then the pervasive ambiguity about the relationship of poetry to
truth and of the poet’s ability to utter it that many critics see in Calli-
machus’s poetry becomes more explicable. It is not the pose of a cynic
nor the result of belatedness in respect to the achievement of earlier
Greek poetry; rather, it may stem from the complexity of the task that
the poet has set himself, namely, to explore the potential for cultural in-
teractions for which there was not, as yet, a corresponding reality. Like
Hesiod before him, then, Callimachus—to modify Detienne’s formula-
tion quoted above—is creating “a myth of emergence” suitable for the
new royal line of the Ptolemies and by means of his poetic voice not
only articulating but actively collaborating “in setting this new world
in order.”

the hymn to delos

We have seen how the narrative details of the Hymn to Zeus conform
to the Egyptian tale of Horus-in-Chemmis. We have also seen that a
version of this story was recounted in Herodotus, where Horus was
identified not with Zeus, but with Apollo. In Herodotus’s version, Leto
was the nurse of the newborn who was hidden on a floating island to
escape Typhon. In Callimachus’s fourth hymn, addressed to Delos,
these same elements are combined to produce another theogony with
narrative ties to the Egyptian. A number of scholars have already iden-
tified the Egyptian patterns of thought to be found in this hymn.117 My
intention is not to duplicate their work but to examine the Delos hymn
in light of the Zeus hymn, which despite differences of length and em-
phases displays at its core a similar theogonic narrative. The Delos
hymn must have been composed at least a decade after the Zeus hymn:
lines 162–95 refer to the historical circumstances of 275 b.c.e, a mutiny

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

of Ptolemy II’s Gaulish mercenaries, and provide a clear terminus post

quem. The relative unimportance of the Gaulish mutiny, however, lim-
its the efficacy of the topical reference to within at most a few years
after the event, and most scholars suggest the range 275–270 b.c.e. At
any rate, the prominence of Cos in the poem indicates that it was writ-
ten before the end of the Chremonidean War, when Ptolemy lost effec-
tive control of the island; this provides an extreme lower terminus of
about 260 b.c.e. No specific occasion suggests itself, though the theme
of Apollo’s birth lends credence to W. H. Mineur’s supposition that it
was written as a genethliakon, or birthday hymn, for Ptolemy II.
Mineur points to the habit of composing and performing birthday
poems for those who were founders of philosophical schools, suggest-
ing that such a practice may also have taken place in the Museum.118 Al-
though it is tempting to accept this argument, since it would provide a
further connection with the Zeus hymn, Minuer’s evidence is suggestive
rather than conclusive. Callimachus’s hymn was modeled on the Home-
ric Hymn to Apollo, which falls into two parts—Delian Apollo and
Pythian Apollo119—and, as Peter Bing has demonstrated, several of Pin-
dar’s odes—the fragmentary Hymn to Zeus, which stood at the opening
of the ancient edition, and the fifth and seventh Paeans.120
The story in broad outline is as follows: (1) Asteria, a nymph who
shunned Zeus’s bed, jumped into the sea and became an island—a float-
ing island—wandering around the Mediterranean; (2) Leto, who did
not shun Zeus, found herself pregnant with Apollo (Apollo’s twin sister,
Artemis, is notably absent in this hymn); (3) Hera, Zeus’s wife, is a fear-
some opponent and persecutes her rival, who flees throughout the
Aegean looking for a place to give birth; in her jealousy Hera prevents
her as long as she can; (4) Leto arrives at the island of Cos, but
Apollo—from her womb—prophesies that Ptolemy II Philadelphus is
destined to be born at Cos and urges Leto to seek out another island;
(5) finally, Leto arrives at Asteria (which only after Apollo’s birth is
called Delos), where the island welcomes her, and she gives birth as the
river, Inopus, swells as a result of its subterranean connection to the
Nile (205–8); Hera is reconciled; the island immediately becomes fixed

118. 1984, 10–11.

119. For the relationship of the two parts as well as the dating, see R. Janko, Homer,
Hesiod, and the Hymns (Oxford, 1982) 114–32. On the Pythian section, see M. L. West,
“Cynaethus’ Hymn to Apollo,”CQ 25 (1975) 161–70.
120. 1988, 96–110. See also I. Rutherford, “Pindar on the Birth of Apollo,” CQ 38.1
(1988) 65–75.
116 Callimachean Theogonies

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

thought that in Herodotus’s version of the birth of Horus-in-Chemmis,

the nurse, Leto, should be identified with Wedjoyet, the goddess of
Buto, who was sometimes associated with Isis. It is also possible that
Herodotus’s source has in mind one of the four protecting goddesses
who can figure in the story, or Hathor, usually depicted as a cow-
headed deity, who is sometimes Horus’s nurse, sometimes his mother.
But whatever variant of the birth of Horus stands behind Herodotus’s
version we should note that although a nurse for Apollo/divine new-
born is absent in the earlier Greek versions, the figure is a significant
actor in Herodotus’s Egyptian tale as well as in both of Callimachus’s
poems. The third element—Apollo’s prophecy—provides a different
sort of parallel: between the god Apollo and the future king. It also
provides the place in which Apollo’s future accomplishments (in Greek
hymnic terms, his aretai) are sketched: the defeat of Pytho, the “great
serpent,” whom Apollo slays in order to establish his most authorita-
tive prophetic seat at Delphi; and the killing of the children of Niobe,
who would appear to have been hereditary enemies of Apollo and
Artemis. Apollo then prophesies about Ptolemy’s birth on Cos, cou-
pling it with his victory over a group of Gaulish mercenaries who had
rebeled against him and threatened to take over Egypt.
This third element interweaves Greek mythology, contemporary his-
tory, and motifs from the ideology of Egyptian kingship. The poem is
set up rather obviously to move from chaos to order. Initially, nature is
in deep disarray as Asteria, an untethered island, wanders the Aegean
and as hostile divine forces threaten cosmic upheaval in Hera’s attempt
to impede Leto’s giving birth. Initially, we find a narrative sequence sim-
ilar to that of the Zeus hymn, though now attributed specifically to di-
vine malevolence.124 Rivers are blocked and threatened with aridity
(125–35), a correlative in nature to Leto’s blocked parturition. But the
birth itself marks the change to order, peace, and stability at the very
moment when the Nile inundation begins to flow (205–8). The island is
fixed in the sea and is finally able to harbor seafarers, but it also be-
comes a cultic center sacred to the god who was born there, at whose
shrines joyful worshippers are imagined proleptically. The fearful dance
of natural phenomena (136–40), terrified by the din of Ares’ shield, is

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

transformed into the celebratory choir of islands and dancing maidens

at the end of the poem (300–306). The island’s new status is marked by
a transition from adelos, or obscurity and darkness, to delos, or clarity
and light, symbolized by a profusion of gold. At the center of the tran-
sition and indeed its cause is the birth of Apollo, on the divine level, and
the birth of Ptolemy, on the human. Apollo’s prophecies function to
link past, present, and future, and his birth with Ptolemy’s.
Initially Apollo prophesies his own defeat of Pytho and the children
of Niobe (90–97);125 later he foretells the birth of Philadelphus and his
victory over “latterday Titans” (162–95). He begins with his own fu-
ture killing of Pytho, a primeval serpent. Not coincidentally. The defeat
of Pytho is the central feature of the Pythian section of the Homeric
Hymn to Apollo. In this hymn Pytho has a peculiar history. Hera, furi-
ous about Zeus’s philanderings—specifically the occasion that results in
the birth of Athena—decides to get pregnant without his assistance. She
prays to Earth and Heaven and the Titans to bear an offspring who will
be stronger than Zeus by as much as Zeus is stronger than Cronus
(339–40). In a scene reminiscent of Rhea striking the rock in the Zeus
hymn, Hera then strikes Earth with her hand, and her prayer is an-
swered. When her time came, she gave birth to Typhaon,126 and en-
trusted him to Pytho to rear. Typhaon’s fate is not recorded in the
Homeric hymn, but Pytho clearly functions as a Typhaon-surrogate in
dealing death to all who enter her vicinity in Delphi. Structurally Ty-
phaon and his nurse Pytho are doublets of Apollo and his nurse Delos,
or rather their cosmic inversion—Delos is light, order, clarity, and song,
while Pytho is darkness, disorder, and chaos. To defeat Pytho, at least in
the terms of the Homeric hymn, is to bring order and prophetic light

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

into the hitherto oppressed region of terror and doom. In an analogous

fashion, the defeat of the forces of chaos by order in Egyptian cosmol-
ogy is often represented as the defeat of the serpent, Apophis, by
Horus.127 Indeed, we have seen in an earlier chapter that Seth, like
Apopis, was identified as disorder and chaos and was locked in an eter-
nal struggle with Horus and his surrogate, the pharaoh. Further, Seth
was identified with death-bearing serpents and often with Apopis him-
self. Just as the infant Horus destroyed the serpents sent against him, or
as the adult Horus continually wards off Apophis, so the pharaoh in
routing or killing the enemies of Egypt symbolically replicates the vic-
tory of order over chaos, or of Horus over Seth and Apophis.
If in the Zeus hymn the aretai of the god and by extension the king
were expressed in terms of characteristic and potential, and the slaying
of the enemy took place offstage in the Hesiodic subtext, in the Delos
hymn that action is stage center. Apollo not only predicts his own con-
test with and defeat of Pytho, he also foretells the birth of Ptolemy and
his defeat of the Gauls. The two events are linked: Ptolemy’s actions
symbolically replicate those of the god, just as Ptolemy’s island birth
symbolically replicates that of Apollo. The victory over the Gauls,
however historically insignificant, is mythologically an ideal exemplum.
The Gauls are external enemies of Egypt, whose duty it was historically
for the pharaoh to repulse. All such enemies were synonymous with
Seth/disorder/chaos. Callimachus signals this by labeling them “latter-
day Titans” (dcAgonoi Titpne%, 174), defeat of whom in the Hesiodic
Theogony brings about the orderly rule of the Ouranids. Moreover, the
Gauls had previously attacked Delphi and been repulsed; hence
Ptolemy’s struggle against them in Egypt can be understood as an ex-
tension of that earlier battle, a battle that, like the defeat of the Pytho,
which takes place in mythological time, is but one moment in the con-
tinual struggle of elements of disruption against those of order and
light. Similarly, Theseus, who arrives at the end of the poem after his es-
cape from the “son of Pasiphae” (that is, the Minotaur) and the “coiled
seat of the crooked labyrinth” (311), provides an example of this same
activity from the realm of heroes or demigods. The monstrous beast,
half man, half bull, who resembles Pytho as he threatens death from the
center of his coiled lair, is defeated by Theseus in heroic time, and the
event is celebrated by choral song, repeated annually on Delos.

127. Bing 1988, 130 n. 69.

120 Callimachean Theogonies

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

Another, from Napata in the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty, hymns Piye:

Hear what I did, exceeding the ancestors, | I, the King, image of god, |
Living likeness of Atum! | Who left the womb marked as ruler, | Feared
by those greater than he! | His father knew, his mother perceived: | He
would be ruler from the egg.129

Moreover, Apollo’s precocious utterances take the form of post even-

tum prophecy, a device that was consistently exploited in Egyptian ide-
ology to position the new king as a creator and renewer of both cosmic
and political order.130 E. Hornung explains in terms that could easily de-
scribe the dynamic of the Delos hymn:
Each new government signaled a new beginning for the world, and be-
fore its commencement primeval chaos reigned, as documented in Egypt-
ian texts that report anarchy at the death of the ruler. Injustice and disor-
der would rule until a new king could ascend the throne and reintroduce
maat as the basis of all order. Laughter and rejoicing would then take the
place of sorrow, and the lawless of anarchy would give way to a spirit of
peace and reconciliation in which a person might even “embrace the man
who killed his father.”131

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

128. Žabkar 1988, 34–35.

129. Lichtheim 1980, 68.
130. Compare the discussion of Sesoösis in Hecataeus of Abdera in chapter 2.
131. 1992, 163.
Callimachean Theogonies 121

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

The Heracliscus is a relatively short narrative poem in hexameters that

takes as its subject the infant Heracles. The surviving text divides easily
into three discrete sections: (1) Heracles throttling the snakes that are
sent by Hera to kill him in his cradle (1–63); (2) Teiresias’s prophecy of
Heracles’ future greatness and eventual immortality (64–102); and (3)
the detailing of Heracles’ education in the arts as well as warfare

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

Dionysus who, if he knows how to raise up a clear-voiced song, fails to

receive the gift suitable to his art” (112–14) suggests actual experience
rather more than mere literary imitation of such events. Although the
poet need not have been referring to the Heracliscus, or even his own
victory, the comment does allow the possibility that he had written for
competitive performance in the past. Since Idylls 24 and 17 are linked
by similar treatments of Heracles, allusion to the earlier in the later
poem would have been entirely appropriate.
Although the Ptolemies are nowhere mentioned in the Heracliscus,
there are excellent reasons not only to include the poem within The-
ocritus’s court poetry, but to date it to the beginning of Philadelphus’s
reign. Theocritus locates the poetic event very specifically: he insists
that Heracles is ten months old—as against the Pindaric version in
which the snakes attack the newborn—and that the time is “midnight
when the Bear sets opposite Orion himself, who shows his great shoul-
der” (11–12: rmo% dA strAfetai mesonAktion D% dAsin 6rkto% |
\VrAvna kat’ aDtan, f d’ dmfaAnei mAgan rmon). Gow construed the
specifics about Orion to refer to the relatively narrow time period in
which the only star in the constellation visible was Betelgeuse (high up
in the shoulder), which set at midnight in mid-February and rose at
midnight in late August in 300 b.c.e.12 He preferred the February date
because when Orion rose, more than a shoulder would have become
visible.13 By Gow’s reckoning, Heracles’ birth date would have fallen in
late April, a circumstance that led him to link the performance of the
Heracliscus with the celebration of the coronation of Philadelphus as
coregent in Dystros in 285 b.c.e., since Dystros in that year was
thought to have fallen in April. Ludwig Koenen’s recalculation of the
Ptolemiac calender places Dystros of the year in question not in April
but in the previous December,14 though in an appendix to his edition of
the inscription in which the relevant information occurs, he too main-
tained that the Heracliscus was performed during the celebration of the
Basileia and Genethlia in 285/4,15 suggesting that the August date for
the astronomical indicators might be a better possibility. There is an-

12. 1950, 2: 419.

13. He rose on his side with “shoulder, belt, and foot . . . more or less together”
(Gow 2: 417 ad 11f.).
14. 1977, 85–86. He further revised this (1993, 74), with schematic and attendant
discussion. Weber (1993, 172–73) follows Grzybek (1990, 97), in whose own dating
scheme the Basileia and the coronation no longer coincide, but see Koenen’s criticisms of
Grzybek (1993, 73 n. 6).
15. 1977, 86.
126 Theocritean Regencies

other option, however. In her 1979 commentary on the poem, H.

White, independent of Koenen and without trying to connect composi-
tion to a specific occasion, nonetheless argued on the basis of literary
parallels that Theocritus’s phrase referred to the time during which the
Bear set at midnight opposite a rising Orion. White linked Odyssey 5.
272–74 (“[Odysseus] kept his eye on the Pleiades and late-setting
Boötes, and the Bear whom men call the Wagon, who turns about and
looks at Orion,” strAfetai kaA t’ \VrAvna dokeAei) to Aratus,
Phaenomena 581–88. Aratus locates the midnight setting of Boötes
precisely at the time when Orion rises, a phenomenon scholars agree
occurs “between the end of September and the end of October.”16 The
Odyssey passage may also be thematically relevant: Odysseus has just
begun his journey away from Calypso’s island in a small raft when he is
attacked by the malevolence of Poseidon. The infant Heracles, who has
been put to bed in his father’s shield is about to be attacked by malevo-
lence of Hera. However, Theocritus inverts the passage: while Odysseus
cries out in fear a wish to have died at Troy (305–6), the doughty infant
laughs and easily dispatches his tormenters (56–58). Theocritus’s echo
of the astronomical description (strAfetai . . . \VrAvna) would seem
prima facie to indicate that the events of Heracliscus took place at the
same time of year as Odysseus’s departure from Calypso’s island.17 With
a late September-early October dating, Heracles’ birth date would in-
deed fall in the last half of December, and Gow’s original inference
about the poem can stand. It is possible to object to such an early dat-
ing by pointing to Heracles’ marriage to Hebe (84). But the inclusion of
this detail from Heracles’ biography does not necessarily require the
poem to have been written after the marriage of Philadelphus to his sis-
ter, Arsinoe II, which occurred between 279 and 274 b.c.e. The mar-
riage, after all, was a very familiar part of Heracles’ mythology,18 and

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)

Domesticating elements from heroic poetry is standard operating pro-

cedure for Theocritus—one might compare the cup (kissybion) in the
first Idyll.22 But the shield is more than a humorous domesticating
touch; detailing the circumstances of its acquisition must be meant to
recall Heracles’ conception. It was while Amphitryon, Alcmena’s hus-
band, was beseiging Pterelaus’s city that Zeus lay with her and begot
Heracles. He did this by assuming the appearance of her husband. In
Greek myth, the assumption of the appearance of a human male is just
one of the many transformations Zeus uses to gain access to human fe-
males. Such a physical alteration is analogous to appearing as a shower
of gold, the method Zeus chose to reach Danae, the mother of Perseus,
or as a swan, the form he chose to inseminate Leda, the mother of
Helen and the Dioscuri. But unlike many of Zeus’s other metamor-
phoses this one preserves the virtue of the lady in question from even a
hint of impropriety—in her union with Zeus she was unsuspecting, be-

21. See Fantuzzi 2001b.

22. See, for example, Halperin’s detailed discussion (1983, 161–83). This feature of
Theocritus’s poetry has been discussed by a number of critics; see Hunter 1996a, 27 n.
105, for a recent bibliography.
Theocritean Regencies 129

having as a proper wife in accommodating her lawful spouse. While the

ruse allows the mother of one of Ptolemy’s ancestors her unblemished
virtue—and the virtue of the Ptolemies’ women is a theme in Idyll 17—
it does create a certain ambiguity about Heracles’ actual paternity,
upon which the poem capitalizes. In a number of ways it corresponds
to the ambiguity about the birthplace of Zeus exploited by Calli-
machus. If Callimachus expressed doubt whether his Zeus was Arca-
dian or Cretan, or by extension, as I have suggested, whether he is to be
figured as a Greek or an Egyptian monarch, Theocritus’s recollection of
the circumstances of Heracles’ conception produced the same effect.
In terms of Greek myth, the story allows the Ptolemies, who claim
descent from Heracles, at least one divine ancestor,23 and it is possible
that Theocritus chose this particular image—the child in the shield—to
implicitly remind his audience of Ptolemy I. The following anecdote is
preserved in the Suda and attributed to Aelian;24
[Lagus] married Arsinoe, the mother of Ptolemy Soter. And being unre-
lated to him (oDdBn oQ prosakonta), Lagus then exposed this Ptolemy in
a bronze shield (DjAuhken Dp’ dspAdo% xalkp%). And a tale comes from
Macedon that says an eagle came near and extended its wings and rose
up to protect him from the direct rays of the sun and the downpour when
it rained. And besides, it put to flight ordinary birds, but rent asunder
quails and fed the blood to him as milk.

If this image stands behind the opening of the Heracliscus, by retroject-

ing it into the past, Theocritus constructs family history as a series of
repeating events: Soter exposed in the shield is now repeating the be-
havior of his divine ancestor, just as in the Ptolemy, the language of
aDxmhtb PtolemaPe, | aDxmhtu PtolemaAi (56–57) for father and son
conveys an unbroken chain from one generation to another.25 Genera-
tional sameness is a significant feature of pharaonic succession,26 and it
is possible that Theocritus may be alluding to that aspect of Ptolemaic
kingship in the opening of the Heracliscus and in the Ptolemy. In any
case, the ambiguity over Heracles’ fathering provides another doublet

23. See, for instance, Zanker 1987, 180–81.

24. Fr. 285 Herscher. A number of scholars have noted the connection: e.g., Gow 2:
416 n. 4; Koenen 1993, 44–45; Weber 1993, 311 and n. 3; Hunter 1996a, 27.
25. The anecdote may be connected with the report in Pausanius (1.6.2) and Curtius
(9.8.22) that Soter was really the son of Philip II, though this is generally taken to be of a
later date. See Herz 1992, 72–73, for details. The story as it stands implies no more than
signal divine favor for Soter.
26. See Koenen 1983, 163–64.
130 Theocritean Regencies

of sorts—Alexander. His competing paternities—Zeus Ammon (on the

divine level), Philip II (on the human)—correlated to historical circum-
stance in which Alexander as king of both Greeks and Egyptians was
required to operate on two different ideological levels. As a Macedon-
ian Greek he was a human king and a participant in Greek culture, but
as an Egyptian pharaoh he was required to be a god.
This double vision extends also to Heracles. Alcmena’s divine in-
semination has a very particular analogue in Egyptian myth. The
theogamy, or union of the god with the wife of the pharaoh, in the
guise of her husband, was a staple of royal ideology, and we saw ear-
lier how it was Hellenized in the Alexander Romance. The parallel
with the Heracles story is probably not coincidental. Walter Burkert,
and M. L. West following him, argues that the two stories are actively
interconnected and that the Egyptian birth myth was attached to the
Greek Heracles in the course of the growth of his legend (not that The-
ocritus would have known this).27 Whatever the merit of Burkert’s or
West’s observations, it is obvious that they were stimulated by the
structural parallels between the two stories, parallels that were equally
available to the Ptolemies and Theocritus and must have been a salient
factor in the selection of Heracles as an ancestor for the royal house.
On some levels, Heracles was a far more obvious mythological model
for kings intending to rule both Greeks and Egyptians than Calli-
machus’s Zeus, because the idea of a Greek as well as a Near Eastern
or Egyptian Heracles was a staple in Greek writing about these regions
(Egypt, Libya, and Phoenicia) by the fourth century. Even a century
earlier Herodotus elaborates upon the idea of two Heracleses in his
Egypt book, telling us:

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

Herodotus further concludes that the Egyptian Heracles was to be

equated with a Tyrian deity, who in turn was identified with the Phoeni-
cian god Melqart.29 He also marks out a unique characteristic of Hera-
cles’ persona that permitted some flexibility in the way he might be con-
ceptualized. He could be regarded as a divinity, a demigod, or a hero:

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

Nor are Heracles’ Near Eastern connections confined to historical

writing. Heracles killing the Egyptian king Busiris, who regularly sacri-
ficed strangers, was a popular theme in fifth-century vase painting. In
many renditions of the myth, Heracles is depicted in poses that seem to
imitate or appropriate pharaonic behavior: on the Caeretian hydra, for
example, Heracles “tramples” Busiris’s slaves underfoot, and on a
number of other vases he strides forward and wields an Egyptian like a
club, as if “smiting the foe.”31 In another Greek myth, Heracles crosses
the sea in a golden bowl borrowed from the sun-god Helios to journey
to the far west in search of the cattle of Geryon. The folkloric elements
of this tale are well documented, and more than one scholar has
pointed out the similarity of Heracles’ behavior to Egyptian myth.32 The
Egyptian sun-god, Re, nightly in his sun bark, accompanied by the
souls of the dead (called “the cattle of Re”), traveled from west to east

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

The Heracliscus continues with a description of the nocturnal attack of

the snakes and Heracles’ dispatching of them (11–33). The narrative
closely follows Pindar, though Theocritus’s account is considerably
more elaborate in its detail. The Greek audience would already have
been familiar with the image of Heracles grappling with the snakes, at
least in a general way,36 but Theocritus imbues it with a concreteness
and specificity of detail that runs slightly counter to usual representa-
tions. The children rest peacefully in their unorthodox cradle, lulled to
sleep by a doting mother:
cptomAna dB gynb kefalp% myuasato paAdvn¢
\eEdet›, Dmb brAfea, glykerbn kaB DgArsimon Epnon¢
eEdet›, Dmb cyxa, dA’ ddelfeoA, AGsoa tAkna¢

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

glbioi eDnazoisue kaB glbioi dp Ekoisue.’

10 f% famAna dAnhse sako% mAga¢ toB% d’ Elen Epno%.
Touching the boys’ heads, the woman soothed them: “Sleep, my children,
a sweet sleep from which you awake; sleep safe, children, two brothers,
my souls, may your rest be blest, and blest may you come to the dawn.”
Speaking in this way, she rocked the great shield. And sleep overtook
them. (6–10)

Previous scholars have noted the verbal and contextual similarities

between the opening of the Heracliscus and a fragment of Simonides in
which Danae sings a lullaby to her infant son, Perseus, as they float
upon the sea, locked up in a chest: eQde brAfo%, eCdAtv dB panto%, eC-
dAtv d’ gmetron kakan (“Sleep, baby, sleep; may the sea sleep; may my
measureless evil sleep”).37 The Simonidean intertext introduces Perseus,
who, as a descendant of Danaus and an ancestor of Heracles, forms a
link in the chain that joins Greece to Egypt by blood. Within the Greek
tradition Perseus had a long association with Libya and Ethiopia as a
slayer of the snake-haired Gorgon and the sea monster who attacked
Andromeda. His passage over Libya with the Gorgon head, dripping
gore, was the source of the poisonous serpents in that region.38 Thus
Perseus is not merely a forefather, but a model for his descendant’s signal
exploits. Moreover, according to Herodotus (2.91), Egyptians in
Achmim venerated Perseus and celebrated games in his honor, and while
the details do not permit certainty, on balance he seems to have been
identified with Horus.39 Perseus, therefore, provides the Ptolemies with a
Greco-Egyptian pedigree parallel to that which Nectanebo provided for
Alexander in the Alexander Romance, but constructed entirely within
the framework of Greek myth. The Ptolemies, by virtue of their descent
from Heracles and Perseus, were already Egyptian, and these solidly
Greek ancestors (seemingly) were already revered in Egyptian cult.
Heracles’ infant exploit is well suited for this parallel universe. After
Alcmena has tucked her children into their shield-cradle two monstrous
(pAlvra) snakes, spitting poisonous venom (barBn d’ DjAptyon Dan)
and undulating on their rippling coils, (frAssonta% Cpb speAraisi),
enter the room (13–19). Iphicles cowers in terror, but Heracles grips

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-

43. Ritner 1989, 105.

44. Gow 2: 420 nn. 28–29.
45. See plates in Woodford 1983.
136 Theocritean Regencies

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.

If Theocritus, like Callimachus in the Zeus hymn, constructs his open-

ing to reflect both Greek and Egyptian mythologies, his approach dif-
fers. Unlike Callimachus, who only occasionally inserts the “human”
king in his hymns to the gods, Theocritus’s narrative operates on two
planes—the divine and human. The divine events, marked by the phe-
nomenon of light at midnight, test the child Heracles, demonstrate his
divinity, and foreshadow his future labors. In contrast to these events
are the domesticity of the marital bedchamber, Almena’s maternal con-
cern, and Amphitryon’s (misplaced?) paternal pride. Within this scene
Amphitryon is presented as a standard epic hero—his shield, obtained
during a city sack; his sword, with its ornate scabbard, hung above the
bed. His character and heroic activity are pointedly otiose; he begins
the scene with a vain attempt at epic valor and ends it as a weary par-
ent tucking in his baby son. It is not just that the hero’s shield has been
coopted for domestic duty; the hero himself and the values he repre-
sents in both social and literary terms are rendered marginal or irrele-
vant. Amphitryon’s heroic shield with its Homeric sidebar detailing its
acquisition serves as a reminder of his cuckolding. Neither his sword-
play nor his heroic assistance is useful in dispatching the snakes; his in-
fant son has already accomplished that deed by the time he enters the
scene. Further, the supernatural light, which confers heroic status by
marking the presence of the divine among specially chosen mortals, is
extinguished as Amphitryon enters his sons’ presence; and he must call
out to servants to furnish some natural illumination. In the Odyssey, in
contrast, Athena lights the chamber for Odysseus and Telemachus
(19.37). Although Demeter’s revelation of herself in the Homeric Hymn
to Demeter (189, 280) is not benign, she is visible in her divinity to the
heroic queen Metaneira. In a similar way, Zeus apparently furnishes a
light to reveal the presence of Hera’s instruments of divine destruction,
but far from manifesting the heroic proportion of her power and wrath,
as it does with Demeter, it only illuminates her feebleness as Heracles in
childish glee exhibits the snakes as if they were new toys. In the poem,
epic events and epic values are not so much transformed into the mun-
Theocritean Regencies 137

dane as they are submerged or obviated. Theocritus clears the deck, as

it were, for new modes of action as Heracles, along with his loving par-
ents, is reconstructed as the prototype for royal behavior in the Hel-
lenistic age.
After Heracles’ feat, Alcmena summons the prophet Teiresias, who
reveals the future and prescribes a course of purification for the pres-
ent. In Pindar the prophet’s relatively brief remarks (ten lines) focus on
Heracles’ labors, the most significant of which is his participation with
the gods in their battle against the Giants (68–69) and who “shall win
calm for his mighty labors” to reside in the halls of the blessed with
Hebe for a bride (70–71). In contrast, Theocritus’s Teiresias first praises
Alcmena and prophesies her fame as mother of Heracles (73–78) and
then briefly mentions Heracles’ twelve labors, his death and funeral
pyre at Trachis, his fate to be called the “son of the immortals,” and his
marriage on Olympus (79–85). He concludes with a long instruction
(88–100) about disposing of the snakes (88–96), purging the house,
and performing appropriate sacrifices (96–99) so that “you may always
be conquerors of your enemies” (100: dysmenAvn aDeB kauypArteroi
c% telAuoite). The details that Theocritus chooses to emphasize in this
section can be related to contemporary circumstance. The foreground-
ing of Alcmena in summoning the prophet and in her son’s subsequent
education suggests a complimentary allusion to Berenice, the mother of
Philadelphus. If the poem was composed around the time of Philadel-
phus’s ascension to the throne, the stress on Alcmena, as well as the ref-
erence to Heracles as “late-born” (dcAgonon, 31), is fitting for the cir-
cumstances of Philadelphus’s succession. Berenice was Soter’s second
wife, and it is a fair assumption that her force of character was instru-
mental in Philadelphus becoming his father’s heir, since Philadelphus
was younger than the sons of Soter and Eurydice.
The detailed purificatory rites are less easy to explain in Greek
terms. Fumigation and the sacrifice of a piglet to Zeus are familiar
enough in Greek practice, as Gow’s parallels demonstrate,46 but The-
ocritus includes an elaborate burning ritual for the dead snakes and
connects the whole to “being conquerors of the enemy.” The snakes
must then function as stand-ins or ritual substitutes for the enemy.47 We

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

have seen above that in Egyptian mythology snakes were associated

with Seth/Typhon, the divine enemy of the god-king, Horus, and that
throttling the snakes took on complex symbolism—killing snakes was
simultaneously to defeat the forces of chaos, personified by Seth, and to
demonstrate one’s right to rule. We have also seen that conquering the
enemy was, in Egyptian terms, a ritual equivalent of defeating the
forces of chaos, and that the pharaoh (and only the pharaoh) was con-
sistently portrayed enacting this event, and to do so was both to mani-
fest his royal status and to mark his legitimacy as a ruler who works to
maintain the moral order (or maat). Manetho provides us with a good
parallel for the behavior prescribed by Teiresias, claiming that Egyp-
tians “used to burn men alive in Eileithyiaspolis (El Kab), calling them
‘Typhonians,’ ” and “they scattered and winnowed their ashes until
they disappeared.”48 Of course, scholars dispute whether Egyptians
were actually performing human sacrifice,49 but the accuracy of the
statement is not important; what is significant is that a near contempo-
rary writing about Egyptian customs and located within Alexandrian
court circles had described—in Greek—a sacrificial rite in which Seth
surrogates were burned and their ashes scattered. The likelihood that
Theocritus is inserting Heracles and his descendants into a pharaonic
space is increased by the next lines.
As Koenen has pointed out, Theocritus’s expression at line 100—
dysmenAvn . . . kauypArteroi—bears a close resemblance to the phrase
employed on the Rosetta stone to render in Greek the third of the five
traditional names of the pharaoh—dntipalvn CpArtero%.50 Four of
the five names were assigned when the new pharaoh ascended the
throne and were employed by the Ptolemies in official decrees, whether
or not they were actually crowned as pharaoh.51 This third name was
called in Egyptian H‘r nbw or Golden Horus in the Dynastic period,
but apparently in the Ptolemiac period it was reinterpreted to refer to
the age-old victory of Horus over Seth, and the symbols used in writing
the title, a falcon standing upon a golden collar, were taken to mean

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

Horus on top of the Ombite ( = a title of Seth).52 Thus dntipalvn

CpArtero% renders the idea that is visually implicit in the hieroglyphic
representation of the Horus of Gold name and is, in effect, a verbal
equivalent of the ubiquitous representation of the pharaoh who domi-
nates his enemy by trampling him underfoot or smiting him with a
club.53 In the Hymn to Delos Callimachus applies the same term, dys-
menAvn, to the Gaulish mercenaries, who, as we have already found, are
functioning as hereditary enemies, or Seth-surrogates—that is, as pro-
totypical foes to be destroyed.54
Moreover, Callimachus’s description of the Gauls collapses the
temporal framework: in Apollo’s prophecy of the future the foe are
imagined as both menacing and already captive. Lines 181–82—“But
already they might behold by the temple the ranks of the foe” (dll›
gdh parb nhbn dpaygazointo falagga% | dysmenAvn)—conjure up
not only the enemy as they advance, but the ranks of the defeated
enemy as they would be traditionally represented along the temple
walls after the victory.55 Further, the unusual expression phlaganvn
Dlatpra in the Hymn to Zeus (2) may be conceptually related to dys-
menAvn kauypArteroi and dntipalvn CpArtero%. “Mud-born” is a
virtual equivalent of ghgeneP%, a term that is often applied to Typhon,
as well as to the Giants, who occupy the same symbolic space in
Greek myth56 as Seth does in Egyptian cosmology,57 while Dlatar can

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

mean “striker” as well as “driver away.” Hence Callimachus’s phrase

could well have been intended to render the Egyptian expression
“smiter of the foe,” or the equivalent of “on top of the foe.” The con-
junction of these expressions raises a question: although the first sur-
viving appearance of the phrase dntipalvn CpArtero% dates from
Philopator, the Ptolemies are using the pharaonic titulary from a
much earlier period. Are the poets in these early poems merely reflect-
ing Greek linguistic protocols for Egyptian concepts that had already
been put into place, or were they actively interpreting Egyptian im-
ages and imputing meanings to them, as Horapollo did in a later pe-
riod? Were they experimenting with the language of imperial self-
presentation that later came to be preferred in official writing?
Scholars normally separate the world of the court and its literary pro-
duction from that of higher administration, particularly under
Philadelphus, if not Soter, but it seems to me that this is open to de-
bate. The world of those capable of reading Greek in Alexandria and
its environs would have been very small, especially in this early period
(ca. 284–282 b.c.e.), and a sizable segment of it would have been the
administrative class. Such men would have provided an obvious audi-
ence for the court poets as their works came to circulate in written
form. Certainly, the famous example from a later period of the Greco-
Egyptian who not only read Callimachus but employed his rare word
for “mousetrap” in a tax return, thus creating a bogus entry (rather
like a modern employee of the IRS entering Mouse, Mickey), should
alert us to the possibility that poetic image making may not have been
an activity entirely divorced from practical consequence.58

Although Theocritus follows Pindar’s narrative of the attack of the

snakes and its aftermath, where he does diverge he seems to depend on
an episode in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter.59 Demophoön, like Hera-
cles, is the late-born (dcAgono%, 165, 219) child. When Demeter is in
the process of making the infant Demophoön immortal by burying him
like a brand in banked hearth fires, she is interrupted at midnight by the
baby’s (justifiably) hysterical mother, Metaneira. Demeter in her anger
rejects the child and announces what her intentions had been had the
mother’s interruption now not condemned him to mere human exis-

58. See H. C. Youtie, “Callimachus in the Tax-Rolls,” in Scriptiunculae (Amsterdam,

1973) 2: 1039–41.
59. The similarities have been noticed by White (1979, 40) and Gutzwiller (1981,16)
and elaborated by Hunter (1996a, 10).
Theocritean Regencies 141

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

60. See Foley 1994, 51, 191–97.

142 Theocritean Regencies

the Eleusinian mysteries in Athens, and we know that Heracles as early

as the fifth century was represented as a prominent initiate of the cult.61
Therefore, allusions drawn from the hymn that locate him, like his par-
ents, among those who have need of divine assistance in the form of es-
tablished religious rite serve to further reinforce his humanity. But they
might also introduce the idea of alternate routes to “immortality”
through the implicit example of initiation into a mystery cult, and in
another way as well. Koenen raised the possibility that Teiresias’s in-
struction to sacrifice the piglet alluded specifically to the Eleusinian
mysteries.62 Satyrus’s On the Demes of Alexandria mentions that the
Alexandrian deme of Eleusis was named for its Attic counterpart and
annually hosted a musical contest. Whether there was an attempt to in-
stitute the Eleusinian mysteries in Alexandria is moot; similar rites,
however, could have been associated with the Sarapis or Isis cult, since
Tacitus mentions that it was Timotheus, from the family of the Eu-
molpids, the hereditary priests in charge of the Eleusinia, who was in-
strumental in setting up the Sarapis cult in Alexandria.63 Whatever the
contemporary historical circumstances, a reminder of the Eleusinian
mysteries might well serve proleptically to provide a model of the kind
of activity that warrants the conferral of divine honors upon humans—
the establishment of cults of the gods. The model would only gain in ef-
ficacy if it alluded to an accomplishment of Ptolemy’s own father, who
by the time of Idyll 17 was to be seen enjoying the kind of immortality
that was available to Heracles, fraternizing with the Olympians.

The Education of Princes

With the departure of Teiresias (101–2) Theocritus abandons his ar-

chaic poetic models and turns to a description of the education of the
boy Heracles, who according to one commentator “has become the
perfect gentleman. He has, in fact, proved himself in just those activi-

61. Foley 1994, 49, 51, 68 n. 11.

62. 1977, 81–82. Koenen also connects the pig with Seth. (p. 83 and n. 174). In sup-
port of his thesis, see Te Velde (1967, 22, 47), who points out that Seth is often repre-
sented as a black pig. See also Gwyn Griffiths 1960, 31–33, and plate 4, an intriguing il-
lustration (B.M. 10471/14) from a Book of the Dead, showing its owner, Nakht, in an
apotropaic ritual spearing a snake and a pig.
63. Historiae 4.83. But see Borgeaud and Volokhine 2000 on the Sarapis cult. See
also Weber 1993, 173–74; Fraser (1972, 1: 200) argues that the importation of Demeter
cults into Alexandria may well have been spurred by the fact that Greek writers like
Herodotus and Hecataeus had claimed an Egyptian ancestry for the Thesmophoria and
the Eleusinian mysteries.
Theocritean Regencies 143

ties—love, sport, music, and a little bit of warfare—that we know to

have been closest to the heart of Philadelphus himself.”64 Undoubtedly
this is so, and indeed it has been on the basis of this section that claims
for the Heracliscus as court poetry have rested. But the section may
have other parallels. We have seen in chapter 1 that Hecataeus of Ab-
dera incorporated a history of Sesoösis in his work as a model of the
Egyptian ideal of kingship and that the education of the young prince
by his father provided the fundamentals for his model rule.65 In the
Alexander Romance, too, Philip, though not Alexander’s father, treats
him like a true son and undertakes his education with some care.66 The
elements of that education—letters (grammata), music, geometry, rhet-
oric, and philosophy—are close to Theocritus’s catalogue, though he
omits the advanced education of rhetoric and philosophy, which would
only serve to further strain credulity in Heracles’ case. In addition to
the manly arts of archery, boxing, and chariot racing, Heracles is taught
the principles of modern warfare: how to arrange the phalanx, assess
the enemy, and command the cavalry, skills that are not particularly
applicable to his later life, but that coincide with the lessons in war-
fare that Sesoösis and Alexander receive.67 Moreover, the education of
Sesoösis stresses the endurance of hardship and abstemiousness,68
which also appears in the Heracliscus (138–40). As we saw in chapter
1, this type of education was not provided to turn these princes into
“the perfect gentlemen.” It was tied to an expectation that the prince
would become a proper king, not simply by leading armies, but by in-
stituting a rule of law by which he himself abided. Additionally, the
most characteristic feature of Hecataeus’s ideal king was, in Oswyn
Murray’s words, “eDergesAa, which is indeed elevated until it becomes
the ultimate justification of monarchy itself. . . . Thus in Hecataeus the
notion of the basileB% eDergAth% usurps the position often given in
other Greek writers to the gristo% dnar, the rule of the best man, or to
the filanurvpAa of the ruler.”69 In stressing the king as eDergAth%

64. Griffiths 1979, 92.

65. Diodorus Siculus 1.53.7= FGrH 264 F25.53.7.
66. AR 1.13. The date of this section is generally taken to be early; see page 65.
67. Diodorus Siculus 1.53.1–6; AR 1.13–14. These specific skills are not listed, but
Sesoösis and Alexander get on-the-job training in warfare at an early age.
68. The incongruity of this quality for Heracles has not gone unnoticed. Most re-
cently, see Hunter 1996a, 11–12. Once again, Theocritus juxtaposes the conceptual bag-
gage of his models. Can a modern education overcome mythological determinism and
turn the traditionally gluttonous Heracles into a model prince?
69. Murray 1970, 159–60.
144 Theocritean Regencies

Hecataeus domesticates Egyptian pharaonic practice by subsuming it

under the familiar Greek idea.70 Though, as Murray’s comment makes
clear, for Hecataeus, eDergesAa was less a matter of imperial potlatch
(as it often seems to be in Greek writing)71 than a fundamental behav-
ioral pattern that manifested itself through building projects, the estab-
lishment of cults of the gods, and imperial generosity to one’s subjects.
These are the very features of Ptolemaic kingship that Theocritus elab-
orates in Idyll 17.
The trajectory of the Heracliscus follows Hecataeus also in that a
prophecy, in the form of a dream, preceded the description of Sesoösis’s
education and indeed precipitated it. Sesoösis’s greatness and future ac-
complishments, which paralleled those of the divine Osiris, were fore-
told by the god Ptah ( = Hephaestus) to Sesoösis’s father at his birth,
who therefore designed his education to prepare him to achieve the
greatness predicted for him.72 Though probably later than the Heraclis-
cus, Callimachus in the Delos hymn places a prophecy about Ptolemy II
and Cos in the mouth of the embryonic Apollo, and this conforms to
Egyptian patterns of figuring the king as the recipient of special post
eventum prophecy.73 In Theocritus, Alcmena after hearing Teiresias’s
prophecy takes Heracles’ education in hand; he is likened to “a young
sapling in an orchard” (nAon fytbn c% Dn dlvu | DtrAfet’)—that is, the
twig to be encouraged in the right direction and thus prepared for his
destiny. This is an odd detail for the traditional picture of Heracles,
who seems a product of nature rather more than of culture, but essen-
tial for a model ruler. Theocritus certainly knew Hecataeus’s work, as
we will see in our discussion of Idyll 17,74 and by constructing Heracles
in accordance with an idealizing model, Theocritus not only compli-
ments the court by enhancing the status of one of its primary mytho-

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

Since Euhemerus wrote within the same intellectual framework as

Hecataeus, it is intrinsically likely that Hecataeus included Heracles
within his scheme of culture heroes. In a section that is only doubtfully
attributed to Hecataeus (1.24.5) Diodorus asserts that “the Greeks
have preserved a tradition that Heracles cleared the earth of wild
beasts.” He adds: “Indeed it is reasonable to suppose that . . . after he
had cleared the land of wild beasts, he presented it to the peasants [of
Egypt] and for this benefaction was accorded divine honors” (1.24.7).76
Dionysus Scytobrachion similarly constructs his Heracles as a military

75. Diodorus Siculus 6.1.1–2 = fr. 25 Winiarzyk.

76. Although Jacoby and Murray reject this passage as Hecataean, it does coincide
with a view of Greek prehistory that Cole (1990, 44–45, 153–55) locates within the in-
146 Theocritean Regencies

leader and a founder of games, for which he receives immortality.77

What is overtly set out in these accounts is also implicit in Theocritus—
divine honors were accorded to Heracles not for random acts of vio-
lence, but for efforts that brought about civilization.
Heracles in Herodotus and, perhaps, in Hecataeus is already both
Greek and Egyptian. In the Heracliscus I suggest that Theocritus is con-
sciously playing with the various traditions of Heracles, Egyptian and
Greek, divine or heroic, comic glutton or proper Hellenistic princeling.
In the interplay of traditions is the point; this one mythological figure
offers the newly crowned king a variety of behavioral models, some of
which are useful to emulate, some to avoid, some of which, the poet
suggests, are impossible, like the heroic or divine, but others of which,
like the laboring Heracles or the young prince, can lead to the only kind
of divinity that is available to mortals, a divinity acquired by actions
that benefit one’s fellow humans. Theocritus’s conformation of Hera-
cles to a Hecataean model of kingship stands in contrast to Calli-
machus’s use of Hesiod in the Hymn to Zeus. In that poem the proper
behavior of kings was implicit and distanced, located in the mythologi-
cal past. Callimachus in his poetic persona projected “doubt” about
truth and by implication the outcome of Ptolemy’s historic kingship,
while the Hesiodic passages established a connection between the just
behavior of kings and wealth; Theocritus, by using contemporary ideal-
izing models of kingship analogous to those found in Hecataeus, who
had already established a baseline behavior for good kings, shifts his
emphasis from wealth as an index of divine favor to the proper use of
wealth as the index of a good king. Thus the poet is not a passive enco-
miast but like Pindar before him asserts himself as a critical arbiter of
royal behavior. The wealth of kings, if it is to bestow a lasting distinc-
tion, must become a means of conferring benefits on humanity in gen-
eral and one’s own people in particular. Theocritus’s recollections of the
Hymn to Demeter serve as a reminder of one kind of beneficium, the in-
stitution of religious cults like the Eleusinian mysteries. Hence poetry
functions to monitor the king’s progress as well as articulate its signifi-
cance to the wider audience.

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 2. Cartouche of Ptolemy V Epiphanes (Rosettana), preceded by a

sedge and bee. Courtesy of the British Museum.
Plate 3. Horus throttling snakes. “Metternich Stelae.” Courtesy of the Metro-
politan Museum of Art, New York.
Plate 4. Nakht spearing a snake and a pig (from The Book of the
Dead). Courtesy of the British Museum.
Plate 5. The solar boat being towed through a snake (from The Amduat). Courtesy
of the British Museum.

Plate 6. The Sun emerging from a hill at dawn (from The Amduat). Courtesy
of the British Museum.
Theocritean Regencies 147

encomium for ptolemy

Heracles makes another appearance in Idyll 17, which must have been
written in the 270s b.c.e. The date of composition is fixed by the fact
that Philadelphus is married to his full sister Arsinoe. That marriage
took place between 279 and 274 b.c.e. and lasted until her death in ei-
ther 270 or 268.78 The catalogue of Ptolemaic possessions detailed in
lines 80–94 must reflect some kind of political reality; whether it points
to complete Ptolemaic control or only spheres of influence for these re-
gions cannot be determined with any degree of confidence,79 though
consensus favors the latter half of the decade. Thus the poem will have
been written after the Heracliscus and Callimachus’s Zeus hymn and
would have been a near contemporary of Callimachus’s Delos hymn,
which probably falls between 274 and 268. Whether the Delos hymn
predates the Ptolemy is moot, and plausible arguments to support the
priority of one or the other are easily devised.80 Whichever is prior, the
linguistic and thematic similarities guarantee that the two poems stand
in a self-conscious relationship to each other and again allow us to see
the different ways in which the two poets construct the image of the liv-
ing king. In form,81 the Ptolemy has affinities to traditional hymns to
the gods and earlier praise poetry, while it also displays a number of
features of the prose encomium, a genre that Isocrates claims to have
initiated with his Evagoras (8–11). It proliferated in the fourth century,
and by Theocritus’s time had received considerable treatment in the
rhetorical theorists and was a well-mined staple of rhetorical educa-
tion.82 Like its prose relative, the hymn of praise exhibited familiar and

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

predictable features,83 so at least one factor in Theocritus’s choice to en-

gage in encomium must have been deliberately to set out upon a well-
trodden path.84 The central difference between the poetic and prose ver-
sions of encomia, at least according to Isocrates, was that poets could
represent the gods as associating with their subjects and aiding
whomever they wished in battle (9), while those writers confined to
prose were also confined to the facts (10). In his movement between the
two—the mythological options familiar from hymns and the relatively
more fact-based realm of prose encomium—Theocritus seems to engage
in an intentional generic mixing that plays with these two distinct styles
in ways that often display the limitations of the mythic hymn. Further,
the Ptolemy writes itself quite obviously against Callimachus’s earlier
Zeus hymn. If Callimachus expresses doubts about how to hymn the
god and by extension the king, doubts about poetic models, and doubts
about precisely who the king is or will become—a king of Greeks or
Egyptians or both—then Theocritus’s overt choice of Ptolemy for his
subject, as opposed to Zeus or Heracles, will provide an answer to
these Callimachean questions.

Zeus and Ptolemy

Callimachus opens the Hymn to Zeus with a pattern of doublets85 that

begin as coordinates—Zhnb% and uebn aDtan, deB mAgan and aDBn
gnakta, Phlaganvn Dlatpra and dikaspalon ODranAdisi—but slide
into disjunction—DiktaPon or LykaPon, \IdaAoisin Dn oGresD or Dn
\ArkadAh. These become the external correlatives of his internal mental
state (Dn doiu mala uyma%). This pattern is visible also in his conclusion:
xaPre mAga, KronAdh panypArtate, dptor Davn,
dptor dphmonAh%. teb d› Grgmata tA% ken deAdoi;
oD gAnet› oDk Gstai, tA% ken Dib% deAsei;

stance, W. H. Race’s treatment in “Pindaric Encomium and Isokrates’ Evagoras,” TAPA

117 (1987) 131–55. See also his remarks about the distinction between the mythic hymn
and encomium. Nightingale (1995, 93–132) sets the relationship of the poetry of praise
and blame in a philosophical context.
83. See, for example, Plato’s remarks in Lysis 205b-d.
84. Although it is one of the few surviving examples from this early period, the hymn
of praise probably flourished in Hellenistic courts. In fact, Cameron (1995, 268–73) has
recently argued that much of what has been identified as Hellenistic epic is more likely to
be encomium.
85. I am indebted to Benjamin Acosta-Hughes for this observation.
Theocritean Regencies 149

xaPre, pater xaPr’ aRui¢ dAdon d’ dretan t’ gfena% te.

95 oGt’ dretp% gter glbo% DpAstatai gndra% dAjein
oGt’ dretb dfAnoio¢ dAdoy d’ dretan te kaB glbon.
A hearty farewell, most high son of Cronus, grantor of wealth, grantor of
security. Of your works who could sing? There has not been, there will
not be, someone who would sing your deeds. Father, farewell again.
Grant virtue and prosperity. Without virtue prosperity knows not how to
profit men, nor virtue without wealth; grant us virtue and prosperity.

Theocritus answers the doubt, both explicit and implicit in Calli-

machus’s ordering, by beginning with a pair—Dk Dib%, D% DAa—that is
really the same:

Dk Dib% drxamesua kaB D% DAa lagete MoPsai,

duanatvn tbn griston, Bpbn †deAdvmen doidaP%¢
dndrpn d’ aR PtolemaPo% DnB pratoisi legAsuv
kaB pAmato% kaB mAsso%¢ f gbr proferAstato% dndrpn.
5 erve%, toB prasuen df’ cmiuAvn DgAnonto,
r\Ajante% kalb Grga sofpn DkArhsan doidpn¢
aDtbr Dgb PtolemaPon Dpistameno% kalb eDpePn
Cmnasaim’¢ Emnoi dB kaB duanatvn gAra% aAtpn.
From Zeus let us begin, and at Zeus, best of the immortals, let us cease,
Muses, whenever we hold forth in song [?]; but of men let Ptolemy be
spoken of first and last and in between, for he is the most distinguished
of men. Heroes, who of old came from demigods, when they accom-
plished fair deeds hit upon skilled songsters, but I know how to praise
and would sing of Ptolemy. Hymns are the privilege even of the immor-
tals themselves.

Here the hierarchies are preserved: Zeus is divine, Ptolemy mortal.

Each in his class is the best and worthy of praise, and the categories are
not permeable (or are they?). These extremes are mediated by heroes
and demigods who earn their poetry by virtue of their deeds, not by
right of divinity, and it is to this latter group that Theocritus will seem
to attach Ptolemy. To Callimachus’s doubts about how to hymn Zeus,
Theocritus replies firmly—“I know how to praise and would sing of
Ptolemy”—an assertion with generic consequence. What Callimachus
avoided in his experiment with the hymn form, Theocritus embraces.
To what purpose? Encomium as a genre is ostensibly less subtle, less
supple. What Callimachus can hint at through Hesiodic allusion to
kings, namely, proper moral behavior and prosperity, values which
Theocritus similarly hinted at in the Heracliscus, are stated much more
150 Theocritean Regencies

openly within a form whose parameters should hold few surprises.

However, the Ptolemy is not unadulterated encomium; Theocritus con-
sistently moves between the allusive indirection of the mythic hymn and
the (apparently) bald expression of admiration that the encomium
(prose or verse) demanded. Perhaps, in this lies the reason for Theocri-
tus’s choice. The poem is suspended between the mythical and the con-
temporary in its subjects and arrangements, but by juxtaposing or in-
terweaving the two different approaches to praise the poem as a whole
takes on the character of a exploration of the nature and potential of
encomiastic writing.
In the concluding lines Theocritus indulges in a similar rewriting of
Callimachus:
xaPre, gnaj PtolemaPe¢ sAuen d’ Dgb Rsa kaB gllvn
mnasomai cmiuAvn, dokAv d’ Gpo% oDk dpablhton
fuAgjomai DssomAnoi%¢ dretan ge mBn Dk Dib% aDteP.
Farewell, Lord Ptolemy. I will be equally mindful of you and other
demigods, and I think I shall utter a word that will not be disgarded by
those to come. As for excellence, seek it from Zeus. (135–37)

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

omitted temporal category—the present. But Theocritus decides to take

the assertion at face value. To Callimachus’s opening gambit of poetic
aporia, he counters: “I know how to praise and would sing of
Ptolemy”; and to Callimachus’s concluding omission of the present, he
asserts: “I think I shall utter a word that will not be disgarded by those
to come.”
After the proem Theocritus turns to the subject of Ptolemy’s parents,
both of whom are now dead. He leads off with what seems almost a
paraphrase of the sentiments Callimachus had applied to both Zeus
and Ptolemy II,87 now predicated of Soter:88

Dk patArvn oQo% mAn Ghn telAsai mAga Grgon

LageAda% PtolemaPo%, ete fresBn Dgkatauoito
boylan, fn oDk gllo% dnbr oQa% te nopsai.
In lineage such a man to accomplish a great deed was Ptolemy, son of
Lagus, when he stored up in his heart a plan that no other man could
have devised. (13–15)

Moreover, he rewrites Callimachus in Homeric language borrowed

from Odyssey 2.270–72, where Athena, disguised as Mentor, tells
Telemachus that if he is truly the son of his father—“such a man he was
for accomplishing both word and deed” (2.271–72: eD da toi soP
patrb% DnAstaktai mAno% dJÓ , | oQo% kePno% Ghn telAsai Grgon te Gpo%
te)—he will succeed with his plans. She further remarks that few chil-
dren turn out to be the equal of their fathers, though there is some hope
for Telemachus (274–80). Theocritus thus creates a link between Zeus,
Soter, and Philadelphus in such a way that Soter is simultaneously
model and reflection (an idea expressed again in lines 56–57: aDxmhtb
PtolemaPe, | aDxmhtu PtolemaAi). Behavior already attached to
Philadelphus by Callimachus is now reassigned to his father, and the
Hesiodic and Egyptian allusions are recast as Homeric. The result is
that the link between thought and accomplishment is now a distin-
guishing characteristic of the royal line, not simply the mark of divine
or precocious children. The ensuing narratives of the divine parents are
constructed to provide both the Greek heroic and the Egyptian
pharaonic context in which Ptolemy has been formed.

87. See above, page 108.

88. See Griffiths 1979, 76 n. 58; and Schwinge’s remarks (1986, 73).
152 Theocritean Regencies

Fathers and Sons

First, Soter is presented as dweller on Olympus in the company of

Alexander, and both are attendants of their mutual ancestor Heracles.
The scene owes much to the opening of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo,
where Leto greets her son, Apollo, as he enters his father’s halls, taking
his bow and quiver to hang up, then seating him in the presence of the
gods (5–13). She rejoices to have such a mighty son, just as Heracles re-
joices “exceedingly in the sons of his sons, because the son of Cronus
has taken age from their limbs, and his offspring are called immortal”
(23–25). But the gods tremble at the entrance of Apollo (Homeric
Hymn to Apollo 2), while Theocritus’s language suggests that Soter and
Alexander are not full participants as their ancestor “keeps festival with
the other Ouranids” (22: Gnua sBn glloisin ualAa% Gxei ODranAdisi;
note the singular verb). When Heracles is ready to leave the celestial
dining room, Soter and Alexander, like Leto, relieve him of his bow and
quiver and club, and attend him to his wife Hebe’s chamber. The price
of divinity is very high. Not only are arguably the two greatest military
leaders that the Hellenistic world had known reduced to the status of
page boys, they are, at least allusively, rendered feminine, performing
Leto’s task in the Hymn to Apollo. This is the more jarring because we
were invited to reflect on Alexander’s military prowess only a few lines
before, where he is called “bane of the Persians.”89 Ancestors who are
“descended from Zeus” or who “dine with Heracles” were among the
most frequently employed clichés of the hymnic repertory,90 though
Theocritus’s humorous treatment rescues the compliment from com-
plete banality. However, in contrast to Berenice, Soter’s divinity renders
him, in effect, impotent.91 He may survive in his Greek mythological im-
mortality as a vivid image, but on his efficacy for the living Theocritus
has no comment.
Theocritus’s presentation of Berenice I, in contrast, was shaped by
contemporary Alexandria. The queen mother achieves an immortality

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

of her own, not by joining the divine households of Olympus, but by

being snatched away from the grim ferryman as she was being trans-
ported to the realms of the dead to inhabit Aphrodite’s temple, where
she has a share in “her divine honors” (46–50). There is no contempo-
rary information about Berenice’s deification, and later evidence testi-
fies only to the cult she shared with Soter, alluded to by Theocritus in
line 123, not a separate co-templing with either Greek or Egyptian di-
vinities.92 Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine that Theocritus would
have embroidered the truth and promoted Berenice to a co-templed
goddess, if she did not in fact enjoy that status.93 Berenice apparently de-
ified and linked to Aphrodite is found again in Idyll 15,94 where Arsinoe
has instituted the festival of Adonis in honor of her deceased mother:
KApri DivnaAa, tB mBn duanatan dpb unatp%,
dnurapvn c% mPuo%, DpoAhsa% BerenAkan,
dmbrosAan D% stpuo% dpostajasa gynaika%·
Lady of Cyprus, Dione’s child, you, as men say, changed Berenice from
mortal to immortal, dripping ambrosia onto her woman’s breast.
(15.106–9)

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)

What is novel in this presentation depends upon an interweaving of

a series of Greek and Egyptian ideas. In both accounts, Aphrodite acts
to immortalize Berenice by “pressing her hands” or “dripping am-

92. Quaegebeur 1978, 247–49, with illustrations.

93. There is extensive evidence for the inclusion of Arsinoe II in both Egyptian and
Greek cult, as a “co-templed divinity” (sAnnao% uea%). For example, she was installed
after her death in the ram cult of Mendes and is shown on the Mendes stele, along with
the ram-god and his consort, receiving offerings from her husband, Ptolemy II. In the
Greek world she was associated with Aphrodite at Cape Zephyrium and a variety of
other locations. Though if Theocritus rightly represents the situation, Berenice I would
have preceded her in this respect. See Quaegebeur 1978, 249–54, with a good illustration
of the Mendes stele, and J. Tondriau, “Princesses ptolémaïques comparées ou identifiées à
déesses (IIIe—Ier siècles avant J. C.),” Bulletin de la Société Royale d’ Archéologie-Alexan-
drie 37 (1948) 15–21. Selden (1998, 339–40) discusses the identification of Arsinoe and
Isis.
94. In a fragment (fr. 3) Theocritus mentions Berenice receiving an offering of fish.
See Weber 1993, 253–54, for possible interpretations. Not enough remains for fruitful
speculation.
154 Theocritean Regencies

brosia” upon her breast. Thetis preserving the body of Patroclus by

pouring ambrosia into his nostrils is usually adduced as the closest
Greek parallel to Idyll 15,95 though explanations of the relevance of this
particular heroic corpse are somewhat forced. What the Iliad passage
and Theocritus have in common is an underlying familiarity with
Egyptian rituals of embalming.96 But where Thetis (in keeping with
Greek cultural norms) can merely preserve the body, Aphrodite revital-
izes her (48–50). Aphrodite seems to enact elements of the embalming
ritual in which fragrant oils are rubbed over the body of the deceased,
often by the god of the ritual—Anubis—who is portrayed as leaning
over the body and touching its breast (or the location of the heart), not
simply to preserve but to reanimate the dead.97 L. Žabkar explains the
essential connection of rebirth and aromatic oils:
The role that myrrh, incense, unguents, and various aromatic substances
played in cult and ritual [was m]uch more than just creating a pleasant
atmosphere for gods and men, such substances had the effect of propiti-
ating the deities, of purifying them, of repelling evil influences from them,
and of bestowing new vitality upon them. . . . These beneficient effects
extended also to the deceased, “who live on myrrh and incense on which
the gods live.”98

Ambrosia, therefore, is an effective parallel, since it served to maintain

and occasionally even induce immortality. But in Theocritus, Berenice’s
fragrant breast is further linked to the desire she inspired in her hus-
band. For Egyptians fragrance does triple duty in that it indicates the
presence of divinity, it is instrumental in revitalizing the dead, and it
arouses erotic desire; thus it was an ideal symbol for Aphrodite and her
co-templed companion.99 These three aspects of fragrance are joined
also in Callimachus’s Lock of Berenice, for example, where the anoint-
ing of the lock of the newly married Berenice II with a fragrant oil is
both a symbol of the lock’s divine status and proleptic of Berenice’s

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

own subsequent apotheosis, as well a sign of the mutual desire of hus-

band and wife.
In Idyll 17, Aphrodite is fashioned not as the goddess of sex, but of
the erotic reciprocity of marriage that breeds true sons, and Berenice is
her human reflection. In Idyll 15, Theocritus’s presentation of the Ado-
nia also repositions Aphrodite by portraying Adonis as her “bride-
groom” and the bed of the tableau as the nuptial couch. The novelty of
Theocritus’s Aphrodite in her dimension as a protector of marriage100 is
likely to be related to her identification with Isis. In Egypt the cult of
Isis-Aphrodite was extremely popular and was either the reason for or
the result of the queens of the imperial household identifying them-
selves with Aphrodite.101 The link with Isis as both wife and sister of
Osiris is illustrated in the epithet “brother-loving,” which was first at-
tached to Arsinoe as a cult name.102 In her status as a co-templed god-
dess, Berenice I, like Aphrodite and Isis, continues to confer the benefits
of appropriately directed desires, and her son Ptolemy II serves as the
best example of the true sons that result when the love of husband for
wife is mutual (38–40).
The love of Soter and Berenice thus guaranteed Ptolemy II’s legiti-
macy, expressed by his likeness to his father, an idea that appears again
in lines 56–57 and 63–64. In Greek texts, a positive erotic relationship
between husband and wife is not easy to document, though Penelope as
the good wife and Arete and Alcinous as a loving couple are familiar
from Homer’s Odyssey, and Gow recalls both when commenting on
this passage.103 But Egyptian ideas also come into play. Isis was the par-
adigmatic good wife, whose devotion to her husband led to the recov-
ery and protection of his body as well as to the conception of Horus,
who was born to be the image and avenger of his father. The mythology
spilled over into the ideology of kingship, where in the absence of a tra-
dition of primogeniture the concept of the pharaoh’s “likeness” to one’s
divine father, whether Re, Osiris, or Amun—established after the fact—
played a central role in claims of legitimacy.104 Claims of “likeness” to a
god became a familiar element in royal titulary. For example, the hiero-
glyphic shm-’nh-n-Jmn occurs as a throne name for Euergetes, Phil-

100. Cerfaux and Tondiau 1957, 196–200.

101. Dunand 1973, 80–85.
102. Koenen 1993, 61–63.
103. 2: 335–36.
104. For a discussion of the development of this idea of “divine like,” see O’Connor
and Silverman 1995, 61–63.
156 Theocritean Regencies

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

In the eighth century, Osorkon is identified as “the legitimate egg and

image of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt.”107 Birth temples (mam-
misi) of the late Ptolemaic period exhibit the logical development of this
idea, as the pharaoh is associated with the divine child in cult and de-
scribed as “he who truly resembles his father.”108 This age-old Egyptian
motif is ideal for Theocritus because Ptolemy by virtue of his becoming
pharaoh de facto exhibits “likeness” to his father (i.e., his legitimacy);
equally it implies a level of excellence in behavior to which the encomi-
ast can implicitly hold the king.
The contrast between the presentation of Ptolemy II’s deceased fa-
ther and that of his mother in many respects corresponds to the con-
trast between Amphitryon and Alcmena in the Heracliscus. Soter (and
Alexander) cool their heels on Olympus as they wait for Heracles to fin-

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

109. 2001b, 135.

110. See Koenen 1983, 157–68.
111. See, for example, Gow 2: 335; Griffiths 1979, 75–77; and Schwinge 1986, 62 n.
43. S. Burstein, “Arsinoe II Philadelphos: A Revisionist View,” in Philip II, Alexander the
158 Theocritean Regencies

ambivalences in the application of the heroic model to a “modern” king

are the point? Unlike Ptolemy II, neither Diomedes nor Achilles demon-
strated the skills required for governing a modern state, but then suit-
able parallels for this new kingship in the heroic tradition are not easy
to find—apart from Zeus, who had some experience in ruling over the
fractious society of Olympus., though he might not always be an ap-
propriate model for other reasons. Operating within the symbolic
repertory of mythic hymns might work well for those few kings who
are also successful militarists, but there is little room for negotiation
for kings like Philadelphus, whose worth can be measured by only
one mythological standard—prowess in battle—whatever their real
achievements in governing.
As Theocritus recounts the birth of Philadelphus on Cos, he is again
following the Homeric Hymn to Apollo in giving a speaking part to the
island. And in the apparent parallel—Delos is to Cos as Apollo is to
Ptolemy—there is another hint that Ptolemy is destined to surpass mere
mortals. But if in Callimachus Leto was in labor nine days and nine
nights, wracked with birth pains as she awaited Eileithyia (91–101),
Berenice’s labor is mercifully brief: “For there the daughter of
Antigone, heavy with her birth pangs, called for Eileithyia who looses
the girdle, and she stood by to give her aid and poured surcease from
pain upon every limb” (60–63). This harmony with the divine contin-
ues as the eagle of Zeus appears: “This I suppose (poy) was a sign from
Zeus; for Zeus, the son of Cronus, takes care of compassionate kings,
and he is first whom he [Zeus] loves from his very birth” (73–75). The
language and sentiment is borrowed from Hesiod’s Theogony 79–85
and is used by Callimachus in the Zeus hymn, as we saw earlier.112
The eagle as a symbol had early been adopted by the Ptolemaic royal
house, as the anecdote about Soter, discussed in the context of Heracles
in the shield, makes clear. In that vignette the eagle appears with out-
stretched wings to protect the exposed infant. Gow’s comment on the
anecdote’s relationship to this passage is instructive:
The eagle, besides being the bird of Zeus, seems to have been in some
sense an emblem of the Ptolemies. An eagle on a thunderbolt commonly

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

113. 2: 337–38, note on line 72.

114. See, for example, the statue of Chephren or representations of Ramesses II with
the Horus falcon. See the discussion in Shafer 1997, 68–70.
115. For Ptolemaic use of this device, see Selden’s discussion (1998, 388) with illus-
trations.
160 Theocritean Regencies

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)

Similarly Sesoösis provides peace, wealth, and security that manifest

themselves in monuments:
Sesoösis relieved his people of the labors of war; to the comrades who
had fought bravely with him he provided ease and enjoyment of the good
things which they had attained, while he himself, being desirous of glory
and eager for a memory that lasted forever, constructed great and mar-
velous works in conception as well as in their lavishness, winning for
himself immortal glory and for the Egyptians security with leisure for all
time.120

116. See Gow 2: 339 ad 82ff.

117. pleAoy% tpn trismyrAvn (1.31.7) = FGrH 264 F19. See also Murray 1970, 168
n. 10.
118. See Gow’s discussion (2: 338–39 ad 82ff.).
119. 1.56–57. So Murray: “How much of the rest of the poem is inspired by
Hecataeus can only be guessed at, but compare ll. 95–101 with Hecataeus’ emphasis in
the geographical section on the defensibility of Egypt” (1970, 168 n. 10).
120. Diodorus Siculus 1.56.1.
Theocritean Regencies 161

And a little later:

He made the country secure and difficult of access for enemy incursions,
since hitherto almost all the best part of Egypt had been suitable for
horses and accessible for chariots, from that time on because of the num-
ber of canals from the river it became very difficult for an enemy to in-
vade.121

Just as he appropriated the model of the young Sesoösis as a parallel

for the young Heracles of the Heracliscus and as a tribute to the newly
crowned Ptolemy, here the accomplishments of the mature Sesoösis serve
as a template for the mature king. Wealth, which the king possesses now
by virtue of his deeds both in the Syrian war and on the home front, is a
mark of his favor from Zeus, but it also obliges him to behave, as Sesoö-
sis, as a just king and to extend his generosity to his subjects. Though the
conferral of benefits on one’s subjects is a feature of Greek kingship from
Homer on, the particular form in which these virtues are articulated in
this passage closely approximates Egyptian kingship. The emphasis on
control of the eastern, western, and southern borders to guarantee peace
(86–87) in order for the country to prosper, combined with wealth and
its disposition, was a feature of pharaonic kingship that apparently
Ptolemy continued. The Israel stele of Merneptah, set up after the king’s
victory over the Libyans, for example, proclaims: “One walks free-strid-
ing in the road, for there is no fear in people’s hearts; fortresses are left to
themselves . . . , the cattle are left to roam, no herdsman crosses the
river’s flood; . . . towns are settled once again . . . all who roamed have
been subdued by the King of Upper and Lower Egypt.”122 R. Hunter pro-
vides a more contemporary hieroglyphic parallel for this passage: “Good
things, all good things abound in his reign . . . his granaries reach to
heaven . . . his soldiers outnumber the sands . . . all the sanctuaries cele-
brate . . .” He observes: “Theocritus does not merely combine the Greek
poetic tradition with a native language of praise, but finds in the former
the authorizing pattern of the latter.”123 Or vice versa.

121. Diodorus Siculus 1.57.4.

122. Lichtheim 1976, 77. The theme of cattle not being able to roam freely is a com-
mon feature of admonition or lamentation literature, and its inverse, the restoration of
free ranges to cattle, marks the good king.
123. Hunter 1996a, 89. The Egyptian text he translates from French is in S.
Sauneron, “Un document égyptien relatif à divinisation de la reine Arsinoe II,” BIFAO 60
(1960) 83–109.
162 Theocritean Regencies

Theocritus’s praise is not unalloyed, however. Consider the brief

speech of the island of Cos at Ptolemy’s birth: the island asks the new-
born for a favor, namely, “In the same honor [as Apollo held Delos] es-
tablish the Triopian hill, granting an honor equal to the Dorians who
live nearby” (68–69). Whatever the exact identification of the Triopian
hill,124 it would seem to have been a region of potential Ptolemaic ex-
pansion. To be cynical, Ptolemy can “favor” the region by acquiring it,
and thus complete his own expansionist policies—one example of how
he might increase what he has inherited from his father. It is of course
possible to read this as a compliment to Ptolemy,125 but it is also an ex-
posure of the complicated nature of imperial wealth and generosity.
Theocritus caps the whole section with a final example of Ptolemaic
largesse in lines 112–16, by noting the beneficium that presumably he
had already received for success in an earlier poetic context. This ex-
ample from the past is intended to serve as a reminder (if not an out-
right plea) to Ptolemy for the future reward that should accrue to The-
ocritus himself for this fine piece of encomiastic writing. But it also calls
attention to the power of the encomiast. His example is self-consciously
manipulative, and instructive when juxtaposed with Cos’s request vis-à-
vis the Triopian hill. For the Triopian hill, whatever the actual desires of
the inhabitants, the attentions of Ptolemy are to be considered a benefi-
cium—that is, Theocritus has constructed them as such within the con-
text of the poem. Similarly, the attentions that Ptolemy receives from
the poet are marked in advance as worthy of beneficium, regardless of
the views of the subject himself.
Theocritus’s poem concludes with Ptolemy’s establishment of the
cult of the Theoi Soteres, “a shrine to his dear mother and father”
(123), immediately followed by a recollection of the marriage of
Ptolemy to his full sister Arsinoe II, for which he provides the mytho-
logical parallel of “the immortals whom Queen Rhea bore to be
rulers of Olympus,” Zeus and Hera (132–33). The phrase oF%
tAketo . . . \RAa occurs in Homer in a passage that Callimachus re-
calls in the Hymn to Zeus when he rejects the “ancient poets who did
not speak truly when they said that lot assigned their three dwellings
to the sons of Cronus” (61–62). In the Homeric passage Poseidon
claims:

124. On which, see H. White, “Theocritus, Ptolemy Philadelphus and Colonus,” CL

1 (1981) 14–58, and Rossi 1989, 118–19.
125. So Rossi (1989, 118), who sees it as “felicitous and appropriate.”
Theocritean Regencies 163

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

Callimachus’s rejection of Homer was in part tied to historical cir-

cumstance. Preference for the Hesiodic version of Zeus’s elevation by
consensual agreement of the other gods based on his clear superiority
has been taken to suggest fraternal accord at the elevation of Ptolemy
II, the youngest of Soter’s sons, over his brothers. But by the time of
the Ptolemy circumstances had changed, and this Homeric allusion is
now ironically apt. The wider context of Poseidon’s statement is Zeus
forbidding his brother Poseidon to continue to support the Trojan
cause, and Poseidon complaining that Zeus is too autocratic and that
Olympus was given to all. Hera in this rare instance is supporting her
husband’s decision, though in the past she had sided with Poseidon.
Consider the parallels: Arsinoe II is now married to Philadelphus,
though she had been married to his older brother (and her half
brother) Keraunus until his death. Keraunus, if not lord of the dead,
could certainly be said to be inhabiting that realm. In returning his
audience to this pivotal moment in the Hymn to Zeus, Theocritus
does more than cap allusions. Callimachus’s preference for Hesiod
over Homer was a deliberate choice of a certain poetic model, one
that gave him access to the tradition of theogonic writing as a means
of imagining the new world of Ptolemy’s court, while it also located
the poet as a particularly privileged speaker—as the writer of theogo-
nies. Theocritus confronts the same fundamental issue—how to de-
ploy the poetic repertory from the past in serving the present—and his
use of Homer here is not pointing to his “solution” so much as un-
derscoring the difficulties encountered in the process. While the pas-
sage in question may now seem more appropriate than it would have
earlier, still there are inconcinnities with any allusion from the mythic
past, as we saw with the heroic priamel of Diomedes, Achilles,
Ptolemy.

Further, the orthography Theocritus uses here, \RAa, is not common in

hexameter, and it returns us to the Zeus hymn in another way. Calli-
machus has used this spelling once in his hymn at line 21,127 when after

126. Iliad 15.187–89.

127. No doubt because of the pun; see the discussion above, chapter 2.
164 Theocritean Regencies

Rhea’s parturition water begins to flow in thirsty Argos, thus, as we

have seen, calling to mind the Nile. Theocritus “reading” of Calli-
machus’s Zeus hymn has now come full course with his allusion to the
birth of Zeus and Hera, as opposed to merely that of Zeus. If he began
by claiming to know how to speak of both Zeus and Ptolemy and by
seeming to draw firm distinctions between them, he concludes with an
equation of human and divine, not in relation to immortality but to
marriage. Further, he hints that the process by which Ptolemy and his
wife will, like their parents, achieve an immortality differs from the
course of the traditional Homeric hero. Finally, the ending symmetry of
the brother-sister pair mirrors the concord not only of the parent di-
vinities memorialized by their pious children in cult but recreates the
accord of Alexander and Soter on Olympus. In many respects the theme
of this poem is concord and harmony—of heaven and earth as human
and divine cohabit in Olympus, and of Zeus, the patron of kings, with
Ptolemy, his protégé; of ruler and ruled as Ptolemy fitly displays his eu-
ergesia; of parent and child in the image of Ptolemy, the beloved and
true son of Soter and Berenice who most resembles his father; and fi-
nally, of brother and sister, husband and wife. This homonoia128 is ac-
tively constructed against other poetic parallels, most obviously Calli-
machus’s and his “doubt” or double-mindedness about how to praise,
but also against the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, in which Leto and the
birth of Apollo are opposed by Hera, and finally against the heroic tra-
dition, as the mention of Achilles and Diomedes suggests. Both men
eclipse their fathers; both are examples of violent warriors who possess
the arete of heroic poetry in abundance, but whose efficacy is limited to
the context of heroic battle, against which the “spearman” Ptolemy is
positioned, who leads a nation-state in prosperous peace. As such The-
ocritus’s poem stands in contrast to another of Callimachus’s poems,
the Hymn to Delos.
As I noted earlier, the two are roughly contemporary, and which is
prior cannot be determined with any degree of conviction. Whether
Callimachus rewrote Theocritean harmony or whether Theocritus posi-
tions his poem against the turbulent cosmos of the Delos hymn, the two
clearly construct themselves against each other. What is interesting
about these poems is this literary behavior: how, regardless of their
compositional order, the fiction of order and the relationship of subject

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

130. Castiglione1967, 251.

168 Theocritean Regencies

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

good offices (eDergesAan) to all attained immortality, some of them even

had been kings in Egypt. When translated, the names of some are
homonyms of the celestial gods (oDranAoi%), but others retain their dis-
tinctive name, Helios and Cronus, and Rhea, and the Zeus whom some
call Ammon, and also Hera. . . . Then Cronus ruled and, having married
Rhea, fathered Zeus and Hera, who became rulers of the entire cosmos
because of their excellence (dI dretbn basilePsai toP sAmpanto% kas-
moy). From them were born five gods . . . Osiris and Isis, and Typhon
and Apollo and Aphrodite; and Osiris is translated as Dionysus, and Isis
is nearest to Demeter. When Osiris married her and succeeded to the
kingship he did many things for the benefit of the life of all people (pollb
prpjai prb% eDergesAan toP koinoP bAoy).134

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.

The inconcinnities in the perceptions that Theocritus’s allusions or in-

tertextualities actually generate in the reader (ancient or modern) and
what his surface text seems to say create a problem in reading: how are
we to respond to these court poems? Are they deliberately ironic? Or
are they subversive in response to the necessity to write poetry in a dis-
tasteful environment? Are they simply failures of poetic judgment—ei-
ther on the poet’s part, who ineptly chose his exempla, or on the part of
readers who can now no longer appreciate the intricate gavotte of court
poetry? The problem is the same for Callimachus, though the particu-
lars are different. Callimachus’s decision to locate his poems for the
most part within the mythological past of archaic poetry has often ob-
scured their political nature, and when he does specifically mention a
Ptolemy modern readers have easily bracketed this off from the text.135

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

In contrast, Theocritus’s obvious application of that same mythological

realm to the contemporary world of the court creates greater strains for
reception; the gap between the poetic press and perceived reality seems
larger. Both poets are experimenting with image making, and humor
sustains many of their experiments; some are intrinsically humorous,
like Heracles, the boy prince, or potentially humorous, like Soter and
Alexander in heaven, or potentially disastrous, like Hera and Zeus as
the ideal couple. But there is in both also the constructed persona of the
poet, which we can watch as he creates his poems. The poets’ habit of
distancing themselves from the surface of the text should allow us to
read the poems in a more nuanced way. If Callimachus constructs his
images of the court in terms of Zeus and Apollo, while Theocritus em-
ploys Heracles, neither is constructing a literal equivalent so much as a
vehicle for expressing the emerging ideologies of the Ptolemaic court
and for devising imaginatively viable myth not simply for what are the
new realities, but for its desires and potential. The available mytholo-
gies—Homeric, hymnic, encomiastic, theogonic, Hecataean—allow
each poet to foreground different elements of the relationship of the
court to the constituent elements of its world—cult, relations with
other parts of the Hellenistic world, with those within and without
Greek-speaking Alexandria, its Greek heritage.
But the variant mythologies have their limits. They come with a
generic encoding and preset parameters within which they functioned
in the past and within which the poet was obliged to work. If Hera and
Zeus are poor paradigms for Isis and Osiris, or at least for the model
behavior that that divine brother-sister marriage would have encoded
for Egyptians, by choosing to write on the subject Theocritus may well
be underscoring the difficulty, namely, that better models do not exist
within the Greek mythological repertory. This is perhaps why Calli-
machus treats the subject not at all or (more likely) employs the non-
sexual pairing of Apollo-Artemis as his Olympian analogues for the
Ptolemaic consanguineous couple. But however successful or otherwise
we may, at this distance, deem these symbolic maneuverings, they are
constitutive of the poetic discourse that is taking place within the court
and between those poets who choose to participate. And it is far more
likely that the poets themselves determine the parameters of this dis-
course than that it is the result of imperial dictation.
chapter 4

Apollonian Cosmologies

In choosing to write epic Apollonius distanced himself from Calli-

machus’s and Theocritus’s poetry about the court so successfully that R.
Hunter could write in 1993: “Very little attention has . . . been paid to
the Ptolemaic context of Apollonius’ epic, to the question of why the
Head of the Library should write on this subject rather than any
other.”1 The question has been ignored because the Homeric epic, un-
like the Aeneid, is constructed as a closed generic form that resists con-
nection with the present; rather, its action is located in a remote past of
national beginnings and first times. The genre itself erects a barrier be-
tween past and present, and, in respect to the present, the past main-
tains a moral hegemony. Events located or narrated within this mythic
past are inherently worthy of memorialization, while contemporary
events, because they have not withstood the test of time and the verdict
of future generations upon their significance, must always be found
wanting in comparison.2 Critical attempts to link events of the Arg-

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

onautica to the Ptolemaic court, therefore, would seem to breach the

temporal authority of epic and both result in an aesthetic diminution of
the poem and sharply underscore the necessarily reduced status of con-
temporary events in comparison with an epic past. If Callimachus and
Theocritus consciously eschewed the epic model, it is easy to imagine
that they did so because of the intransigence of this valorized past and
its impermeable temporal boundaries. Which is not to say that these
poets did not invoke the mythic past. The genres of epinician and en-
comium implicate their subjects in that past as a means of valorizing
the present, but it is precisely the relationship of past and present that
both Callimachus and Theocritus were struggling to articulate (as is
Vergil in Roman epic), and as we saw in earlier chapters their modern
critical reception reflects the difficulty in moving from mythologies en-
coded in the received genres of classical culture to current events.3 With
epic, however, the relationship of past and present is characterized by
rupture, and Apollonius by virtue of choosing to write within the lin-
guistic and mythological framework of Homeric epic inscribes his text
within the value system inherent in that genre, distancing it from the in-
determinacy of contemporary events. I would like, therefore, to con-
sider to what extent the absolute valorized past of the poem is not just
a concomitant for Apollonius, but a central feature. What he chooses to
include enters this privileged state, and even seemingly incompatible el-
ements belong to the system—a closed temporal system removed from
and inherently superior to the present. What is excluded is the present.
This is not to say that Apollonius’s epic past was not related to his con-
temporary world—to have meaning, all writing of the past must be
framed in reference to the present and will necessarily reflect the cul-
tural values and experiences of its author—but the connection need not
be logical, linear, or even obvious. Epic functions not so much to privi-
lege any one particular relationship of present and past, but to enhance
the significance of the present by endowing it with an epic heroic past in
light of which the meaning of all subsequent events is elevated and
against which all subsequent events may be read.4

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.

an epic for the ptolemies

What kind of past, then, did Apollonius seek to create for the Ptole-
mies? The story of Jason and the Argonauts is a quest myth—a staple of
folktale and romance as well as epic. The subject was treated frequently
in previous epic, and elements of the tale were known to Homer,5
though no particular version achieved the dominance that the Homeric
material did for the Trojan War. In outline, Jason, a Greek hero, and his
companions proceed to the eastern edge of the known world, the land
of Colchis, to recover a magic fleece, where he is helped by the king’s
daughter, whom he subsequently marries and brings back to Greece.
The tale has two distinct motifs—the quest for a valuable object and

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

6. There is a tendency to regard tragic sources as the authoritative versions of the

myth (Euripides’ Medea and the now lost Colchian Women of Sophocles), but the Douris
vase, from 490–470 b.c.e. (Vatican no. 16545, Beazley ARV, p. 286), on which Jason has
been swallowed by the dragon, and Dionysius Scytobrachion’s Hellenistic version, in
which Heracles and Jason codirect the expedition, suggest that there was considerable
room for creativity within the parameters of the received tale.
Apollonian Cosmologies 175

western Europe.7 Also, Dionysius Scytobrachion’s euhemerizing account

of the Argonauts, which must have fallen within the early Hellenistic pe-
riod (between ca. 270–220 b.c.e.), provides evidence of how the story
could have been fashioned for contemporary audiences. Several ele-
ments from Scytobrachion’s work are particularly relevant to Apollo-
nius: a prominent feature of both the Argonautica and the Libyan tales
was the opposition of the civilized behavior of Greek conquerors to the
behavior of the barbarians they confronted. In the Libyan tales Scyto-
brachion locates the activities of Dionysus and the Amazons not in
Thrace but in North Africa and Libya, and his narrative action moves
from west to east along the southern Mediterranean from Libya to the
Taurus region (the Amazons) and from Egypt to India (Dionysus). Two
of his characters—Heracles and Dionysus—are Alexander equivalents;
and he incorporates both Ammon and Horus into the more familiar
Olympic pantheon. Thus Scytobrachion produced a set of stories that
conform traditional Greek myths to the historical particularities of the
early Hellenistic period, and integrated Libya and Egypt into his picture.
In its general contour, then, Apollonius has chosen a story in which
the encounter of Greek with a non-Greek world is paramount, as op-
posed to heroic battles or homecoming. But Colchis is not simply an-
other instance of the barbarian. In the Argonautica, it is particular-
ized as Egyptian.8 Initially, an Egyptian connection is suggested by
Apollonius’s appropriation of one of Herodotus’s most distinctive
narrative strategies. For Herodotus the inversion of Greek cultural
norms is a central and defining feature of Egyptian behavior (2.35.2),
and in the Argonautica, as the Argonauts approach the land of
Colchis, they experience a rapid escalation of such inversions ex-
pressed in terms already familiar from Herodotus. The Argonauts en-
counter the Timbarini (2.1010–14), who practice the couvade, and
the Mossynoeci, who do openly out of doors what others do inside.9

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

In book 3, the local burial customs invert a “natural” order by expos-

ing the bodies of men in the air instead of burying them underground
(3.200–209).10 Thus Apollonius constructs a narrative trajectory of
increasingly more alien peoples and behaviors, which peak as the Arg-
onauts reach Colchis. In Colchis itself they find the king, Aeetes, who
is literally the son of Helios. Egyptians from as early as the fifth dy-
nasty identified the pharaoh as the “son of the Sun (Re)” and incor-
porated the phrase into the imperial titulary. The practice was contin-
ued by the Ptolemies, and the Egyptian title was translated into Greek
as yCb% toP \HlAoy.11
More explicitly, in book 4, although he does not name him, Apollo-
nius identifies Colchis as a foundation of Sesostris, the legendary Egypt-
ian conqueror whose exploits were recorded both in Herodotus and in
Apollonius’s near contemporary, Hecataeus of Abdera:
ˆEnuen da tina fasi pArij dib ppsan cdePsai
EDraphn \AsAhn te, bAi kaB karteJ lapn
sfvitArvn uarsei te pepoiuata¢ myrAa d’ gsth
nassat’ Dpoixameno%, tb mBn g poui naietaoysin
dB kaB oG¢ poylB% gbr gdhn Dpenanouen aDan,
ARa ge mbn Gti nPn mAnei Gmpedon yCvnoA te
tpnd’ dndrpn oF% e% ge kauAssato naiAmen ARan¢
oE da toi graptP% patArvn Euen eDrAontai.
From here [Egypt] they say someone (tina) traveled throughout all Eu-
rope and Asia, trusting in the might and strength and courage of his
troops; and he established thousands of cities when he passed through;
some are still inhabited, some are not; for many an age has passed since
then. But Aia [the land of Aeetes] continues even now, and the descen-
dants of those men whom he settled to dwell in Aia. They preserve the
writings of their forefathers.12

Herodotus’s narrative stands behind many of these details:

Dk tp% \AsAh% D% tbn EDraphn diabb%. . . . DpeAte DgAneto DpB Fasi
potamu, oDk Gxv tb DnuePten dtrekAv% eDpePn eGte aDtb% c basileB%

10. See, for example, Fusillo 1985, 159–67.

11. See Beckerath 1999, 25–26. Hieroglyphic versions of this title are used by the
early Ptolemies; yCb% toP ^HlAoy first occurs in the trilingual Rosettana (196 b.c.e.). See
Koenen 1993, 48–49, 61–62.
12. 4.272–79. The stability of its institutions (Gti nPn mAnei Gmpedon) and its use of
writing (graptP%) were defining characteristics of Egypt, most obviously exploited by
Plato in the opening of the Phaedrus (274c5–75b1) and in the Timaeus (21e–24) and the
Laws (700a–701b).
Apollonian Cosmologies 177

SAsvstri% dpodasameno% tp% CvytoP stratip% marion eson db aDtoP

katAlipe tp% xarh% oDkatora%, eGte tpn tine% strativtAvn tu plani
aDtoP dxuesuAnte% perB Fpsin potambn katAmeinan. faAnontai mBn
gbr Dante% oC Kalxoi ADgAptioi¢ noasa% dB prateron aDtb% h dkoAsa%
gllvn lAgv. c% dA moi Dn frontAdi DgAneto, eDramhn dmfotAroy%, kaB
mpllon oC Kalxoi DmemnAato tpn ADgyptAvn h oC ADgAptioi tpn
Kalxvn.

[Sesostris] . . . crossed from Asia into Europe. . . . Then he came to the

river Phasis; I cannot say for sure whether King Sesostris himself de-
tached a body of troops from his army and left them to settle, or whether
some of his men were sick of their travels and remained by the Phasis.
For the Colchians appear to be Egyptians. I say this having noticed it my-
self before hearing it from others, and when it occurred to me I asked
some questions of both parties and found that the Colchians remembered
the Egyptians more distinctly than the Egyptians remembered them.13

Apollonius is likely also to have been alluding to a contemporary por-

trayal of Sesoösis found in Hecataeus of Abdera when he describes the
king as “trusting in . . . his troops” and with his portrait of the world
conqueror as simultaneously a founder of cities. Hecataeus explains
that before beginning his campaign of world conquest, Sesoösis first
courted the goodwill of all of the Egyptians by generosity and benefac-
tions and by these means acquired soldiers who were prepared to die
for their leaders.14 Although the figure of Sesostris is unmistakable,
Apollonius does not name the Egyptian pharaoh but refers to him only
with the indefinite tina. In this way the entire passage conveys a sense
of the distance of the past, as well as the vagueness and conjecture rem-
iniscent of the style of earlier logographers.15 Also, Apollonius’s indefi-
nite allows an initial impression that he is referring to the more recent
exploits of Alexander, in whose eponymous foundation the Argonau-
tica was probably composed.
For contemporary readers Hecataeus of Abdera had already drawn

13. Herodotus 2.103.1–104.1 (with omissions).

14. Diodorus Siculus 1.54.1 ( = FGrH 264 F 25.54.1), and see Murray 1970, 168 n.
9.
15. Pearson 1938, 455–56. By Apollonius’s time the Egyptian name had been Hell-
enized as “Sesostris” by Herodotus, “Sesoösis” by Hecataeus of Abdera, and “Seson-
chosis” in the Alexander Romance. For a discussion of the variants of the name, see Mur-
ray 1970, 162 n. 1.
178 Apollonian Cosmologies

an explicit parallel between Sesoösis and Alexander,16 and in the

Alexander Romance as well Alexander is packaged as the “new Seson-
chosis” (1.34.2 Kroll). Indeed it would have been difficult for a con-
temporary audience not to have regarded Alexander’s conquests as a
template of sorts for the Argonautica. Alexander had gone to the edges
of the known world, to India, before turning back, and he had notori-
ously effected the marriage of his satraps to foreign princesses as part of
his foundation of a new world order in which the boundaries of Greek
and non-Greek were to be softened or blurred. Vignettes like the foun-
dation of the temple of Concord (homonoia) in 2. 714–19 were surely
designed to recall what seemed to have emerged, at least in historical
and philosophical treatments, as a salient characteristic of Alexander’s
regime.17 But Jason would have been a poor parallel for Alexander, and
although Heracles figured in the mythology of the court, particularly in
Theocritus’s poetry, he is excluded from Apollonius’s adventure in any
direct role as leader. As a monster-slayer, however, he is often present in
the Argonautica as an offstage counterpoint to the action of the young
heroes—a circumstance that suggests that despite the occasional simi-
larities the acts of the Argonauts were not consistently modeled on
those of the great world conquerors. Jason and his crew pass through
alien lands without conquest or founding cities; rather, it is through the
building of altars or the institution of rituals that they leave an impres-
sion on these regions. Further, the text is marked by a divine reciprocity.
No divinity opposes the voyage, and it is particularly favored by Hera
and Apollo. Apollo is addressed in the opening line (drxameno% sAo,
FoPbe), and his benficient appearance marks the end of the adventure
in book 4, with the result that he seems to be the patron deity of the
whole poem. When Jason murders Apsyrtus, the intertextual frame-
work of murder and expiation casts the event in terms of the Oresteia,
which allows it to be understood, like Orestes’ murder of his mother, as
part of the process that moves from the chthonic and primordial world
of Helios’s son, Aeetes, into a civilized Olympian order.18
A consideration of Pindar’s fourth Pythian allows us to expand this

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

picture. Pindar’s ode is a layered narrative in which the Argonauts’ ex-

pedition serves as the point of departure for events central to the prais-
ing of the Cyrenean victor Arcesilas IV. Located at the beginning of the
poem, when the Argonauts have broken their journey on Thera, is a
prophecy placed in the mouth of Medea about the founding of the
royal house of Cyrene. She tells Euphemus, one of the Argonauts, that
the clod of earth that had been previously given to him near the Triton-
ian lake in Libya as a gift of hospitality by Triton (who had assumed
mortal shape) was destined when washed into the sea to come to rest
upon the island of Thera. Through its instrumentality Euphemus was
destined to become the ancestor of the Cyrenean royal house: after sev-
enteen generations, his descendants would migrate from Lemnos to
Sparta to Thera and thence to Libya—the land of Zeus Ammon. Thus
the broader context of Greek civilizing barbarian is particularized in
the Battiad line, who, as Greeks, lay claim to the fertile fields of barbar-
ian North Africa:
KAklyte, paPde% CperuAmvn te fvtpn kaB uepn¢
famA gbr tpsd’ Dj clipla-
ktoy potB gp% \Epafoio karan
dstAvn r\Azan fyteAsesuai melhsimbratvn
Dib% Dn 6mmvno% uemAuloi%.
Hear, sons of high-hearted men and gods. For I say that out of this sea-
beaten land [sc. Thera] the daughter of Epaphus shall be planted with a
root of famous cities, amid the foundations of Zeus Ammon.19

The clod of Libyan earth given as a gift that comes to rest on

Thera—that is, Greek soil—confers by its migration a kind of au-
tochthonous claim to Libya, which subsequently becomes Greek by
manifest destiny or divine plan.20 In Pindar, the marriage of Medea and
Jason is proleptic of the destined union of Libya and Greece, and the
usual structural hierarchies are fully operative: male over female, Greek
over barbarian, and culture over nature.21 The recovery of the fleece,

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

which was already Greek, is a narrative isomorph of the recovery of

Libya. It comes as no surprise that Apollonius would adapt these Pin-
daric elements for a poem written in Ptolemaic North Africa, though it
can hardly have been his purpose (as it was Pindar’s) to celebrate the
Battiad line of Cyrene.22 As we might anticipate, Apollonius makes no
overt reference to the Battiad connection of Euphemus and does not
mention Cyrene at all.23 Rather, he seems to have cast Euphemus and
his line as mythological analogues for the Greeks in general who were
destined to colonize Libya. He fashions the last book of his poem to
begin with a recollection of the Egyptian conqueror and colonizer,
Sesostris, who in Hellenistic writing has come to be the precursor of
Alexander. Much of the action in the last book takes place in Libya,
and it comes to an end not with the prophecy of Greek migration to
Cyrene, but with the birth of an island from Libyan soil that will be-
come a home for Euphemus’s descendants—that inchoate moment
when all future realities are possible:
Balaka gbr teAjoysi ueoB panton dB balanti
npson, Cn’ cplateroi paAdvn sAuen Dnnassontai
paPde%, DpeB TrAtvn jenaion Dggyalije
tande toi cpeAroio LibystAdo%.
For the clod, when you toss it into the sea, the gods will make into an is-
land, where sons of your sons in latter days will dwell, since Triton has
pledged a gift of friendship, this piece of the Libyan continent.
(4.1750–53)

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

city of Alexandria.24 For Apollonius’s audience, many of whom would

have been among the first or second generation of Alexandrian settlers,
the end of the Argonautica, with its alteration of Pindar’s narrative
order,25 exhibited a number of elements found also in the hybrid Greco-
Egyptian myth of their own origins: a dangerous trek across the Libyan
desert, a prophetic appearance of a North African divinity, an island,
and a promise of land from African soil where Greeks were destined to
dwell. According to the Alexander Romance (1.30.6–7), Alexander
crossed the desert to the shrine of Zeus Ammon at the Siwah oasis in
Libya, where the god in the form of an old man with ram horns ap-
peared to him in a dream and instructed him to establish his new city
opposite the island of Pharos.26 Since the most familiar aspect of the
Egyptian coastline for Greeks was the island of Proteus (Pharos), the
story of which is related in detail by Menelaus in the Odyssey
(4.354–592), it is not surprising that a Greek account of the foundation
of Alexandria would include an element already present in Homeric
mythology, but the earliest accounts also include distinctively Egyptian
features like the prophecy sent by Ammon. Apollonius does not explic-
itly recount the foundation of Alexandria, but the Pindaric narrative
that he refashions in epic time might easily serve as a template not only
for Greek colonization of Cyrene, but for Ptolemaic Egypt as well. His
language at 4. 1753—dpeAroio LibystAdo%—is not necessarily a syn-
onym for the Cyrenaica; it might equally refer to the whole of North
Africa. In writers ranging from Herodotus to Eratosthenes “Libya” was
not only the country to the west of Egypt but was considered to be a
continent separate from Europe and Asia, including all of North Africa
from the Pillars of Heracles in the West at least as far as the west bank
of the Nile and sometimes even to the Red Sea. Alexandria itself could
be located in Libya in this sense, as an epigram of Poseidippus on the
temple of Arsinoe-Aphrodite Zephyritis at Zephyrion to the east of
Alexandria makes clear. The site is described as “midway between the

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

shore of Pharos and the mouth of Canopus, among the encompassing

waves . . . this wind-swept breakwater of well-flocked Libya.”27 If
“Libya” could refer to the coastline of Egypt for Poseidippus, it could
also serve as a recognizable synecdoche for (at the very least) Alexan-
drian Egypt in Apollonius.28 This flexible geography permits Apollonius
to fashion a past that could provide the mythological paradigm for all
Greek presence in Libya, broadly defined, onto which more than one
set of historical particulars could be retrojected. For these reasons it
seems unlikely to me that Apollonius’s narrative was constructed to re-
flect historical events or to take any particular position on the issue of
who controlled the Cyrenaica—Magas or one of the Ptolemies—
though it could accommodate either.29

We have then the beginnings of an answer to our question, What kind

of past did Apollonius create for the Ptolemies? It is a past in which
Greece encounters Egypt, recovers from it a most valuable possession
(the fleece), which is already Greek, by virtue of a divinely inspired col-
laboration of Medea with the enemy, and effects a return, during
which, again by divine favor, one of the Argonauts is singled out as the
ancestor of those Greeks who are destined to inherit North Africa. Just
as the defeat of Troy in the Homeric poems served as the paradigmatic
triumph of Greece over Asia, reenacted in historical times by the Per-
sian wars, or the historical hostility of Carthage and Rome as well as
the more recent enmity with Alexandria is given a mythological raison
d’ être by Vergil in the encounter of Dido and Aeneas, the Argonautica
may be read as a mythological account of the inevitability of Ptolemaic
rule over alien North Africa. But this is not the end of the story. Apol-
lonius experiments with many of the traditional pharaonic themes
throughout his text both independently of their use in Callimachus or
Theocritus or dialogically with these poets. Egyptian elements are not

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

confined to only one area or stratum of his narrative, however; they

permeate the entire text. Therefore, before considering where and why
they occur, I should like to suggest a strategy for organizing Apollo-
nius’s text to place in perspective his evocations of Egypt. In his narra-
tive of the journey from old Greece to these new African beginnings,
neither “Greek” nor “barbarian” was a simple category. Apollonius
wrote in a world in which the historically potent ethnic categories of
Argive, Ionian, Athenian, and Peloponnesian were giving way to the
aggregated “Hellene,” for which the markers of identity were as yet
open to negotiation.30 The category of barbarian was similarly labile. It
included the many non-Greeks to be found in the Greek epic past as
well as the rather more one-dimensional “barbarian” found in tragedy
and in philosophy of the classical period. By the third century, Alexan-
der’s conquest and his vision of an empire that included both Greek and
non-Greek had left their intellectual residue, with the result that writers
like Hecataeus of Abdera even elevated barbarian Egyptian culture over
Greek, thus calling into question previous essentialist distinctions.31 For
Apollonius there could have been no single template for “barbarian,”
and it is not surprising that the Argonauts encounter many varieties of
“other” who may differ widely or scarcely at all from themselves. Most
significantly, Egypt, which for earlier Greek writers occupied the posi-
tion of the paradigmatic “other,” the culture farthest in its behavior and
beliefs from Greek norms, as Herodotus asserts in his Egypt book,32 had
now become Greek by right of conquest, a circumstance that required
new accommodations to alien modes of thought, including structures
of government and religious belief.

encountering the “other”

In creating his epic world Apollonius adapts a variety of narrative
strategies, combining folklore, romance, tragedy, magic, and scientific
(especially geographical) observation in unpredictable ways, often
shifts his narrative perspective,33 and in the course of narrating an event
hints at untold alternatives.34 “Meaning” quickly dissolves into “mean-

30. Fraser 1972, 1: 38–55, and see chapter 5.

31. Murray 1970, 157–61.
32. 2.35.2: “In almost every respect [the Egyptians] in their behavior and customs are
the opposite of other men.”
33. See, for instance, the full-length treatment of Fusillo 1985.
34. Hunter 1993, 1–7.
184 Apollonian Cosmologies

ings,” since Apollonius’s text is constructed with competing centers of

authority. What on the surface may appear to be eccentric composi-
tional behavior I believe can be better understood if considered as an
attempt to construct an epic past to provide a behavioral model differ-
ent from that of Panhellenic epic for the culturally multidimensional
world of the eastern Mediterranean. Apollonius’s narrative can be con-
veniently segmented into three distinct types: (1) a quest for a golden
fleece with its attendant voyage into a realm of magic and monsters; (2)
“objective” observation that includes scientific information as well as
aetiological explanations; and, finally, (3) the erotic encounter of Jason
and Medea, which appears on the surface to be stylistically and con-
ceptually at variance with the rest of the text. I believe it is not coinci-
dental that these three types are also found in the travel writing pro-
duced by Europeans who wrote about Africa or Latin America in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In writing about this literature
M. L. Pratt, for example, distinguishes the following narrative patterns.
Initially during the period of conquest, travelers experienced the re-
gions as populated by monsters, as lands in which they had a series of
fantastic and dangerous adventures, usually confined to the periphery
or coastline. This was followed by a period of scientific exploration of
the interior, in which explorers and botanists, like Adam and Eve in
Eden, renamed the alien landscapes and organized their geography and
ecology into categories suitable for their European conquerors. The
final phase Pratt characterized as one of romantic encounter, usually be-
tween European male and a native woman, who often betrays her own
culture to aid or even “marry” the foreigner.35 What make Pratt’s study
relevant for understanding the Argonautica is her insight that each of
these three patterns results from a different type of epistemological or
cognitive response to alien peoples and places, as the European travel-
ers’ interactions with them become progressively more extended and in-
timate. In turn, these cognitive responses generate their own rhetorical
and narrative strategies. Moreover, at least one of them, that of roman-

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

tic encounter, was directly dependent on classical models like the

Odyssey or the Aeneid,36 so the application of Pratt’s categories to
Apollonius is not the importation of an alien model, but of a linear de-
scendant. In her analysis, however, these three were not usually in play
at once but succeeded each other in time, because they represented nor-
mative changes in European perception of African and Latin American
peoples. By using Pratt’s work as a lens through which to view Apollo-
nius’s poem, we will find that he employs similar cognitive modes as a
means of expressing in epic form the Greek experience of the eastern
Mediterranean. We can also account more easily for the variety of his
temporal structures if we realize that his narrative encodes discrete and
changing conceptions of the “other” (akin to Pratt’s) not successively,
but simultaneously. In other words, Apollonius deploys elements de-
rived from different levels of experience of the non-Greek Mediter-
ranean—myth, geographic exploration, psychological realism—as in-
terlaced narratives.37 His technique becomes clearer if we examine each
type individually.
Apollonius’s frame tale—the voyage of the Argonauts to repossess
the golden fleece—is an early Greek myth that corresponds to Pratt’s
initial category of cultural interaction, an encounter with an alien re-
gion that was experienced as populated by monsters or creatures exist-
ing in an uncivilized state. In this world Heracles, the slayer of all man-
ner of mythical beasts, is entirely appropriate. Yet a tension quickly
develops between the precivilized, pre-polis world that Heracles inhab-
its and what is figured as the “real” world of Jason, a tension that plays
itself out for the reader in a series of narrative doublets. Initially Jason
encounters the Lemnian women, who are “real” analogues of the myth-
ical Amazons. Heracles in a brief and hostile encounter takes the girdle
of Hippolyte, the Amazon queen (an event alluded to as having hap-
pened in the past as the Argo passes by Themiscura on the way to

36. Pratt 1992, 96.

37. Tension between two different modes of narrative reality is an important feature
of the Odyssey. The fantastic world of Odysseus’s return, with its Laestrygonians and Cy-
clopes, is blocked as a separate narrative from the “real” world of Ithaca. This allows
Odysseus to create and edit his own narrative history whenever he chooses to retell it,
and his fantastic adventures stand in contrast to the opening and closing books in such a
way that subsequent critics like Lucian can claim that Odysseus is a liar who gulls the
Phaeacians with tall tales and that the events never “really” happened (True Histories
1.3.8–12). Apollonius, in contrast, interweaves disparate modes of experiencing reality in
such a way that for the reader the hierarchies are blurred, a circumstance that contributes
to the difficulty in understanding the character of Jason.
186 Apollonian Cosmologies

Colchis, 2.966–1001). Jason and his men in a more nuanced incident

leave Lemnos with Hypsipyle’s cloak freely given, after having insemi-
nated the Lemnian women with sons whose descendants are destined to
be the inheritors of North Africa. Again, the events with the Doliones
are constructed as double.38 Heracles slays the Earth-born men
(1.989–1011) while Jason and his men in a fatal case of mistaken
identity unwittingly kill their former hosts, the Doliones (1. 1012–78).
The swiftness and necessity with which Heracles responds to the attack
of the monsters and clears them from the landscape so they no longer
pose a threat to the civilized communities around them is a poignant
counterpoint to the needless deaths of the hapless Doliones. Even when
Heracles has ostensibly disappeared from the narrative, some of the
Argonauts dwell on how much more effectively he would have dis-
patched Amycus than Polydeuces did (2.145–53), and at the end of
book 4 Heracles’ encounter with the Hesperides is constructed to con-
trast with that of the Argonauts’. Heracles does not, I would argue, rep-
resent the loss of the heroic in contrast to the feebleness of an all-too-
human Jason as leader so much as a figure who belongs to another
conceptual frame, a frame in which the Mediterranean is populated by
monsters who need to be removed before the course of civilization can
proceed. And it is for this activity that Heracles ultimately is elevated to
Olympus, “to dwell with the immortals” (1.1319). For Heracles the
distinction between self and other, between Greek and non-Greek, and
Olympian and chthonic is clear-cut, and his mythological niche is to re-
move these dangerous creatures from the landscape so that the civiliz-
ing process of Greek culture may begin. The figure of Heracles operates
in a world free from the moral ambiguity of deciding who or what was
an enemy; the monstrous or the unnatural are easily discerned.39 But
this is not so for Jason and his crew, for whom many of the peoples they
encounter, like the Doliones, are mirror images of themselves. One of
the final episodes in book 4 illustrates this quite clearly.
After the Argonauts have carried their ship for twelve days over the
sands of Libya, desperate for water, they catch sight of the Hesperides,
as if a mirage. The nymphs at first disappear from sight, “immediately
becoming dust and earth” (4.1408), but upon entreaty show themselves
to the exhausted crew as trees in an oasis. Here on the edge of daylight,

38. See Clauss’s extensive discussion of this passage (1993, 148–75).

39. Hence his inability to cope with the loss of Hylas, since it introduces the ambiva-
lences of the erotic.
Apollonian Cosmologies 187

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

sults from the colonizing dimension of Ptolemiac rule. Like those

Greeks who settled in the eastern Mediterranean and in Sicily and
South Italy in an earlier age, the Ptolemies were claiming new territo-
ries, and there was need, subconsciously or otherwise, to reconfigure
them imaginatively in Greek terms. Aition is the epistemological cate-
gory that accomplishes this, but in specific ways: the logic of the aition
is to connect the new place with Greek myth, in a way that serves to ef-
face the native and give the intruding Greek population (or colonizers)
continuous claim to the place, to create the illusion in other words not
of intrusion, but of return.41 Consider, for example, the establishment of
the cult of the Great Mother on Mt. Dindymon and Apollonius’s ac-
count of the use of tambourines and drums in her worship:
With many prayers, the son of Aeson implored her [the Mother] to de-
flect the storm blasts as he poured out libations onto the blazing sacrifice;
all together the young men at Orpheus’s command marked the dance,
performing in full armor, and beat upon their shields with their swords so
that the ill-omened cry [of the Doliones] might be dissipated in the air—
the lament that the people were still making in grief for their king. From
that time forward the Phrygians worship Rhea with tambourine and
drum. (1.1132–39)

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

41. Dougherty 1991, 119–32.

42. For the essential foreignness of the Meter cult, see Burkert 1985, 177–79.
Apollonian Cosmologies 189

competing claim and counterclaim to places, rites, and foundations. At

the death of Idmon, the Argonauts erect a barrow over their dead com-
rade on which a wild olive tree begins to grow:
And if I must under instruction from the Muses tell this story bluntly,
Phoebus directly instructed the Boeotians and Nisaeans to worship
[Idmon] as guardian of the city, and around the trunk of the old olive to
lay their city’s foundations. But they, instead of the god-fearing son of Ae-
olus, Idmon, even now honor Agamestor. (2.844–50)

This vacillation reaches its logical conclusion in book 4 when the

very act of establishing colonies is given a different perspective:
From here [Egypt] they say someone traveled throughout all Europe and
Asia, trusting in the might and strength and courage of his troops; and he
established thousands of cities when he passed through; some are still in-
habited, some are not; for many an age has passed since then. (4.272–75)

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)

Apollonius specifically locates Sesostris’s city-founding in a primeval

time, before the constellations, before the moon. While the Egyptians
are engaged in the task of civilizing, the only Greeks who as yet exist,
the Arcadians, live in a precivilized state, eating acorns (the raw, not the
cooked). “The sacred race of the Danaans” reminds us of a foundation
myth that moves counter to the usual pattern, not from Greece to the
Near East, but in the opposite direction: Danaus was supposed to have
migrated from Egypt to Argos, where he became king and thus lent his
name to a whole people.45 But this is presented as an event in the future.
Moreover, in this passage Apollonius uses a number of geographical
markers that belong to both Greece and Egypt: Thebes, Triton ( = Nile),
and, most surprisingly, \HerAh polylaio%. A name and defining charac-
teristic of Egypt here, the term was applied to the Pelasgian land in
1.580: derAh polylaio% aRa Pelasgpn. Such doublets are a feature of
aetiological writing, the Greek marking of a foreign place with familiar
Greek names, a practice that—whatever its conscious or expressed in-
tention—implicitly encodes privilege and hierarchy as the speaker, the
namer, exerts control over his new environment by displacing the local
name in favor of one that signifies for him. But if both Thessaly and
Egypt are called by the same name \HerAh polylaio%, and implicit in
this is the practice of one cultural group renaming, hence dominating,
another, this passage hints at an earlier trajectory of conquest that
moved from Egypt to Greece, thus setting the scene for the Greco-
Egyptian world of the Ptolemies. Or is the ambivalence about the pri-
ority of these names that Apollonius’s text creates a deliberate reflection
of what we saw in earlier Greek writers, where the cultural trajectory
from Greece to Egypt or from Egypt to Greece did not represent histor-
ical realities and could be reversed in service of specific philosophical
and political agendas?

44. Apidanians were Peloponnesians; see sch. on AR 4.263–65 Wendel: Apidanpa%

dB toB% Peloponnasoy% dpb 6pido% toP ForvnAv%. Hence “Arcadians” should qualify
“Apidanians,” not the reverse, as if Apollonius were saying “Arcadian Peloponnesians.”
45. Herodotus 2.91, and see chapter 1 above.
Apollonian Cosmologies 191

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

46. 1992, 97.

47. 1992, 98.
48. Pratt 1992, 101.
49. The Cyrenean constitution is a case in point: it permitted the intermarriage of
Cyrenean male citizens with Libyan women. Fraser (1972, 2: 787), however, remarks that
“it would . . . be wrong to suppose that the practice of racial intermarriage penetrated the
192 Apollonian Cosmologies

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

that proceeded along more typical lines of erotic encounter without

marriage. We can read these divergent scenarios against historical cir-
cumstance and conclude that they serve as a cautionary tale against
fraternization with conquered peoples, as a not very covert warning to
the Ptolemies about becoming too closely allied with the natives. But
more important both aitia—one of marriage, the other of sexual liaison
with offspring—partake of the same strategies: they redefine conquest
in terms of intrafamilial relationships of marriage and lineal descent.
Within the poem the romantic encounter provides the space in
which what are set out as two distinct behavioral patterns begin to co-
alesce. Unlike her father, whose rage and cruelty mark him as a “typi-
cal” barbarian, Medea is cast as sympathetic to their goals and takes
pity on the strangers, eventually joining her fate to theirs. The attempt
to “save” Jason from her father’s brutality is a sign of Medea’s en-
lightened character.51 Still, the dangers of this type of liaison are easily
identified. With Medea’s help—not wholesome Greek skills like those
of Heracles, but foreign magic—Jason quickly becomes the “other.”
He replicates the acts of Aeetes in yoking the bulls, sowing the
dragon’s teeth, and killing the Earth-born men, acts of strength of
which he would ordinarily have been incapable, but which Aeetes per-
formed as a demonstration of his power to the Colchians (4.406–18).
When the two flee, Jason’s murder of Apsyrtus in front of a temple
continues the transformation. He strikes him down “like a butcher
felling a bull” (4.468–69). When Jason first appeals to Aeetes to give
him the fleece, the king responds with a clichéd exhibition of “barbar-
ian” cruelty, threatening the Argonauts with mutilation, to cut off
their hands and cut out their tongues (3.378). But it is Jason who later
mutilates his enemy by cutting off of Apsyrtus’s extremities (4.478).52
We find that when Jason and Medea link fates the boundaries be-
tween Greek and other, barbarian and non-barbarian, begin to col-
lapse, and the number of moments in which cultural behaviors over-
lap climaxes in book 4. Circe, for example, is explicitly identified as a
sister of Aeetes, hence a foreigner (she and Medea speak their native
tongue together at 4.730–31), but the rites of expiation she performs
for Jason and Medea are thoroughly Greek: she kills a piglet and drips

51. Medea’s essential Hellenism is a central theme in Scytobrachion’s account

(Diodorus Siculus 4.46 and 52).
52. See Hunter’s remarks (1993, 21) on the various interpretative layers possible with
this passage; also Pietsch 1999, 152–58. After the murder Jason performs the expiatory
elements of the maschalismos, but this does not make the event any easier for the reader.
194 Apollonian Cosmologies

its blood over them in a scene consciously reminiscent of Orestes at

Delphi (4.705–14). As we saw above in the characterization of Hera-
cles by the Hesperides as a “monster,” the earlier trajectory of Greek
civilizing barbarian is reversed, and in one of the last similes of the
book the two are conflated as the Argo itself becomes the quintessen-
tial signifier of a chthonic, precivilized world, a serpent:
ˆV% dB drakvn skolibn eDligmAno% Grxetai oRmon,
eRtA min djAtaton ualpei sAla% delAoio,
r\oAzi d’ Gnua kaB Gnua karh strAfei, Dn dA oC gsse
spinuarAgessi pyrb% DnalAgkia maimaonti
lampetai, gfra myxbn dB dib r\vxmoPo dBhtai¢
e% „rgb lAmnh% stama naAporon DjerAoysa
dmfepalei dhnaibn DpB xranon.
As a serpent writhes along its crooked path when the sun’s hottest rays
inflame it, and with a hiss it 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. (4.1541–47)

Even divinities partake of this ambivalence of signification: as the

ship is rescued by Triton, the god first appears to them as a youth to
offer them the gift of a clod of earth but ultimately reveals himself in his
“real” form (oQa% per Dtatymo% ren DdAsuai)—from head to belly like
the “blessed ones” but with the sides and spiky tail of a sea monster
(4.1602–16). This merging of man and monster brings the reader to the
final moments of the poem in which a “new” (and I have argued Ptole-
maic) beginning is marked by the birth of an island. As a prelude to this
moment the narrative provides us with a series of opposing ways of see-
ing—empty desert sand or oasis of the Hesperid nymphs, good snake
and bad snake, dragon slayer and slain—that converge in the simile of
the Argo, the boatload of once and future dragon-slayers who have
now become their prey. Similarly, divinity no longer has only its
Olympian aspect but is hybrid, a man-monster, close kin to the
chthonic serpents that populated the text before the advent of the he-
roes, or to hybrid gods like the ram-horned Ammon who appeared to
Alexander. Moreover, these images are not static. They shape-shift like
the Hesperides and Triton. In this way the narrative itself effects a vir-
tual collapse into symbolic chaos that presages the dawn of a new order
in which two distinctive cultures—Greek and North African—will nec-
essarily be joined.
Apollonian Cosmologies 195

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

quently found able to access chthonic powers or engaged in magic prac-

tice.58 Moreover, Jason’s home was Thessaly, the proverbial home of
witchcraft. Also, as others have already observed, many of the crew of
the Argo have chthonic connections as well as magic skills: Lynceus
could see beneath the earth, Periclymenus could alter his shape, Euphe-
mus could run on water, and Boreas and Zetes had wings.59 A. Moreau
points out that a homonym of the pilot Tiphys was the Greek Typhon
and that he and his successors in all versions of the tale had chthonic
associations.60 The quest itself—for the golden fleece of a talking ram
and in a ship with a talking beam—seems more suited to folklore and
to the fanstastic than to the usual battle world of Hellenic heroes. Apol-
lonius seems to take pains to begin his narrative with already breached
categories in order to show that magic was not the sole property of for-
eign Medea in far-off Colchis, but already in various ways an essential
component of the Greek story as well as its protagonists.
Apollonius launches his heroes into a world with a distinctive cos-
mology, articulated by Orpheus at 1.496–511:
He sang how earth and heaven and sea, at first mixed together in one
form, out of dire strife (neAkeo% Dj dlooPo) were separated from each
other; and how the stars and the paths of the moon and sun always keep
their fixed place (Gmpedon aDBn . . . tAkmar) in the sky. And how moun-
tains arose and how rivers sounded with their attendant nymphs, and all
crawling things came to be. He sang how first Ophion and Eurynome,
Ocean’s child, held power on snowy Olympus; how by force and might
the one yielded his honors to Cronus, the other to Rhea, and they fell into
the waves of the Ocean. But the others then ruled the blessed Titan gods,
while Zeus, still a child, still thinking the thoughts of a child (gfra ZeB%
Gti koPro%, Gti fresB napia eDda%), dwelt in his Dictaian cave. For the
Earth-born Cyclopes had not yet armed him with the thunderbolt, with
thunder and lightning, for these things provide glory for Zeus.

In creating Orpheus’s song Apollonius availed himself of more than one

source for Greek cosmogonic material: lines 496–98 conform to Empe-
docles’ idea that creation resulted from the oppositions of neikos and
philia, or repulsion and attraction,61 while lines 503–6 depend on

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

Pherecydes of Syrus intermixed with Hesiod (Theogony 505–11). The

passage is not consistently Empedoclean, but its formulation does re-
flect Empedocles’ basic idea that the created universe was subject to an
alternation of complete fragmentation and complete harmony—a
world that came into existence but was not eternal. This idea closely
approximated the Egyptian cosmogonic struggle between order and
chaos. What survives of Empedocles had much in common with earlier
pre-Socratics, but he was also linked with Pythagoreanism, an intellec-
tual tradition that Greeks themselves often identified with Egyptian
modes of thinking.62 Also, in his later biographical tradition, Empedo-
cles was said to have worn one bronze sandal, a circumstance that P.
Kingsley in a recent study connects with the practice of alchemy and
magic.63 This is by no means to suggest that Jason’s wearing of one san-
dal was meant to remind the reader of Empedocles, but rather that
Apollonius may have selected a “Greek” cosmology that was already
suffused with alien ideas and behaviors in Greek minds. Orpheus’s song
also borrows language and concept from the Hymn to Zeus.64 The ver-
bal reminiscences are specific to a passage in which I have argued Calli-
machus has constructed his narrative of the birth of Zeus (in Greek
terms) to mirror that of Horus (in Egyptian). Apollonius’s introduction
of elements from that poem into an Empedoclean cosmology may not
be fortuitous, and it permits us to ask whether Apollonius too is locat-
ing his epic in a hybrid cosmogonic landscape that blends Greek and
Egyptian.
I do not claim that Orpheus’s song is consistently Egyptian, but
rather that elements of it do resemble Egyptian cosmogonic thought in

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

several ways.65 Most strikingly, the Egyptian cosmos begins by separat-

ing from the undifferentiated void, characterized by a watery darkness
or hiddenness, and is always conceived as a struggle between maat,
through which the differentiated universe is maintained, and the undif-
ferentiated state, or chaos, into which inevitably it will return. Next,
Apollonius introduces Ophion, a figure from the cosmogonic writings
of the sixth-century Pherecydes of Syrus.66 In Pherecydes’ theomachy
Ophioneus was, like Egyptian Apophis, a snake-limbed equivalent of
Typhoeus.67 As the personification of disorder, Apophis lived in the
primeval waters before creation and had to be driven from the ordered
world of existence.68 Similarly, after his defeat by Chronos,69 Ophioneus
is plunged into the primeval waters of Ocean that surround the world.70
The forceable separation of Earth and Sky and the fixed location of the
constellations resemble the Egyptian deities Geb and Nut (Earth and
Sky), who must be physically separated by their father, Shu ( = Air).71
Stars and the courses of the sun and moon are thought of as fixed and
are often represented pictorially upon the semicircular body of Nut as
she rises above Geb. The succession of sexed pairs—Ophion and Eu-
rynome, Cronus and Rhea—culminates in Zeus, who is present without
his siblings and described as still a child. It is possible to read the focus
on Zeus alone as an early indication of the centrality of Zeus’s will and
his divine justice in the poem. But the omission of the other Olympians

65. See Hunter’s remarks (1993, 163).

66. See West 1971, 1–75, and Schibli 1990, 140–75, for the fragments.
67. So Schibli 1990, 83–84 and 93–96. Ophion’s significance in Greek cosmogonic
thought has come down to us from the writings of Pherecydes of Syrus. See sch. ad loc.
(Wendel) and also West 1983, 127–28, for a discussion of this passage and its relation-
ship to various cosmologies. Ophion seems to have been quite familiar to the Hellenistic
poets. Lycophron, for instance, refers to Zeus as “the lord of Ophion’s throne” (1192:
dnakti tpn \OfAvno% uranvn), and Callimachus in a fragment from the Victory of
Berenice in the Aetia remarks that the sun, when it has set, “shines upon the sons of
Ophion” in the underworld (SH fr. 259 = 177 Pf.: b% kePno% \OfionAdisi faeAn[ei). How-
ever, the context is lost.
68. Hornung 1971, 158–59.
69. In Pherecydes, Chronos or Time “began everything by generating progeny from
his own seed,” another idea that has closer analogues in Near Eastern than in Greek
thinking.
70. M. L. West remarks that when Pherecydes describes the fate of Ophioneus “we
cannot fail to think of Egyptian . . . cosmography” (1971, 47).
71. Diodorus Siculus 1.7.1 has a similar description of the separation of earth and
sky, which Cole (1990, 174–92) assigns to Diodorus’s account of the origins of life in
Egypt (1.10 = FGrH 264 F10), a passage most scholars derive from Hecataeus of Ab-
dera’s Aegyptiaca. However, there are dissenters, most notably Spoerri (1959, 34–38). See
also Burton 1972, 46.
200 Apollonian Cosmologies

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

her father pursues; crime and punishment is limned by Apollo slaying

Tityos for attempting to rape his mother, Leto; plotting and accusa-
tion, then safety by the talking ram, Phrixus. The fact that the cloak
was a gift of Athena indicates that the cosmos was created through di-
vine purpose (franhsi%). Whatever man does without this franhsi% is
done wrongly.72
What lends credibility to the scholiast’s allegorical interpretation is
the fact the first scene on the cloak takes up where Orpheus’s song left
off. In the former the Cyclopes are just completing the thunderbolt,
with which, in the latter, “the Earth-born Cyclopes had not yet armed
Zeus.” Also, Pherecydes’ cosmogony may link the two passages. In
Pherecydes, when Zas ( = Zeus) defeated Ophioneus he immediately
married Chthonie, bestowing upon her as a marriage gift a robe upon
which he had embroidered the earth and sea. The gift of the robe delin-
eated the world as her sphere of influence, and her name is simultane-
ously changed from Chthonie to Ge to reflect her new role.73 Finally,
there are close correspondences with Pindar’s initial description of
Jason. He first appears with two spears and wearing “double dress”
(Pythian 4.79: Dsub% . . . dmfotAra), which consists of native Magne-
sian clothing (Magnatvn Dpixario%) over which he wears a leopard
skin. This is garb that would seem to locate him midway between the
natural world, with his upbringing by Chiron, and the civilized world
of the patrimony that he is intent upon reclaiming. As part of that ini-
tial description, Jason is likened to Ares, the pasi% of Aphrodite, and
the section ends with a reference to Artemis slaying Tityos with her ar-
rows. In Apollonius, Jason wears a cloak that is dAplaka porfyrAhn
and carries one spear. His cloak contains seven scenes, two of which
may gesture towards Pindar: the second, in which Aphrodite looks at
her reflection in Ares’ bronze shield, and the sixth, in which Apollo,
though a child, slays Tityos for attempting to rape his mother, Leto.74
But in contrast to Pindar’s Jason, whose garments position him between
nature and culture, Apollonius’s Jason is situated more completely in
culture.
For Jason to be distinguished by a cloak and not a shield or other
implement of war has been taken as a sign of his ambivalent status in

72. Wendel 67.1–15.

73. Pherecydes B1–2 D-K, and Schibli 1990, 165–67, frr. 68–69.
74. The reason that both Pindar and Apollonius contain this reference is that Tityus’s
daughter was the mother of Euphemus, who is destined to receive the gift of Libyan soil
from the gods.
202 Apollonian Cosmologies

the poem,75 but parallels suggest a somewhat different reading. In con-

trast to the bronze-clad warrior world of the Iliad or the skin-wearing
world of Heracles, Jason appears as an inhabitant of the civilized
world, characterized by the arts and the institution of cult. Jason’s role
in the poem is commensurately less a warrior in the Iliadic mode than
an originator of or participant in cult, where his behavior is significant
or efficacious because of the ritual he enacts, not the presence or ab-
sence of heroic qualities in the man himself. Aetiological events and rit-
uals in the narrative take on greater significance for the overall meaning
of the poem than the character or inherent heroic status of any individ-
ual. Even in the Iliad, however, the shield of Achilles was not simply a
weapon of war but carried on its surface a message of cosmic and po-
litical ordering.76 Jason’s cloak carries a similar message.77 By putting on
the cloak, Jason, like Aeneas when he accepts the shield from his
mother, may be inscius of the broad implications of his raiment, uncon-
scious of its import or his future role, but he is necessarily complicit in
implementing its overall intent. Jason’s role in this poem is to facilitate
the triumph of—in Empedoclean terms—philia over neikos or—in
Egyptian terms—order over chaos. Therefore, it is significant that Jason
first wears this gift of Athena in Lemnos, the place from which the Arg-
onauts set in motion the process that after many generations ultimately
allows Greeks to (re)claim North Africa. Pindar states it thus:
[Euphemus] will find in the beds of alien [Lemnian] women a choice race,
who by favor of the gods will . . . beget a man [Battus] to be master of
the dark-clouded plains [Libya]. He it is whom Phoebus . . . will admon-
ish in his oracle to lead many men in ships to the rich precinct of the son
of Cronus by the Nile.78

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

75. See Clauss 1993, 123 n. 28, for an annotated bibliography.

76. P. R. Hardie, “Imago Mundi: Cosmological and Ideological Aspects of the Shield
of Achilles,” JHS 105 (1985) 11–31.
77. See Hunter 1993, 52–59, for its relationship to the shield of Achilles, and Pietsch
1999, 192–94.
78. Pythian 4.50–56. The translation is that of Braswell (1988, 42–43).
Apollonian Cosmologies 203

we saw in Hecataeus of Abdera and in Theocritus’s court poetry, where

kingship was a matter of behavior rather than birth and expressed by
actions that benefited the ruled, particularly through largesse and by
the institution of cult. This becomes clearer in Apollonius’s narration of
the establishment of the cult of the Great Mother.
After the slaughter of the Doliones we are given an extended aition
in which the Argonauts ascend Dindymon to erect a cult statue to the
Great Mother, Rhea, on its peak (1.1117–52). Here too Callimachean
elements surface—the Cretan cave, the dance in armor, and bringing
forth water in an hitherto arid location—so that we are once again re-
minded of the Greco-Egyptian milieu of the Zeus hymn, but where in
the one these elements were connected with kingship and Callimachus’s
facade of doubt about how to hymn the new royal order, Apollonius
recombines Callimachus’s material into an externally narrated tale of
cultic origins. In Callimachus the pouring forth of water in the dry land
was connected with Egypt and the birth of Zeus. But Apollonius
rewrites these events and locates them in a landscape in which Zeus
and his potency are marginalized, or female takes preeminence over
male. Rhea is the “mother of all the blessed gods” to whom even Zeus
yields.79 At her will beasts fawn upon the Argonauts, and plant life
blooms. The final sign of her power, the coming of water, is connected
not to Zeus, but to Jason and the establishment of a cult: “beforehand
water had not flowed on Dindymon, but for them at once a stream
poured forth from the thirsty peak, and the men who lived around
there in subsequent ages called that water Jason’s spring.”80 Jason and
his companions complete the rite by dancing in armor to drown the ill-
omened cry of the mourning Doliones, in contrast to Callimachus’s
“explanation” of the armored dance as an amusement, with only a
fleeting allusion to drowning out the newborn’s cries so that they
would not come to Cronus’s ears. They enact for the first time a dance
that will come to have deep roots in classical culture—the pyrrhiche—
and one appropriate for their ephebic status.81 Apollonius’s version also
provides an account of the distinctive rites of the Great Mother, which
he repositions as fundamentally Greek. In his version of Zeus in Crete,

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

I suggested that Callimachus rationalized the mythological elements as

part of an overall strategy of refiguring Zeus as a human child as a prel-
ude to his merger with “my king” or Ptolemy. Apollonius refashions el-
ements found also in Callimachus into an explanation for cult behavior
that is in turn made efficacious not by Zeus or divine activity, but by
Jason’s careful implementation of Mopsus’s instructions. Jason’s re-
ward for his compliance in divine will is a peculiar affect of culture.
The precivilized world of nature is tamed by cult and now named: the
local spring that commemorates the establishment of the cult will be
named after Jason. There is also a significant difference in temporal
perspective: “Zeus” in Callimachus’s hymn belongs to a world in
which kings rule by law, epitomized in the poem by Ptolemy. The
events described here by Apollonius belong to an earlier and more un-
stable time in which the forces of divinity are elemental rather than leg-
islative and where human behavior is portrayed in activities that effect
the transition.82
The Egyptian spaces within the Argonautica—Colchis and Circe’s is-
land—display a nature that is still primordial, a condition that in philo-
sophical writers was characterized by the ability to produce creatures
spontaneously from the earth. When the Argonauts encounter Aeetes’
sister, Circe, she is accompanied by an entourage of abnormal crea-
tures. These are not the men who have been transformed into beasts
that accompany her in the Odyssey, but untimely products of Earth’s
spontaneous creation:

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

the course of time ordered in correct combination.83 Thus they followed

her, shapeless in form. (4.672–81)

The description is apparently indebted to Empedocles’ conception of

meigma, or the stuff from which life originally emerged. This passage
conveys the impression of an unstable space in which neikos still holds
sway, of a world that is at some evolutionary distance from the already
abnormal Argonauts, with their enhanced abilities to see below the
earth or fly through the air with winged feet. The terms of Apollonius’s
description—primordial ooze, compaction from the sun—are sugges-
tive of the language of spontaneous generation that Diodorus uses of
Egypt in the passage quoted below.
Apollonius inserts Colchis, too, into this primordial world with the
details he choses to emphasize in the episode of the testing of Jason.
Apollonius tells us that Aeetes has been given half of the dragon’s teeth
that Athena gave to Cadmus, and that he was in the habit of sowing
them from time to time in the soil of Colchis and mowing down the
men who sprang up from the teeth in order to demonstrate his powers
(3.409–18). Aeetes sets this same task for Jason. The sowing of
dragon’s teeth is not in Pindar; it is first preserved in a fragment of the
historian Pherecydes of Athens.84 When Jason cuts down these mon-
strous shoots, they are said to have been emerging from the soil: “many
half-risen into the air as far as their belly and sides, and some as far as
the shoulders—and some just standing upright” (3.1382–84). The de-
scription matches a passage in Diodorus, usually attributed to
Hecataeus of Abdera’s “Theologoumena,” the preface to his Aegypti-
aca. There the generation of life from Egyptian soil is twice described in
the same terms and coincides with an earlier description of the emerg-
ing cosmos in Diodorus:

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)

The two Thebeses were often conflated mythologically to form isomor-

phic stories, as in part they are here. The teeth are divided between
Phoenician/Greek Cadmus and Colchian/Egyptian Aeetes, both of
whom sow the teeth and reap a harvest of “Earth-born” men who are
then cut down. The epithets of Thebes (Ogygian) and of Athena (Tri-
tonian) in this passage are not so much ambiguous as bilocal in their
conventional application, a circumstance that Apollonius exploits here
and and elsewhere. Tzetzes cites a line of Dionysius the Periegete to
demonstrate that in the Hellenistic period the rare word “ogygian,”
which is taken as the equivalent of “primeval,”86 might be applied to
both Egyptian and Boeotian Thebes. He claims that Ogygos was the
king of Egyptian Thebes and, when Cadmus came from there into
Greece, he founded the seven-gated city and named it “ogygian” to
conform everything to the name of Egyptian Thebes.87 Others, he main-
tains, call the seven-gated city Thebes, from the cow Cadmus slaugh-
tered, whose name according to Syrus was Thebe. Just as the attributes

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

of Boeotian and Egyptian Thebes could apparently be conflated, in

Apollonius Athena Tritonis is sometimes associated with Boeotia, as in
the passage above, and sometimes with Libya. At 4.1311, for example,
Libyan nymphs came upon Athena after she had sprung from her father
Zeus’s head, and “bathed her in the waters of Triton” (TrAtvno% Df’
Gdasi xytlasanto); the unusual verb occurs also in Callimachus’s
hymn in the expression of Rhea’s desire to wash the newborn Zeus.88 So
Athena is connected with Libya, if not Egypt, and for the rest of book 4
Triton and Tritonian waters are consistently located in North Africa,
not Boeotia.89
In Callimachus we saw conflation of two distinct geographic loca-
tions deliberately employed to collapse at least momentarily two sepa-
rate landscapes. Apollonius also exploits geographical doublets but in a
markedly different way. Apollonius never indulges in narrative decep-
tion, as Callimachus appears to; rather, he applies the same set of fea-
tures in different places in his narrative to two separate places or cus-
toms. His location of Sesostris’s city-founding in a primeval time is one
example (4.259–69):
For there is another course, which the priests of the immortals who have
sprung from Tritonian Thebes have made known. Not yet did all the con-
stellations move in the heaven, nor yet could one hear of the sacred race
of the Danaans, if one should make inquiry. Alone were the Arcadian Ap-
idanians, 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.90

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

nAvn aDzhpn). Apollonius selects the very rare word proterhgenAvn,

which also appears in the Hymn to Zeus, where, I have argued, it con-
formed to Callimachus’s two versions of Zeus’s succession to Hesiodic
and Egyptian myth. Not only does Apollonius attach the word to
Egypt, but he does so in a passage where, like Callimachus, he is creat-
ing a verbal link between Greek and Egyptian landscapes. \HerAh poly-
laio%, here a name and defining characteristic of Egypt, was applied to
the Pelasgian land in 1.580. Egyptian Thebes (or the eponymous
nymph, Thebe) is called “Tritonian” in this passage, while Boeotian
Thebes was called “Ogygian” and connected with the Tritonian god-
dess about five hundred lines earlier. Thus “primeval” Thebes was ap-
parently younger than “Tritonian” Thebes, and the epithet “Tritonian”
for Athena at 3.1182 (ueb TritonA%) might as easily derive from a con-
nection to the Tritonian waters of North Africa as from Boeotia. To
complicate matters, Egyptian Aeria in the passage above is watered by
the river Triton, which must be the Nile,91 named presumably for Tri-
ton, the biform divinity, who gives Euphemus the clod. As in Calli-
machus this geographical pleonasm is not simply an exercise in recher-
ché allusion; it serves to effect a liaison between Greek and Egyptian
worlds and to relocate or collocate divinities and places in both main-
land Greece and North Africa.92 In contrast to Callimachus, who seems
to have employed stable geographies that allowed Greek models of
kingship to be mapped onto Egyptian (or vice versa), Apollonius seems
rather more to operate in the realm of cosmic origins, in which cultural
formation as well as geographical markers are still in a state of flux.
This geographic duplicity concludes in the double birth of islands with
which the poem ends.

the new order

Apollonius relocates at the end of the Argonautica a prophecy, bor-
rowed from Pindar, that a clod of earth taken from Libya was destined
to wash up on the island of Thera. In Pindar the prophecy had marked
the Cyrenaica as well as the Aegean islands as always already Greek.

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

In this context it is important that Apollonius altered Pindar: the clod

does not wash up on Thera but became Thera. This is a trivial change
with considerable consequence. I discussed above the narrative similar-
ities between this event and the foundation of Alexandria. But there is
another similarity. By altering Pindar, Apollonius brings the ending of
his epic into harmony with Egyptian cosmogony. An island emerging
from watery chaos—the primeval hill or place of coming forth, an is-
land that is a holy nurse (1758: Cerb trofa%), an image that Calli-
machus exploited in both Zeus and Delos hymns—signaled the begin-
ning of the Egyptian universe. As it is placed here at the end of the
book, I submit that its purpose is to suggest a new order in which both
Greek and Egyptian are present and in which the ancestors of the Arg-
onauts are expanded to include not simply the kings of Cyrene but the
new Ptolemaic pharaohs of Egypt. Final events do not imply a fusion of
mythologies, however, so much as bilocated mythic sensibilities: one is-
land encapsulates the Greek tale as one of particularity—Thera, Eu-
phemus, and Libya—while the other, Anaphe, hints at the Egyptian is-
land rising from the void, an event of recurrence, and in the context of
the earlier cosmogonic themes suggests a form half-risen, incomplete,
potential.
The trajectory of the end of the book is the creation of order from
chaos, particularly through the instrumentality of Apollo. But if for
Apollo we substitute his Egyptian alter ego, Horus, then this formula-
tion could serve equally as an accurate description of Egyptian myth.
For Egyptians, the emergence of order from chaos marks the beginning
of the created universe, and it could be magically reenacted by a series
of ritual or symbolic acts—killing snakes, trampling, smiting or other-

93. 1993, 168.

210 Apollonian Cosmologies

wise destroying the enemy, who is imagined as the primeval serpent,

Apophis, and who was regularly conflated with Seth/Typhon. Equally,
the conflict of chthonic and Olympian forces or of Greek civilization
and barbarian “other” had been represented in a variety of ways in pre-
vious Greek writings, at least one of which was also the killing of snaky
monsters, particularly by Heracles. Within the Argonautica not every
confrontation of chthonic and Olympian takes on Egyptian resonances.
However, there are a few places in the poem where the individual de-
tails of Apollonius’s narrative seem to converge in an event or activity
that is particularly associated with Egyptian cosmogonic or royal ideol-
ogy. In doing this Apollonius both reinforces the overall narrative tra-
jectory as a movement from primeval or originary chaos to the order of
civilized society and complicates this picture. As in Callimachus, Apol-
lonius exploits the potential for two symbolic realms to be simultane-
ously active, but while the two disparate mental landscapes in Calli-
machus seemed to converge in the institution of Ptolemaic kingship, in
Apollonius they never quite align, and we are left with two parallel or
even potentially competing universes.
The motif of killing serpents first occurs at 2.700–709, and fittingly
the slayer is Apollo, whom the Argonauts first glimpse in the moments
between the end of night and full day.94 They immediately build an altar
to him as \Apallvn \Eaio% and enact a ritual that associates him with
the Delphic Apollo, while Orpheus sings Delphi’s foundation story, the
slaying of the local guardian snake:
e% pote petraAh Cpb deiradi ParnhsoPo
DelfAnhn tajoisi pelarion Djenarije,
koPro% Dbn Gti gymna%, Gti plokamoisi geghua%—
Clakoi%¢
When once under the rocky ridge of Parnassus Apollo slew the monster
Delphyne with his bow, while Apollo was still a naked child and took
pleasure still in long locks.95

The language and sequence of detail is remarkably close to Calli-

machus’s Hymn to Apollo (97–104). Both sections are introduced by

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

A striking difference between Greek and Egyptian models for divine

and/or royal behavior is the ubiquitous presence of female divinities,
who far more than in Greek poetry act to protect and support the
king/Horus. Horus is accompanied by his mother and other powerful
goddesses, all of whom work their magic in his behalf. Although Horus
and Seth engage in a series of trials by strength, Horus’s ultimate tri-
umph depends more on Isis’s tricking of Seth than his own powers.110
The Naucratis stele, which commemorates a gift to the temple of the
goddess Neith, portrays the relationship of the goddess and the king as
one of complete dependence:
[Neith] raised his majesty above millions. | Appointed him ruler of the
Two Lands; | . . . Captured for him the nobles’ hearts. | She enslaved for
him the people’s hearts. | And destroyed all his enemies.111

Further, magic plays a central and positive role in Egyptian thought.

According to R. Ritner, magic, personified as the god Heka, is the “hy-
postasis of the creator’s own power which begets the natural order,” an
event that must be reenacted daily through the aid of Heka, who during
the night becomes a protective power, by destroying the enemy.112 Thus
magic functioned as a potent and legitimate means of maintaining one’s
powers and harming one’s enemies. In the temples of the Ptolemaic pe-
riod, Heka appears before the temple’s divinity, escorted by the king.113
A whole range of divinities, including the goddesses Isis, Hathor, and
Sekmet, derive their own magic powers from Heka, which they use con-
stantly to protect Osiris/Horus/the king.
If Jason’s behavior conforms to a template of Egyptian kingship, his
position as a “Greek” Horus marks him imaginatively as a precursor to
the Ptolemies, who will rule as both Greek king and Egyptian pharaoh.
In this context, it is possible to read his actions in books 3–4 as a sup-
planting of Aeetes. We have already seen that Colchis was an Egyptian
colony founded by Sesostris, and Aeetes as its king was fitly said to be
the son of the Sun (in which Helios is the equivalent of Re). The acts
that Aeetes requires Jason to perform are tasks that he himself is able to
do, as he maintains at 3.407–8: “the test of strength and courage will

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

be a contest that I myself am able to be superior in, however dire.” One

of these acts, the yoking of the fire-breathing bulls, does have a good
analogue in the rites of Egyptian kingship. The pharaoh in his renewal
festival (Heb Sed) drove asses or oxen around the city walls four
times.114 And although the evidence for it is very late, even the Ptolemies
may have engaged in a similar act as part of their coronation rites. It is
said that they yoked the Apis bull and led him through the city.115
Aeetes imagines, correctly or not, that the Argonauts’ arrival
presages his own downfall, that they might “drive him from his honor
and his throne” (3.596–97). Within the terms of the narrative, Jason
obviously does not become king of Colchis, but he does perform acts
that configure him as Aeetes’ successor.116 By successfully yoking the
bulls and sowing the dragon’s teeth, he signals his fitness to assume the
mantle of authority in Aeetes’ place, and thus marks his succession as
legitimate. Aeetes himself fades as a character after Jason takes the
fleece, and Apsyrtus only briefly and disastrously assumes the role of his
father’s surrogate. Within the text, when Aeetes arrives to watch the
plowing contest, he is described as wearing a helmet that gleamed like
the sun, when he first rose from Ocean (3.1229–30). A little later the
solar image is transferred to the fleece, which is like a cloud that grows
red from the rays of the rising sun (4.124–26).117 When Jason takes pos-
session of the fleece, he too begins to shine with a red glow on his
cheeks like a flame (4.172–74), but when he swathes himself in the
fleece and strides forward among his men at dawn, the fleece now
shines like Zeus’s lightning (4.185). This instrument of Zeus’s authority
was being fashioned as the first vignette on Jason’s cloak, which the
scholiast allegorized as the first step in the transition from nature
to culture. As Jason now steps forward in the fleece, Apollonius refig-
ures the imagery of cosmic light as now Greek (Zeus), no longer
Colchian/Egyptian (Helios).
Next, Jason kills the legitimate son, Apsyrtus, and cuts off his ex-
tremities—a standard treatment Egyptians accorded their conquered
enemies.118 This action deprived the Colchians of their leader, with the

114. Bleeker 1967, 103.

115. Thompson 1988, 146–47. The late source is Nigidius Figulus.
116. For the fleece as a talisman of imperial power, see L. Gernet, “Value in Greek
Myth,” in Gordon 1981, 131–40.
117. When Jason appears before Hypsipyle (1.721–26) he is described rather simi-
larly. His cloak is so bright that “it would be easier to look at the rays of the rising sun.”
118. For example, the funerary temple of Ramesses III in Medinet Habu displays the
right hands of the conquered piled up in one scene and their penises in another. The tak-
216 Apollonian Cosmologies

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

tAnessin). Their path to the fleece is impeded by an immortal dragon.

As Jason approaches this serpent, we are prepared for youthful Apollo
encountering a Delphyne,120 but the scene plays out rather differently.
At their appearance, the monster fills the grove with his hissing, terrify-
ing those who live nearby (4.129–30). Jason does not confront the
monster but rather approaches fearfully (149: pefobhmAno%) with only
the foreign woman and her magic as his ally. A simile a few lines earlier
of mothers protecting their children who are frightened at the serpent’s
roar suggests prima facie that Medea’s protection for “fearful” Jason is
similarly maternal.121 In the event, Jason does not kill the serpent,
though he does so in most earlier versions.122 Instead, it is overwhelmed
by Medea’s potent magic.
He raised his terrible head aloft eager to enclose them in his dire jaws.
But [Medea] . . . sprinkled powerful drugs on his eyes while she chanted
her song; all around the overpowering scent of the charm spread sleep;
and on the very spot he let his jaw sink down; and far behind . . . his
countless coils were stretched out. (4.153–61)

What is untypical in Apollonius’s passage—Jason’s fear, maternal

protectiveness, the neutralizing of the snake in place of its death, and
Medea’s role taking precedence over Jason’s—conforms to a well-
known vignette found in Egyptian underworld books. E. Hornung de-
scribes the point at which Horus and his retinue confront Apophis, who
blocks their path as follows:
The serpentine body of Apophis blocks the path of the solar bark and his
withering glance . . . [and] brings the journey to a halt. . . . The darkness
is only broken by the odd fire-breathing serpent, and the roar of Apophis,
whose “thunderous voice” echoes through the Netherworld, terrifying
the sun god and his entourage. . . . Before the stranded vessel is taken by
the enemy, Isis at the boat’s prow reaches out and throws the most pow-
erful weapon known to god and man at the monster—magic. . . . The
“radiant” magic strikes his head. He is neither destroyed nor killed,
merely disabled, deprived of strength and his sense of orientation.123

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.

the night voyage of the sun

The fact that the voyage of the Argo often takes place in a landscape
populated with chthonic creatures and figures imagined or halluci-
nated, in which both narrative and protagonists seem to have lost di-
rection, until at last they emerge from the Stygian darkness into the
light of dawn, has prompted a number of interpreters, both ancient and
modern, to understand the story as in part a katabasis.124 Underworld
associations occur throughout the tale and are concentrated in book 4,
particularly as the adventurers traverse the murky and confusing
Libyan wasteland. But why Apollonius might choose to so configure his
text is not entirely clear. The adventures serve as a test for the heroes,
whose ephebic (hence liminal) status is well known, and it is from these
adventures that they emerge to fulfill their roles as founders of the new
order,125 though Apollonius seems less interested in describing their pro-
cess of maturation than their manifest destiny. Equally, Jason and his
crew have been forced to experience the terrors of the Libyan desert to
atone for the murder of Apsyrtus, though Apollonius does not dwell on
the punitive aspects of the journey. It is also possible to attribute many
of the individual elements of the book to Apollonius’s literary precur-
sors, and, if we are so inclined, to his generally dark or anti-epic vision.
All of these explanations have some degree of cogency, but neither sep-
arately nor in the aggregate can they account for the actual succession
of events in book 4. At this juncture, I wish to propose an explanation
for these events that is meant to complement, not substitute for, other
analyses, namely, that the author has not only deliberately constructed
his narrative to evoke a vaguely Greek poetic katabasis but conformed
his text in strategic locations to mirror one of the most prominent (and
idiosyncratic) features of Egyptian cosmology, the voyage of the Sun

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

Underworld books were initially restricted to royal use, but increas-

ingly they are found in and on coffins and tombs of the well-to-do and
continue in use well into the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. These texts
consisted of annotated illustrations and spells, from which, neverthe-
less, a consistent pattern of events can be extracted, as the solar boat
moves through the underworld from sunset to the new sunrise. In addi-
tion, the papyrus Books of the Dead, which are written not from the
“standpoint of the sun god and his companions” but from the stand-
point of the individual dead person who wished to gain entrance to and
survive in the underworld, exhibit knowledge of the same critical events
of the Sun’s journey that occur in the underworld books.130
Although a considerable number of written and visual representa-
tions of the solar journey survive, Apollonius need not have gained his
information about them from written media. Given the ubiquity of

128. Hornung 1992, 49–51, 63–64.

129. Hornung 1992, 96.
130. Hornung (1999) discusses content and context for each type of underworld text,
the chronological range of its use, and useful bibliographies, including a list of transla-
tions into English for each type. For further bibliography, see T. Wilfong’s review of Hor-
nung, BMCR 4.25 (2000).
Apollonian Cosmologies 221

such ideas in Egyptian culture it is inconceivable that Apollonius and

his Alexandrian audience could have been unaware of them, any more
than modern residents of Christian nations, whatever their actual reli-
gious practices, can escape familiarity with the Christ story—birth in a
manger, the visit of the three wise men, the slaughter of the innocents,
trial before Pontius Pilate, crucifixion, death, resurrection. These were
deeply held beliefs at all levels of society, forming the orthodox view of
the Egyptian realm of the dead, and were manifested in burial practice,
elements of which the Greek population in Egypt seems early to have
assimilated.131 Even the moves in a popular Egyptian board game,
Senet, appear to have been allegorized as the underworld journey of the
soul.132 Moreover, Egyptian ideas of the afterlife had by this period fil-
tered into Greek culture through writers like Eudoxus and Hecataeus of
Abdera, if not much earlier.133 M. L. West, for example, suggests that the
Sun’s struggles through the twelve hours of the dat may have been
the origin for the twelve labors of Heracles, many of which involve the
slaying of snaky monsters,134 and Heracles’ voyage in the bowl of the
sun had obvious Egyptian analogues.135 Also, the very story that Apol-
lonius chose to relate is easily accommodated to Egyptian solar myth,
and the celestial elements in the Argonaut legend were well estab-
lished.136 The Argo itself was identified as a constellation from at least

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

the Hellenistic period,137 and Plutarch, though obviously much later

than Apollonius, claims that it was the boat of Osiris, that is, the night
bark of the sun.138 Aeetes and his clan were the offspring of Helios, and
in previous Greek writing Colchis was identified with the night region
of the sun. Mimnermus, for example, in the Nanno describes Aeetes’
city as a place “where the rays of the swift sun lie in a golden chamber
at the lips of Ocean, to which godlike Jason came.”139 That the Sun tra-
versed the underworld during the night seems to have been a familiar
idea to some Greeks.140 Earlier in the chapter we noted the chthonic and
magic attributes of the Argonauts themselves. Apollonius then does not
invent so much as select a complementary Greek tale and exploit its la-
tencies in ways that developed its potential as an underworld journey,
just as he conforms events in his own narrative to that of Homer’s
Odyssey or Pindar’s fourth Pythian.
Book 4 begins with the removal of the golden fleece from its
guardian dragon, immediately after which the Argonauts flee Colchis to
begin their return to Greece, not by the route taken on their outward
journey, but by an alternate path the knowledge of which the Colchians
have preserved from their Aeaean (Egyptian) forebears. Pursued by the
Colchians, Jason kills and mutilates Aeetes’ son Apsyrtus in the land of
the Brygi and buries his body on the spot. The Argonauts continue their
journey, passing a lake of flames into which Phaethon fell (4.599–603),
to reach “the portals and mansions of Night” (4.630), and when they
are about to fall off the edge of the earth Hera saves them. At this point
they enter an Odyssean geography, visiting first Circe in the far west,
then Phaeacia. On Circe’s island, called Aeaea, we are reminded of
Colchis. Circe is, of course, Aeetes’ sister, who has the look of a child of
Helios, and she and Medea speak Colchian, which if not identical with

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

Egyptian must be closely related.141 Then, the Argonauts are aided by

Hera and the Nereids as they pass by Scylla and the clashing rocks to
get to Phaeacia where Jason and Medea consummate their marriage in
the cave of Dionysus. Here ends the Odyssean adventure, but, unlike
Odysseus, the Argonauts do not return home immediately from Phaea-
cia but must endure “even to the boundaries of Libya” (4.1237). Their
journey across the Libyan desert requires them to carry their ship over
the sands for twelve days, during which time they encounter a number
of serpents; Euphemus receives the clod of earth from Triton, and as
they turn homewards they encounter one final obstacle, the warder of
Crete, the brazen giant Talos, who is destroyed by Medea’s magic and
drained of his vital fluids. After defeating Talos the Argonauts enter
into an impenetrable darkness, which is finally dispelled by the appear-
ance of Apollo. The book ends with the dream of Euphemus, the cast-
ing of the clod into the depths, from which another island in time will
emerge—Kalliste, that is, Thera. A few lines later the weary crew dis-
embark at Pagasae, and the poem ends on a line of joyful homecoming
adapted from Odyssey 23.296.
By listing these events in detail it is possible to identify what is famil-
iar and explicable within a Greek context (whether Homeric or other-
wise), what modern readers have perceived as odd, those areas where
Apollonius has altered his sources, and, finally, how this sequence con-
forms to the Egyptian underworld books. The first point to consider is
the fact that the return voyage differs substantially from the way out. A
number of reasons for varying the route may be adduced, the desire to
conform the poem to the nostos of the Odyssey and to Pythian 4 being
the most obvious. We saw earlier in this chapter that dependence upon
Pindar underscores Greek claims to North Africa and is proleptic of the
establishment of the new foundation of Alexandria. But why does
Apollonius call specific attention to the return route of the Argonauts as
laid out in the writing of the Colchian ancestors and enlarge upon the
Libyan adventure, particularly the sequence of encounters with snakes
and other local phenomena that do not occur in Pindar? Hecataeus of
Miletus included the Nile in the Argonauts’ return route, but in spite of
the fact that Apollonius used Hecataean geography elsewhere, he does
not incorporate this detail, though it would seem prima facie a better fit
for an Alexandrian poem than the Libyan sands. What seems in

141. On the basis of 4.278–81 the “language of the ancestors” must have been
Egyptian.
224 Apollonian Cosmologies

Hecataeus, Pindar, and Antimachus to have been a return course from

Ocean to the Nile with south-north portage from the Nile across
Libya142 to the Mediterranean has been altered to a west-east direction
from the Syrtes to Lake Tritonis. Why does Apollonius construct his
Homeric episode with the marriage in a cave? Why end the poem where
he does?143 Why spend so much time on cosmic beginnings, with home-
coming relegated to a one-line allusion? Why end with not one island
but two? What function can the emergence of Anaphe serve that is dis-
tinct from the promise of Thera?
In Callimachus’s Hymn to Delos we saw the interplay of Greek and
Egyptian ideas in the special role of islands and through the linking of
the birth of Apollo to the emergence of order from chaos. The conclu-
sion to Apollonius’s book 4 plays out this same set of themes. If we
place the events of book 4 alongside of the Egyptian account of the
night voyage of the sun, we will find a remarkable number of corre-
spondences between the ostensibly Greek narrative and Egyptian myth,
correspondences not on the order of two or three vague similarities, but
of overall narrative patterning. Events at the beginning and the end of
the solar journey as well as during its course bear a striking resem-
blance to incidents in Apollonius; moreover, they occur in roughly the
same narrative order. To guard against the possibility that what I think
I see results from a pathological condition rather than a deliberately
constructed optional illusion, I considered other extant accounts of the
Argo’s return journey. I found, however, that neither Pythian 4 nor
Dionysius Scytobrachion nor even the epitome of Apollodorus (who
borrows much from Apollonius) exhibits anything like the same num-
ber of parallels. These other versions are sufficiently varied in detail
that any argument for similarity to Egyptian myth is untenable.144 In
what follows I have enumerated the correspondences between the
Argo’s return voyage and the night voyage of the sun for clarity and
easy reference.

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

1. To begin with, the most significant permanent members of the

Argo’s crew are Orpheus and Jason, whose particular skills are exem-
plified by song and intelligence, while Medea, who joins the crew in
book 4, is a magician whose spells are often efficacious for the journey,
particularly at the very beginning when she subdues the dragon and and
at the close of book 4 when she destroys Talos. As we saw above, the
most important members of the Sun’s crew were Intelligence (Sia), Ef-
fective Utterance (Hu), and Magic (Heka). Further, the pilot Tiphys is a
homonym of the Greek Typhon.145 Just as the destructive power of
snakes could be used apotropaically, Seth (who was called Typhon in
Greek), the archenemy of Horus, often joined him as the helmsman of
the solar boat and used his destructive magic to repel the cosmic threat
of Apophis.146 While it is true that Tiphys dies early in the outgoing voy-
age (2.854), I am by no means suggesting that Apollonius slavishly re-
produced an Egyptian underworld tale in all of its particulars (any
more than he so reproduced the Odyssey), but rather that by a judi-
cious selection of details in his Greek narrative he creates the opportu-
nity for his audience to see his ostensibly Greek events as simultane-
ously Egyptian.

2. Book 4 opens with a passage analyzed earlier in which Jason and

Medea approach the golden fleece just before dawn. Their path to the
fleece is impeded by a serpent whom Apollonius describes as immortal
(2.1209). In Egyptian mythology Apophis could never be permanently
defeated, but only temporarily incapacitated, since he too was immor-
tal by virtue of being originary chaos.147 Jason then cloaks himself in the
fleece and strides forward to join his crew, who are lost in admiration at
his dazzling appearance. For the purposes of his underworld journey,
the Egyptian sun-god was usually depicted as Amon-Re, the ram-god of
Thebes, and when he begins his night journey he is represented pictori-
ally as either a ram-headed man or a man-headed ram.148 Phrixus’s ram
with its golden fleece would have provided an obvious analogue to
Amon-Re, and Jason draped in the fleece would seem to take on these

145. Moreau 1994, 128–29, and see his notes.

146. Te Velde 1967, 99–108.
147. Hornung 1982, 107.
148. Herodotus 2.42 describes a Theban festival in which a ram was killed, flayed,
and and its skin used to drape around a statue of Zeus (i.e., Amon). Lloyd (1976, 195)
thinks this might be part of the celebration of the festival of Opet, a central rite of divine
kingship that was still celebrated in the Ptolemaic period.
226 Apollonian Cosmologies

solar associations.149 The shining fleece is immediately covered with a

cloak and not seen again until it is used as a coverlet for the marriage
bed in Dionysus’s cave. Similarly the sun-god “is obligated to conceal
his radiant eye in order to protect it,” and the nether journey takes
place in darkness.150

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)

These “ancestors” only a few lines before were identified as Egyptian,

by virtue of Sesostris’s colonizing activities in primeval time, so prima
facie their graptP% must be hieroglyphics.151 Further, the medium on
which they are incribed are kurbiai, a term used for the square-based
pyramidal columns on which the Athenians kept their laws. The exact
contents of the Aeaean kurbiai are not clear, and the language of the
passage is ambiguous, but from the reference to the Ister that immedi-
ately follows (4.284), the kurbiai would seem to hold a description or
map of watercourses. Yet Egyptian learning was not distinguished for
cartography, so at this point it seems fair to ask to what purpose is this
poetic space figured as Egyptian, and to observe that Egyptian maps of
the underworld placed on tomb walls, sarcophagi, and papyri have sur-
vived in far greater number than maps of real geographies.152

4. The murder of Apsyrtus may be the single most troubling episode

in the Argonautica, an understanding of which (like Aeneas’s killing of

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

153. See especially Hunter 1988, 450–51.

154. See Pietsch 1999, 152–58.
155. J. Porter, “Tiptoeing through the Corpses: Euripides’ Electra, Apollonius, and
the Bouphonia,” GRBS 31 (1990) 255–80; Hunter (1993, 61) links it with Agamemnon’s
sacrifice of Iphigenia; Goldhill (1991, 332) connects it with the subsequent death of
Pelias.
156. Presumably these actions conform to rituals to avoid the consequences of the
treacherous murder. See E. Rohde’s discussion in Psyche: Seelencult und Unsterblichkeits-
glaube der Griechen, 2d ed. (Tübingen, 1925) 322–26, and Livrea’s notes ad. loc.
157. See F. Griffiths, “Murder, Purification, and Cultural Formation in Aeschylus and
Apollonius Rhodius,” Helios 17 (1990) 25–39, for a nuanced discussion of this reading
of the murder.
158. According to the scholiast on Euripides Medea 1334, Medea murdered Apsyrtus
Dp’ oGkoy Dn tu patrAdi, c% KallAmaxo%.
159. Moreau 1994, 71–72 n. 66; Livrea, note on 4.481.
228 Apollonian Cosmologies

surrogate for Aeetes, whose behavior seemed to place him outside of

the boundaries of civilized community; he and his men are impeding the
course of Jason and the fleece; and his corpse is mutilated. As with the
Gaulish enemy in Callimachus’s Hymn to Delos, every mundane ex-
ample of an enemy of the pharoah (Ptolemy) in “real” time assumes the
ideological baggage of the cosmic enemy, whether Seth or Apophis. The
ritual mutilation of the one (as with enemies on the field of battle) is,
therefore, an apotropaic reenactment in “real” time of an event that oc-
curs nightly in symbolic time, namely, the mutilation or destruction of
Apophis as he attempts to hinder passage of the solar bark. Consider,
for example, this spell from the Book of the Dead, which addresses
Apophis:
Decapitated and with face cut off (art thou) who passest on the road-
sides. Hacked off is thy head, (thou) who art in thy earth; crushed are thy
bones. Dismembered art thou (by Isis); (she) consigns thee to <the Earth
God>, (O) Apophis, enemy of Re.160

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

160. Spell 39 (Allen 1974, 46).

161. Te Velde 1967, 86.
162. The relative dates of the Argonautica and the Lock of Berenice are not known.
See Selden’s discussion (1998, 344), where he remarks that the lock was “the most recent
addition to the celestial corps which daily helps Isis to keep the incursions of Seth at bay.”
Apollonian Cosmologies 229

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.

5. Another familiar aspect of the Egyptian underworld landscape

was the Lake of Fire: compare Hornung’s translation from an early vi-
gnette in the Book of Gates— “This lake is full of grain | The water of
the lake is fiery | Birds fly away | When they see its water | They sense
the stench of what is in it”165—with Apollonius’s text:
And [the Argo] hastened on under sail and entered into the furthest ed-
dies of the Eridanus, where Phaethon, once struck on his chest by a flam-
ing thunderbolt and half-consumed, fell from the chariot of Helios into
the streams of the deep lake. Even now it belches up heavy vapor from
the smoldering wound. And no bird can cross over that water by stretch-
ing out its light wings, but in midcourse plunges into the flames. . . . [The
Argonauts] were afflicted all day, weighed down by the dreadful stench.
(4.594–602, 620–22)

6. The fleece, once placed in the Argo proceeds on a course from

east to west until the Argonauts reach the “portals and mansions of
Night” (4.630) and the western ocean. About to meet with calamity
and fall into Ocean, the crew is saved by Hera and their course directed

163. Te Velde 1967: 150–51. See also Hornung 1982, 107.

164. See Ritner 1993, 86, and his chapter on the significance of spitting and licking in
Egyptian magic, pp. 82–102. The mutilation of Osiris by Seth does not really fit as a par-
adigm for this scene, since Osiris’s mutilation was a type of sparagmos. His body parts in-
tentionally were strewn over much of Lower Egypt. However, since Jason and Apsytrus
are in many ways mirror images of each other and near brothers-in-law, the one inflicting
gross bodily harm upon the other does play out elements of the “Contendings of Horus
and Seth.”
165. Hornung 1990, 157; 1971, 211. Encounter with a fiery lake or sulfurous pit
happened more than once in the night voyage. On the appearance of ideas related to the
lake of flames in later Greco-Egyptian material, see L. Koenen, “Prophezeiungen des
‘Töpfers,’ ” ZPE 2.3 (1968) 184–86.
230 Apollonian Cosmologies

to Circe’s island, called Aeaea, the extreme western analogue of Aeetes’

Colchis, and another reminder of the Egyptian dimension of the poem.
From there, the Argonauts proceed to Phaeacia, where Jason and
Medea are married. Apollonius insists upon the chthonic and vegetative
aspects of this scene.166 The island is called Drepane, or “Sickle,” and
two origins for the name are given: either it commemorates the knife
that Demeter gave to the Titans to harvest grain or the knife used for
the castration of Uranos by Zeus (4.984–92). The marriage takes place
within a “holy cave” in which the nurse of the baby Dionysus dwelt, a
detail known from no other source.167 Moreover, it is only here that the
fleece reappears, to serve as a coverlet upon the nuptial couch, and in its
appearance shines out in the darkness: “from its golden tufts it gleamed
like flame and kindled in their eyes sweet desire” (4.1146–47). For
Greek readers the evocation of this particular set of details would no
doubt have recalled the gift of Dionysus’s robe to Apsyrtus, and his sub-
sequent murder and mutilation, thus creating a macabre and ominous
undercurrent for the nuptials. In Egyptian myth, however, the sequence
of castration, divinities of vegetation, caves, and Dionysus (Osiris) has
a different logic. After Osiris was killed, dismembered, and castrated by
his brother Seth, he retreated to the underworld to rule as Lord of the
Dead. On his nightly journey, Re (the alter ego of Osiris) united with
him deep within the recesses of the dat, and for one moment the god
was reawakened. Vignettes portray the sun disk above the mummified
Osiris from whom corn sprouts, emblematic of his role as god of vege-
tation.168 I submit that the evocation not just of Dionysus, but of Diony-
sus in the context of vegetation in combination with the chthonic and
hidden location of a cave, and the reappearance of the fleece is not for-
tuitous, but by a judicious selection of details Apollonius intentionally
constructed a narrative that imitates a critical moment of the solar jour-
ney—the union of the Sun with Osiris. This event in the solar journey is
one of the greatest peril, when the boat is surrounded by its enemies,
who threaten annihilation; similarly in Apollonius, the impetus for the

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

marriage is the impending arrival of Colchians intent on retrieving the

fleece as well as Medea. In many versions, this momentary union of the
solar and chthonic—of Re and Osiris—is also a time of sexual potency,
when Isis couples with Osiris.169

7. After leaving Phaeacia the Argonauts are blown off course to

Libya, where they then move from west to northeast. Fom the perspec-
tive of the Egyptians who lived to the east of this region, the area of the
western desert was the land of the dead. Burial sites were regularly
placed on the western side of the Nile. This was where the sun set and
began its perilous journey in the underworld, which especially towards
the end of the sun’s course resembled arid desert. As the Argonauts
cross Libya they encounter a series of serpents. The crossing of Libya
requires the Argonauts to carry their boat for twelve days and nights
(4.1389)—the number of hours of darkness in the dat.170 The final
stages of the Egyptian underworld journey provide a close parallel: the
waterways become a desert, and the solar boat must be carried or
dragged before it can emerge again into the light. It may even become a
serpent in order to glide along the sand (see plate 5). Hornung describes
this as follows:
The fourth and fifth hours of the Amduat take the sun into a peculiar
landscape. The realm of the god Sokar is a pure desert guarded by hoards
of serpents. . . . In order for them to move on without the necessary wa-
terway, the sun bark turns itself into a snake, to glide over the hot sand
more easily. Both the bow and stern are snake-headed, and the text de-
scribes how they spew bright fire before them.171

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

169. Hornung 1990, 116–17.

170. This detail is in Pindar (Pythian 4.25–6), so on its own it could not convey an
Egyptian context.
171. Hornung 1982, 77. Compare “This great God drives them along in this way.|
The flames in the mouth of his bark are what guide him on these secret paths” (Hornung
1971, 98).
172. 4.1540–47 (for the Greek text, see above, page 194). The passage was discussed
earlier in the context of transculturation and the collapse of a consistent symbolic matrix.
232 Apollonian Cosmologies

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

9. Immediately after the demise of Talos, the Argonauts enter a

darkness that is chthonic, Hades-like, and chaotic:

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)

This terrifying darkness is dispelled by the appearance of Apollo,

whose gleaming bow presages the sunrise:

LhtoLdh, tAnh dA kat› oDranoP Ekeo pAtra%

r\Amfa MelanteAoy% driakoo%, aE t› DnB panti
qntai¢ doiavn dB mip% DfAperuen droAsa%,
dejiteru xrAseion dnAsxeue% Ccaui tajon¢
marmarAhn d› dpAlamce bib% perB pantouen aGglhn.
ToPsi dA ti% Sporadvn baib dpb tafra faanuh
npso% DdePn, dlAgh% ˆIppoyrAdo% dgxaui nasoy,
Gnu› eDnb% Dbalonto kai Gsxeuon¢ ADtAka d› db%
fAggen dnerxomAnh¢ toB d› dglabn \Apallvni
glsei DnB skieru tAmeno% stiaenta te bvmbn
poAeon, ADglathn mBn eDskapoy eEneken aGglh%
FoPbon keklamenoi¢ \Anafhn dA te lissada npson
Gskon, f db FoPbo% min dtyzomAnoi% dnAfhne.
Son of Leto, when you heard you came swiftly from heaven to the
Melantian rocks, which lie in the sea. Leaping onto one of the twin
peaks, in your right hand you held aloft your golden bow. And the bow
flashed a bright gleam in every direction. A tiny island of the Sporades
appeared to them to see, near to the small island of Hippuris, and there
they cast their anchor and moored. And immediately dawn rose up and
lighted the sky. And for Apollo they made a gleaming sanctuary in a
shady grove and an altar of stones, calling Phoebus “ ‘Gleamer” because
of rays that were seen from afar, and the bare island they call “Appear-
ance,” since Phoebus made it appear to them in their confusion.177

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

This moment was an object of religious awe and venerated in hymn.

In his analysis of solar hymns J. Assmann identifies the aspects of sun-
rise that hymns consistently celebrate: the birth of the sun-god in the
morning, the appearance of the god, and the illuminating of the earth.179
A typical hymn praises the god as “he rises in the eastern sky, and illu-
minates the Two Lands [Egypt] with gold.”180 Another begins: “I am Ra
in his first appearances, when he shines forth from the horizon.”181
Moreover, the verb that expresses sunrise also signifies the appearance
of the pharaoh on his throne and “is written with the hieroglyph . . .
that depicts the sun rising over the Primeval Hill.”182 Thus creation, sun-
rise, and pharaonic presence are implicated in a web of significations
any one of which triggers the whole chain. In contrast to these Egyptian
hymnic formulations of morning, in which cosmic, religious, and polit-
ical ideologies are causally linked, Greek epic personifies the encroach-
ing light as mere episodic transition, as the female figure of Dawn, most
familiar from the Homeric and Hesiodic formula rmo% d› drigAneia
fanh r\ododaktylo% \Ha% (“when early-born rosy-fingered Dawn ap-
pears”). In Apollonius’s careful description of the emergence from pro-
found darkness epic dawn’s appearance (aDtAka d› dbß fAggen dnerxo-
mAnh) is enclosed in a larger vignette that first reports the events—the
sudden arrival of Apollo whose golden bow gleams in all directions,
followed by the appearance of an island—and then transforms them

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.

Taken individually, no one or even several of these incidents ought nec-

essarily to evoke an Egyptian context, but so many in combination, oc-
curring in a text that overtly identifies Colchis as an Egyptian colony
and Aeetes and Medea as descendants of the sun-god, Helios, a text in
which astral and cosmogonic phenomena are prominent and which was
written in a land where solar events play a role in royal legitimation,
cannot be the result of chance. But what effect if any would allusions to
this particular set of Egyptian myths have on the narrative as a whole?
Certainly I have not meant to suggest that this is an encrypted text, that
we are meant to read hidden meanings in Egyptian symbols. Rather,
Apollonius’s compositional technique throughout the Argonautica, as a
number of scholars have demonstrated, has been to include a variety of
time frames, to shift from homodiegetic to heterodiegetic narrative and
back, to combine folklore, romance, tragedy, and scientific observation
in unpredictable ways, so that in the course of narrating an event or
aition the reader might catch a glimpse of untold alternatives. In this
way the “meaning” of the poem very quickly dissolves into “mean-
ings,” since Apollonius has set up competing centers of authority in his
text. Any message of Greek cultural supremacy or of the transforming
quality of Greek values is rendered moot. Just as readers catch occa-
sional glimpses of Heracles throughout the narrative, often in ways that
seem to undermine or call into question actions of Jason or the Arg-
onauts, I would argue that Apollonius provides for us glimpses of the
Egyptian other against which and often through which Greek action is
to be viewed. But the Egypt Apollonius permits us to see is also con-
structed on more than one conceptual level: through the allusion to the
settlements of Sesostris’s veterans we meet the Egypt of an earlier Greek
history; through a series of intertextualities with the works of Calli-

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

machus and Hecataeus in which he experiments with Egyptian ideas

and models we meet a contemporary Egypt being refashioned for the
Ptolemies; but in the cosmogonic realm, in the sustained evocation of
the solar journey, we meet an older, pre-Greek Egypt to match our older
pre-Homeric adventure.
The Argonautica begins with an invocation to Apollo—drxameno%
sAo, FoPbe—and throughout the adventure Apollo appears at critical
times to support the Argonauts. Cults to Apollo, usually connected
with phenomena of light, established by the Argonauts as they pass
through the eastern Mediterranean, are defining moments in the text.
Moreover, Apollonius’s Apollo, an Olympian, a youth, and connected
with the enterprises of civilization, is counterpoised to Helios, the older
Greek sun-god, whose offspring, like Aeetes, Circe, or Pasiphae, seem
to belong to a separate race,184 inclined towards destructiveness and
magic practice. In Egypt, Apollo was equated with Horus, the youthful
son of Isis and Osiris, or Horus-the-Child, who was the prototype of
pharaonic kingship. On the Greek level Apollo triumphs over Helios;
on the Egyptian the new sunrise marks the birth of Horus-the-Child,
the newborn Sun, whose mythology seems to have been actively appro-
priated by the early Ptolemies.185 The Greek island—“Appearance”—
has a name that is meaningful in two cultural spheres and stands pro-
leptically for the island that is destined to rise up from the clod of earth
given to Euphemus. The clod and the island it becomes link Greece and
Egypt in political and hereditary terms, as ruler and ruled. In contrast,
Anaphe in this earlier time is empty,186 and as yet unmarked hierarchi-
cally. But Apollonius’s formulation of the island’s appearance and the
gleaming of Apollo are surely meant to herald the emergence of a Greek
Horus, instantiated in the Ptolemies. Under Ptolemiac rule, the king-
dom of Egypt was undergoing a transformation from a culture com-
pletely Egyptian—the land of the solar journey—to a land of shared
culture—Greek language and political dominance on the one hand and
Egyptian language, religious beliefs, and economic practices on the

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

The Two Lands

Throughout its recorded history, Egyptians conceptualized their coun-

try as dual, as “the Two Lands”: Upper Egypt, or the valley of the Nile
proper from Memphis to the first cataract in the south, and Lower
Egypt, the fertile alluvial plain of the Delta in the north. The historical
beginning of Egypt was imagined as a specific event: the “Unification of
the Two Lands.” Pharaonic titulature emphasized the role of the king as
unifier;1 and the two regions came to have a separate set of iconogra-
phies—crowns, plants, animals, divinities. This dichotomy was so cen-
tral that throughout the course of Egyptian history ceremonies of king-
ship and of royal renewal (the so-called Sed festival) stipulated that the
king perform rituals twice, once as king of the North and again as king
of the South.2 Whether or not unification was actually the formative
moment in Egyptian history—and Egyptologists are in some doubt3—it
did reflect a certain political and ecological reality. Upper Egypt (called
by Herodotus Egypt proper) was very dry and entirely dependent upon
the Nile for its irrigation, cultivation extending in some places less than
a mile on either side of the river. Its cereal crops were a significant part

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

of the Egyptian economy, and it also contained the gold-producing re-

gions. Upper Egypt looked south to Ethiopia and the Sudan, from
which in the Late Period it was invaded and ruled by Nubian dynasts.
The Delta, in contrast, was swampier and more difficult to negotiate; its
agriculture consisted of papyrus, herding, and fisheries. Continuously
subject to encroachment by nomadic pastoralists, as well as to invasion
by foreign armies from the west and east, the Delta was the most famil-
iar part of Egypt to surrounding Mediterranean countries.4 From the
time of the late New Kingdom, imperial power gradually moved north
to establish capital cities in the eastern Delta (PiRamesse, Tanis), then
the central Delta (Bubastis, Sais), and finally the western Delta (Alexan-
dria). The building of Alexandria made excellent sense within the
Greek world because it secured a port city in a location that could con-
trol Mediterranean traffic, while it also followed the pattern of Late Pe-
riod history as another attempt to curtail foreign invasions from the
east and west. For Late Period pharaohs and for the Ptolemies them-
selves control over the whole of Egypt was never secure, and building
Alexandria distanced them even further from the economically potent
south, which was always threatening to break away.5 Under the
Ptolemies the Delta especially, where their court was located, became
progressively more Hellenized, while Memphis remained the center for
Egyptian cult, thus guaranteeing that the mythic and historical opposi-
tions of the Two Lands continued to operate, but now at the level of
ethnicity and culture as well as geography.6
Unlike the Persians or the Romans, for whom Egypt was one of
many (and rather distant) provinces in a vast empire, the Ptolemies had
no political or economic base outside of Egypt. The Ptolemies did not
rule Egypt by satrapal or prefectual surrogates; they were resident
kings. While their military activities in the Mediterranean would have
resulted from a desire to develop an external power base, holding Egypt
and maintaining its prosperity were essential for any dynastic preten-
sions. Thus how to transform what was a military occupation confined

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

to the periphery into a kingship that effectively controlled the Two

Lands was the paramount concern of the early Ptolemies. In order to
rule the whole of Egypt, accommodation to native religious and court
ceremonial was essential. Soter began his rule in Memphis, the religious
capital of Egypt, which sat (not coincidentally) at the apex of the Delta
or at the point where the Two Lands joined, and consolidation of his
Egyptian power base began there.7 It is significant that in the Alexander
Romance it was also in Memphis that Alexander proclaimed himself as
the legitimate heir to Egypt and where he announced that the new cap-
ital would be relocated to Alexandria, with the proviso that it be a city
of and for Egyptians as well as Greeks.8 Although we should question
the accuracy of this rhetorically charged claim, the city Alexandria was
a cultural amalgam. It occupied the place of an earlier Egyptian settle-
ment or more likely border fortress (Rhacotis), but its raison d’être was
to position Egypt in the Meriterranean, to give the Ptolemies a power-
ful port city that dominated the trade routes. For this purpose (if not
for military and/or chauvinistic reasons) a population of Greeks drawn
from neighboring regions was essential. The Ptolemies used their
wealth and patronage to attract a Greek-speaking population, espe-
cially to Alexandria,9 but even with large numbers of Greek immigrants
the city was always ethnically mixed; its population would have in-
cluded Jews, Persians, Syrians, and other Greek-speaking groups like
Lycians and Cretans, in addition to Egyptians. In this mix the imported
Macedonian Greek population was well below a majority. Even the ap-
pearance of Alexandria, with structures like an Isis temple with its
pylon gate, colossi, and obelisks, some of which (in true pharaonic
fashion) seem to have been transplanted from other Egyptian locations,
must have conveyed an impression of cultural mixing.10 How then were

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

the Ptolemies to rule these reconceptualized “Two Lands”—lands with

two different economic power bases and two different ethnic and reli-
gious identities?

Traditional histories emphasize the separateness of the Egyptian and

Greek populations,11 assuming that Greek culture not only took prece-
dence over Egyptian for Greeks (as must have been the case), but that it
isolated Greeks from significant contact with native populations. Yet
this is open to question and dependent upon the materials one consults.
Greek ideas after all are bound to dominate in material written in
Greek. But Egyptians were more numerous, and at the time of conquest
they alone possessed the necessary skills to maintain the extensive bu-
reaucracy. Early in their reign the Ptolemies apparently used incentives
to create a cadre of bilingual Egyptians capable of administering the
country.12 Egyptians possessed an older, richer material culture, a cul-
ture that earlier Greeks had found fascinating if not admirable. What is
more, their political, religious, and artistic practices were thoroughly
integrated and distinctive, adapted over millennia to a unique eco-
system. In contrast, the small population of Macedonian soldiers and
Greeks drawn from diverse regions of the Mediterranean who arrived
in the new city would have lacked a unifying sense of identity, because
their familiar gods and civic structures were notably absent.13 Over
time, assimilation, which had happened to earlier Greek populations
like the Hellenomemphites, was inevitable,14 and it is by no means clear
that Ptolemaic policies were designed to prevent this. Even structures
like the gymnasium, which later appear to have been isolated pockets of
supposed ethnic purity, may have initially included assimilated Egyp-
tians. Dorothy Thompson, for example, has recently argued, on the
basis of “third century BC census lists drawn up in both Greek and de-

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

In other words some “Hellenes” might be Egyptian.

Ptolemy’s world may have been Greek-speaking and essentially
Greek in its relations with the northern Mediterranean, but its location
in Egypt required an accommodation to its native population, the need
for which increased at times of political unrest.16 Soter and Philadelphus
needed to achieve a balance between Greek and Egyptian in their ad-
ministrative and royal behavior, in a context where overtly Egyptian
practice, like brother-sister marriage, may have incurred hostility from
the Greeks, while neglecting the Egyptian religious customs was likely
to provoke political unrest among the native population. In contrast to
the Egyptians, for whom place, language, and religious traditions were
culturally unifying, the Greek population of Alexandria (and Egypt in
general) came from a wide variety of poleis and ethne, often with long
histories of fractiousness, and were accustomed to think of themselves

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

as Cyrenean or Coan or Athenian or Macedonian rather than Greek in

an aggregate sense, as the exchange between Praxinoa and the stranger
in Theocritus 15.87–93 makes abundantly clear. His complaint about
her broad vowels (88: plateiasdoisai) is met with a fierce retort de-
tailing her lineage and asserting her right to speak as she pleases, and
she pleases to speak not Greek, but Peloponnesian (92–93: Pelopon-
nasistB lalePme%). This is a telling anecdote that sheds light on the
world of Alexandria: we see a fragmented Greek population achieving
a fragile equipoise between the Egyptians (who are characterized as
petty thieves) on the one hand (48–49) and Ptolemy as sole ruler on the
other (94–95). For Theocritus, at least, the Hellenism of Alexandria
seems to have been artificially constructed through contrast or opposi-
tion to other groups and dependent on the crown for its nurturing.
While the Greek citizens were organized along the lines of a traditional
polis with a boule or governing body,17 Alexandria is unusual in that
Alexandrian citizenship did not confer a unique status.18 In fact, in the
formative period of the city very few Greeks seem to have availed them-
selves of citizenship but to have retained allegiance to their native
towns without discernable loss of status or privilege.19 The reason for
this is possibly, as P. Fraser suggests, the Ptolemies’ dedication to true
meritocracy, but equally the failure to create a strong polis structure
that fostered civic identity increased dependency on the crown and its
preferment and eliminated a potentially competing source for power or
status. During this period the Ptolemies equally fostered the Egyptian
population: there was a rapid escalation in temple building, and many
monuments constructed and dedicated by native clergy appear.20
The legal system created under Ptolemy II, which provided a frame-

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)

21. See J. Méléze-Modrzejewski, “Droit et justice dans le monde hellénistique au IIIe

siècle avant notre ère: expérience lagide,” in MNHMH Georges A. Petropoulos, ed. A.
Biscardi, J. Modrzejewski, and H. J. Wolff (Athens, 1984) 1: 55–77.
22. PTeb. 1.5.207–20 ( = C. Ord. Ptol. 53). Koenen (1993, 40, esp. nn. 38–39) sum-
marizes the positions and provides relevant bibliography.
23. See Fraser 1972, 1: 110–12.
24. Idyll 15 bears this out. ADgyptistA is used generically, while Greeks are shown at
pains to stress their unique ethnicities.
The Two Lands 245

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

25. See Koenen 1977, 29–30.

26. 2000, 69–72.
27. Kemp 1989, 203–9.
246 The Two Lands

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

28. Athenaeus 5.196–97. See G. Haeny, Basilikale Anlagen in der ägyptischen

Baukunst des Neuen Reiches (Wiesbaden, 1970) 76, fig. 29a.
29. Athenaeus takes his description from Callixeinus’s On Alexandria, written some-
time after the accession of Ptolemy IV. See Rice 1983, 134–50.
30. I am indebted to Professor Robert Ritner of the Oriental Institute in Chicago for
this observation. See, for example, LÄ 1: 655–60, s.v. Baum, heiliger. See also Calli-
machus fr. 655 Pf. on Perseus as the bringer of the persea tree to Egypt.
31. See, for example, A. Stewart, “Nuggets: Mining the Texts Again,” AJA 102
(1998) 281, for the Greek parallels; Kemp 1989, 116, fig. 40, for the Egyptian.
32. See, for example, J. Winkler, “The Laughter of the Oppressed: Demeter and the
Gardens of Adonis,” in Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in
Ancient Greece (New York, 1990) 189–93 and 235 n. 1; and Reed 2000 for the Adonia
and its function within the Ptolemaic court.
33. See Burkert 1985, 176–77; Fraser 1972, 1: 198.
34. Although Burkert disallows the organic connection that Sir James Frazer made
between similar dying god cults throughout the Mediterranean, the point here is not that
the two were the same or even hereditarily linked (though they might have been), so
much as that the similarity of one to the other provided a stimulus for privileging it
within the city. See Reed 2000 for the parallels with contemporary Egyptian festivals of
Osiris.
The Two Lands 247

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

ories in Egypt may have assisted the introduction of Egyptian or Egyp-

tianized elements into the new cult.39

The establishment of cult was not value-neutral, however; in fourth-

century prose writers, this was a function of the culture hero, that spe-
cial human subsequently worthy of elevation to divinity. Figures like
Zeus, Heracles, and Dionysus in Greek myth and Isis and Osiris in
Egyptian are such divinized heroes (epigeioi in the language of Euhe-
merus), many of whom are credited with founding cults of their parents
or other deities. To posit a causal relationship between the ideas of
these writers and the actual behavior of the Ptolemies is not necessary.
Rather, the intersection of theoretical and practical reflects the world of
the early epigonids, who had limited options to display their power out-
side of earlier, familiar structures and whose audience now included
Greeks as well as non-Greeks, many of whom already operated in a
world in which the king kept company with the gods. But if the con-
nection between what fourth-and early third-century writers are saying
and the actual behavior of the Ptolemies cannot be reduced to cause-ef-
fect, the real impact of writing in this period should not be underesti-
mated. The Ptolemies ruled in the immediate moment by military force,
but how their men and the surrounding Greeks viewed their actions
over the long term was not a trivial issue. Obviously they themselves
participated in creating the image of civic benefaction that the festivals
and cult celebrations foster. In this regard public contests that featured
poetic competition within these very events sponsored by the crown
would have had considerable potential to influence public opinion.

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

non-Greek groups within their empire. Egyptian, Persian, and Jewish

texts seem also to have been solicited, at least in translation.43 Whatever
the actual scale of collection of non-Greek material and the relative
proportion of the various literatures to each other, the very fact of im-
perial inclusion of these other texts provided an instant cachet to those
non-Greek writings (as the Letter to Aristeas demonstrates), but it also
underscored what was observable in law and political life, namely, that
Greek writings now coexisted in a world of alternative languages and
literatures. Greek literary models must still have formed the cultural
imagination, but on the periphery other styles of expression were grow-
ing increasingly more visible.
The Greek-speaking poets who were invited by the Ptolemies to par-
ticipate in some fashion in the court were necessarily aware of the col-
lective (and collected) Greek literary past as other than or separate from
themselves. A. Cameron in his magisterial discussion of Callimachus
emphasizes the living literary and performative traditions in which Cal-
limachus and his contemporaries would have participated, in contrast
to an entirely bookish tradition.44 However, the fact of the Library did
alter the relationship of past to present. Whatever was embedded in col-
lected texts was available for imitation and appropriation, but it now
occupied a space that was temporally and physically separate—like
epic, distanced from the present and from the literary events in which
these poets participated. Whatever the living performance practices of
the Ptolemaic world—and these must have been extensive—they must
have been experienced as cognitively different from the repository of
literary remembrance gathered in the Library. Or to put it somewhat
differently, however scholarly and recondite we may perceive the
Alexandrian poets to be, from their own perspective their poetry would
have been the live experience. The poetry of the past was texts, to be
collated, disputed, emended; texts, moreover, that were imbued with an
image of Greekness—of who or what Greeks were or had been—
against which modern Alexandrians might measure themselves. In this
way the Library would have intensified the sense of collective Greek

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

45. See, for example, Goldhill’s remarks (1991, 315–16).

46. The rise of mercenaries in the fourth century was already perceived by Demos-
thenes as contributing to the erosion of civic virtues.
252 The Two Lands

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-

50. See Halperin 1983, 161–83.

254 The Two Lands

dinary world in Homer as a reference point for the Hecale: in narrating

the adventures of the ostensibly heroic Theseus, he chooses for empha-
sis (at least in what we have extant) the values of hospitality and guest
friendship displayed in Homer’s most humble character, the swineherd,
Eumaeus, values that continue to be viable and that are easily portable
from the older culture to his own. The Alexandrians are not trying to
erase Homer in their poetry so much as recreate him for a new world
and conform him to their own distinctive poetic agendas.51 Equally, ap-
propriations of Homer call attention to the creative activities of the
contemporary poet for whom the writers of the past exist no longer as
living poets but as texts to be cannibalized.
Each of these poets responds to the challenge of this new world by
imagining and depicting it in different ways: Callimachus and Apollo-
nius devise origin myths to fit a new political reality, Callimachus and
Theocritus experiment with fashioning models of kingship from previ-
ous literary paradigms. Of the three, Callimachus most obviously situ-
ates himself as a self-conscious ego writing against the past. His archaic
poets of preference are Hesiod and Hipponax; his Aetia begins by re-
producing the moment of Hesiod’s poetic initiation and continues with
a pastiche of narratives that seem never to intersect with the Homeric.
His poetry also implicates itself in the world of the court: he writes
epinicia for royals or members of imperial circles and introduces the
“king” into his ostensibly Olympian hymns. In at least four of Calli-
machus’s complete poems—the Zeus, Apollo, and Delos hymns and the
Lock of Berenice—I (in earlier chapters) and other scholars before me
have made a case for locating a double symbolic matrix, in which the
narrative is constructed to be legible within two different cultural
codes—Greek and Egyptian. In each of them Callimachus seems to
craft Greek myths to focalize often trivial events connected with the
royal house, which in the context of Egyptian royal ideology take on a
much deeper significance. The defeat of the Gauls in the Hymn to Delos
and the translation of Berenice’s lock of hair into a constellation are
cases in point.52 Callimachus also positions himself so that as we expe-
rience the conceptual duplicity of the poems we are in no doubt about

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.

If heroic warfare and its attendant values are characteristics of Homeric

poetry, in the Hellenistic period, as we have seen, this poetry needed to
be refashioned. The poets of Alexandria, therefore, select and reorder
their inherited mythologies to accommodate the new world of the
Ptolemies. One important way in which they do this is by exploiting
foundational or origin stories (aetia). In fact, Alexandrians seem to en-
gage in aetiological explanations to a greater degree than their literary
predecessors, and Callimachus even went so far as to write a long non-
continuous poem entitled Aetia. But, as S. Goldhill puts it, “although
aetiology is inherently a way of articulating a relation between past and
present, the precise nature of this articulation has prompted consid-
erable discussion by modern critics.”55 What characterizes all the dis-
cussions Goldhill reprises is their location of aetia within a strictly tex-
tual or literary milieu, if not divorced from contemporary culture, at
least sufficiently removed that texts seem to be isolated from it.56 The
persistent argument of this book, however, has been to locate the pro-
duction of Hellenistic poetry more precisely within its contemporary
environment, with the result that at several points throughout the ear-
lier chapters I have characterized the use of aetia as a cognitive process
of cultural redefinition. However, in the process of reconceptualizing
Egypt, of rethinking it as a land of Greek behaviors and practices, it is
equally possible to see the poets deploying aetia at a metatextual level.
As T. M. Greene puts it, “when an allusion . . . begins to sketch a
miniature myth about its own past, or rather its emergence from that

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

past, . . . it tends to become aetiological.”57 The writer, in orienting his

work to his poetic predecessors, necessarily constructs a literary history
of that past into which he inserts himself as its inevitable fulfillment.
In the Hymn to Zeus, for example, Callimachus’s deliberately am-
biguous presentation of Zeus’s birth as Arcadian or Cretan climaxes in
an allusion that seemingly replaces Homer with Hesiod. But in reality
Callimachus replaces them both with himself—the poet of “more plau-
sible fictions”—as deftly as he substitutes Ptolemy for Zeus. In an anal-
ogous way, Theocritus picks his way though the inherited debris of po-
etic and prose encomia, with their tropes of supping with the immortals
and figures from heroic battle, only to move out from the shadow of the
Homeric past to position himself against his contemporary, Calli-
machus. Theocritus describes himself as “one who knows how to
praise” in response to the latter’s coy dubiety (Dn doip mala uAmo%).
Both poets write themselves into new literary places via a series of allu-
sions that often need substantial refashioning to suit their new context,
thus calling attention to their altered circumstances (like the child Her-
acles of the Heracliscus and Callimachus’s baby Zeus). Apollonius’s in-
tertextual behavior is more complex because of the genre and the length
of his text. But one of its most noticeable features is his narrative tra-
jectory from a pre-Homeric past to an almost overdetermined future
signified by the gift of Libyan soil to Euphemus. Apollonius provides no
defining Homeric battles for his heroes, but an allusive return to the
homeland in his last line,58 combined with an expectation that the fu-
ture home of his heroes will be not Greece but North Africa.

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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Winiarczyk, M. 1991. Euhemeri Messenii reliquiae. Stuttgart and Leipzig.
Winnicki, J. K. 1994. “Carrying Off and Bringing Home the Statues of the
Gods.” Journal of Juristic Papyrology 24: 149–90.
Woodford, S. 1983. “The Iconography of the Infant Heracles Strangling
Snakes.” In Image et céramique grecque, Actes du colloque du Rouen, edited
by F. Lisserrague and F. Thélamon, 121–29. Rouen.
Žabkar, L. 1988. Hymns to Isis in Her Temple at Philae. Hanover and London.
Zanker, G. 1987. Realism in Alexandrian Poetry. London and Sydney.
———. 1989. “Current Trends in the Study of Hellenic Myth in Early Third-
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land 35: 83–103.
Index of Passages Cited

Aelian Apollonius of Rhodes

fr. 285 129, 159 1.7 196
1.8–11 196
Aeschylus 1.33 212n104
Agamemnon 1.306–10 212
689–90 28 1.496–511 197–200
Alexander Romance 1.507 210n95
1.1–17, 30 65n135 1.554 212n104
1.6.3 71 1.580 190, 208
1.13 66, 143 1.721–26 215n117
1.27–29 66 1.721–68 200
1.30.6–7 181 1.759–62 211n101
1.34 67 1.1012–78 186
1.34.2 178 1.1101 203
1.1110–52 188
Ammianus Marcellinus 1.1117–52 203
17.4.11 2 1.1130 204n82
1.1132–39 188
Antagoras of Rhodes (from CA) 1.1146–49 203
1.1–7 80–81 1.1150 204n82
1.1319 186
Antigonus of Carystus 2.145–53 186
Paradoxa 2.662–68 212
19 (23) 4n11 2.687–89 210n94
2.700–9 210
Antimachus (from Matthews) 2.705–8 210–11
fr. 162 83n28 2.714–19 177
2.718–19 211n97
Antipater of Thessalonica 2.844–50 189
AP 7.369 84n33 2.854 225
2.966–1001 186
Apollodorus 2.1010–14 175
1.9.26 224 2.1015–25 175
2.1.4 25n17, 99n77 2.1141–56 192

269
270 Index of Passages Cited

Apollonius of Rhodes (continued) sch. on 3.1179 205n84

2.1209 225 sch. on 4.156 217n122
3.64–75 196n55 sch. on 4.257–62c 206n85,
3.200–9 176 224n142
3.407–8 214–15 sch. on 4.268 110n108
3.409–18 205 sch. on 4.1153–54 230n167
3.596–97 215 sch. on 4.1646–48 232n173
3.1177–83 206
3.1182 208 Aratus
3.1229–30 215 Phaenomena
3.1382–84 205 30–33 116n121
4.124–26 215 163–64 116n121
4.129–30 217 311 222n137
4.146 217n120 581–88 126
4.153–61 217 sch. on 16 110n108
4.172–74 215
4.185 215 Aristotle
4.259–69 189–90, 207–8 History of Animals
4.263 110n108 553a21–33 2n3
4.263–65 190n44 623b7–627b22 2n3
4.269 208n91
4.272–75 189 Arrian
4.272–79 176 Anabasis
4.278–81 223n141, 226 1.12.1 458
4.284 226 3.1.4 245
4.406–18 193 3.3.2 69
4.433–34 192 3.5.2 245
4.468–69 193, 227 7.11 15
4.478 193, 227 Indica
4.594–602 229 5.4 35
4.599–603 222
4.620–22 229 Athenaeus
4.630 222, 229 5.196–97 246n28
4.672–81 204–5 5.197a 159
4.705–14 194 5.198b 246
4.728 236n184 5.198e 83n31
4.730–31 193 5.201d-e 246
4.984–92 230
4.1146–47 230 Callimachus
4.1237 223 Aetia (fragments from Pf. unless noted)
4.1311 207 1.13–14 98n73
4.1389 231 2.1–3 87
4.1408 186 7 236n186
4.1436–39 187 37 207n88
4.1459 187 66 99n78
4.1513–17 133n38 88 211n97
4.1541–7 194, 231 178.23 107
4.1547–49 179n20 254.4(8) SH 8
4.1602–16 194 254 + 283 SH 175n8
4.1665–66 232 254.16 (30) SH 9
4.1670 232 259 SH + 177Pf. 199n67,
4.1695–1700 233 222n139
4.1706–18 233 Epigrams
4.1734 181n25, 192 37Pf. = AP 13.7 10
4.1750–61 180 57Pf. = AP 6.150 10, 25n17
4.1753 181 Hymns, Zeus
4.1758 209 1–3 77
Index of Passages Cited 271

2 139 fr.202Pf. 90n50

4–8 79 Fragments
6–7 92–93, 89–91 228.51Pf. 182n27
7–8 40n63, 113 384.31–34Pf. 99
10–14 92, 95, 100–102 407, 410 Pf. 30n29
10–32 91 470bPf. 233n177
13–14 103n90 715 Pf. 10
15 207 655Pf. 246n30
18–27 99
19–21 98–99 Columella
25 102 9.2.3 107n95
28–45 102
29, 32, 33 103 Curtius Rufus, Quintus
34 92, 93, 204n82 4.8.1–2 181n26
41 204n82 9.8.22 129n25
41–45 92, 93
42–43 93, 103 Dio Chrysostom
42–45 106 4.62 2n3
46–54 105
47 204n82 Diodorus Siculus
49 106 1.7 206n85
49–50 107 1.7.1 199n71
54–91 108 1.10 199n71
56–59 105, 108, 112 1.10.2–3 206n85
57 200, 210 1.10.6–7 205–6
58–59 109 1.13.4–5 168–69
60 113 1.15 230n166
61–62 162 1.15.6–7 84
65 113 1.24.5 145
66 107, 109 1.24.7 145
68–78 111n110 1.26.6 62–63
79 109 1.28.2–4 33
79–84 111 1.29 247
85 78 1.31.7 160
85–88 108–9, 111 1.47.1–6 44
91–96 148–9 1.47–49 32
96–97 112 1.53.2–4 35
Apollo 1.53.7 143
104 217n120 1.53.9 35, 144
Artemis 1.54.1 177
142–51 152n89 1.55.2–3 178n16
Delos 1.55.7–9 152n89
90–97 118 1.56–57 160–61
91–101 158 1.70.1–4 33–34
125–35 117 1.71.1, 4–5 33–34
136–40 117 1.72 47,
162–95 118 221n133
174 119 1.88.5 62
181–82 139 1.91–92 47,
205–8 115, 117 221n133
260–65 116 3.3.4 42
300–306 118 3.52–55 41
311 119 3.56–57 41
Athena 3.61.5–6 42, 97n66
48 99n78 3.65.7 84n32
Iambi 4.40.4 40
fr. 191Pf. 38, 38n56 4.40–55 39
272 Index of Passages Cited

Diodorus Siculus (continued) Herodotus

4.46 193n51 1.2.-2.3 174
4.52 193n51 2.1 174
4.53.7 40 2.35 175n9
5.41–47 37 2.35.2 175, 183n32
5.80 88 2.39.1–2 23
6.1.1–2 145 2.41.2 25
6.1–5 37 2.42 84n32, 225n148
2.43.1–2 130–31
Diogenes Laertius 2.44.5 131
1.111 88 2.45 27
1.115 40n63 2.59–63 56
8.86–91 30 2.73 59
8.89 31 2.81 198n62
2.86–90 47
Dionysius the Periegete 2.86.3 154n96
249–50 206n87 2.91 23n9, 131n28,
sch. on 415 97n68 133, 190
2.91.5–6 26
EGF Thebais 2.103.1–104.1 177
fr.1 25n17 2.106 152n89
2.112–20 27
2.146 83n29, 104
Empedocles (from D-K)
2.156 23n9, 57–58
B26.10 197n61
2.171 25n17, 247
B77.1 197n61
2.102, 106 48–49
3.97 83n29
Epimenides (from D-K) 4.155 108n101
A1.16–21 88 4.197 179n20
B1 85 6.53–55 29n25
B4 88
B5 88 Hesiod
B8 110n105 Theogony
22–28 85
Eratosthenes (from SH) 79–85 158
397.ii.2 226n151 96 112
120 81
Euripides 187 106
Cretans 467–506 102
fr. 79 (Austin) 89–90 479–83 102–3
Hecuba 491–500 103
465–74 66n132 496 109
Helen 501–5 109
1485 98 505–11 198
Ion 685–819 109
206–7 63n131 801–6 95–6
sch. on Medea 1334 227n158 820–80 109
881–85 109–10
Hecataeus of Miletus (from FGrH) Works and Days
1F305 57 218–63 112
1F324 59n120 Fragments (from M-W)
128 25n17, 99
Herodas
1.26–35 240n9 Homer
Iliad
Herodorus (from FGrH) 3.3–6 9n73
31F52 217n122 4.497 203n80
Index of Passages Cited 273

6.289–92 27n24 Longus

15.186–93 109 Daphnis and Chloe
15.157–59 163 2.5–6 81n21
19.38 154
23.382 80 Lucian
Odyssey Dialogues of the Dead
2.270–72 151 10.2 118n126
2.274–80 151 True Histories
4.227–30 27n24 1.3.8–12 185n37
4.351–92 27n24
4.418 101 Lycophron
5.244 126 119, 576 208n91
5.244–47 95 891–894 179n20
5.272–74 126 1192 199n67
5.305–6 126 1209–21 175n7
7.244–47 95, 233n177 1291–1321 175n7
15.426 111 1312 175n8
19.37 136
23.296 223, 257 Manetho (from Waddell)
fr. 83 46
Homeric Hymns fr. 86 138n48
Apollo
2 152 Menander Rhetor
5–13 152 343.17–20 81n21
22 152
23–25 152 Mimnermus (from West)
339–40 118 fr. 11a 222n138
367 118n126
Demeter
Orphic Argonautica
165 140
14 81
189 136
219 140
Ovid
242–95 141
Metamorphoses
280 136
15.364–7 4n11
Dionysus
1–9 82–84
Hermes Pausanias
17–19 112n114 1.6.2 129n25
2.37.1 99n77
8.20.1 97
Horapollo (from Sbordone) 8.32.2 93
1.62 3 8.38.2 94
8.53.4 93
Isocrates
Busiris PGM
17–18 29 IV 2292–94 198n63
13–23 29n25 IV 2333–34 198n63
Evagoras
8–11 147–8 Pherecydes of Athens (from FGrH)
3F31 217n122
Josephus 3F105 196n56
Bellum Judaicum
2.95 243n18 Pherecydes of Syrus (from D-K)
B1–B2 201
Lactantius
Divinae institutiones PHibeh
1.11.44–48 38 I 85.25 98n74
274 Index of Passages Cited

Pindar (fragments from Snell-Maehler) POxy

Nemean 1 27.2455 49–50
68–69 137
70–71 126n18, 137 PTeb
Nemean 1.5.207–20 244
9, 40–42 103n90
Paean Seneca
20 124n8 De clementia
Pythian 1.19.1 2n3
1.25 102, 134
Pythian 4 Simonides (from PMG)
13–15 179 343.21–22:133n37
25–26 231n170
33 181n25 Stesichorus (from PMG)
50–56 202 192–3 27n23
60–65 108n101
75 186n56 Strabo
79 201 1.4.9 15
fr. 129 222n139 2.3.5 38n55
4.33.1 97n72
Plato 8.4.4 97n72
Cratylus 17.128 10
396a-c 97 17.800 182n27
402b 97
Laws Suetonius
656c-657b 29 De grammaticis
700a-701b 29, 176n12 7 39n60
Lysis
205c-d 152n89 Tacitus
Phaedrus Historiae
274c5–75b1 176n12 4.83 142n63
Republic
424b2–c6 29 Theocritus
Timaeus Idyll
21e-24 176n12 14.59 240n9
Idyll 15
Plutarch 43 247
Alexander 48–49 243
2.6 69 87–93 243
3.1–2 69 94–95 243n35, 247
26.3–7 181n26 106–9 153
DIO 146 168
22 222n138 Idyll 17 (Ptolemy)
57 82n27 1–8 149–50
Obsolescence of Oracles 13–15 151
1 88 34–35 153
Pelopidas 38–40 155
21 40n63 48–50 154
53–57 157
Poseidippus 56–65 127n20
G-P 3110–19 182 56–57 129, 151,
155
POxy 60–63 158
2064 124n4 63–64 155
68–69 162
POxy 73–75 158
22.2327+ 59.3965 79n 17 80–84 147
Index of Passages Cited 275

86–87 161 egyptian texts

95–110 160
112–16 162 Book of the Dead
121–25 166 Sp. 8 60n121
123 153, Sp. 15 234n178
162 Sp. 39 228
132–22 162 Sp. 84 60n121
135–37 150 Sp. 108 232
Idyll 24 (Heracliscus) Sp. 125 48
1–5 128 Sp. 162 213, 234n178
1–63 123 Sp. 185 A S4 213
6–10 132–33
11–12 125 Book of Gates
11–33 132 Scene 46 230n168
13–19 133
28–29 134 Coffin Texts
28–30 135 I 195g 154n97
31 137 I 223f-g 154n97
56–57 134 VI 284r 154n98
56–58 126 “The Eloquent Peasant” 100n80
57 102
64–102 123 Hymns, Philae
73–78 137 Hymn 2 120
79–81 145 Hymn 4 101
79–85 137 Hymn 5 112n114
82–83 141 to Piye 120
84 126
88–96 137 Inscriptions
96–99 137 “Israel” Stele, 161
100 137–38, Mereneptah
139n54 Kubban Stele, 112n114
101–2 142 Ramesses II
103–4 144 Mendes Stele, 213n109
103–40 123–4 Ptolemy II
112–14 125 Naucratis Stele, 213–14
138–40 143 Nectanebo I
fr. 3 153n94 Osorkon’s Victory 154n98, 156,
Stele 213, 216n119
Varro Pithom stele,
De re rustica Ptolemy II 236n185
2.5.5 4n11 Rosettana, Ptolemy V 138, 156,
176n11
Vergil Semna stele, Sesostris III 156
Georgics “Prophecy of Neferti” 100–101
4.281–31 4n11 27
Index
Abrochos (uninundated), Arcadia as,
98–99
Achilles: in Encomium for Ptolemy, 157,
158, 164; shield of, 253; tomb of,
248
Achmim (Chemmis, Upper Egypt), 23n9,
56n109; Perseus worship at, 26,
133. See also Chemmis (Delta)
Adonis: Alexandrian festival of, 153,
155, 167–68, 246–47; Semitic, 89
Adrasteia, 94, 106
Aeetes (Argonautica), 176, 193, 205,
206, 228; ancestry of, 235; testing of
Jason, 214–15
Aegyptus, sons of, 26
Aeneas: killing of Turnus, 226–27; shield
of, 202
Aeschylus: Danaids in, 25; Prometheus
Bound, 213n108
Aetiology: in Argonautica, 184, 189,
190, 192, 193, 203, 235; in cultural
assimilation, 18, 72. See also Aition;
Callimachus, Aetia
Afterlife, Egyptian, 47; burial practices
and, 221. See also Underworld,
Egyptian
Aition: Apollonius’s, 235; cultural redef-
inition through, 256–57; for
Eleusinian mysteries, 141–42; for-
eign places in, 72; in foundation
stories, 188; of Hellenistic poets,
187
Alcmena: Egyptian affiliations of, 131; in
Heracliscus, 128–29, 130, 133, 135,
137, 141, 144, 156, 157
Alexander Romance, 8, 22, 64–73; audi-
ence of, 68–69; intent of, 71–72;
Nectanebo II in, 64n133, 65–68, 71;
Olympias in 64, 65, 66, 67; Philip of
Macedon in, 65, 66, 69, 143; popu-
larity of, 64n134; Sesoösis in,
177n15; sources of, 64, 65; succes-
sion in, 64; theogamy in, 130; trans-
mission of, 67
Alexander the Great, 35; ancestry of, 69,
70–71; Aristotle and, 31n32; in
Dionysius Scytobrachion, 42; divin-
ity of, 70, 72, 130, 152, 155, 157;
education of, 66, 143; in Encomium
for Ptolemy, 152, 156, 157, 164; in
foundation myths, 8; as Homeric
hero, 252; at Memphis, 65n135, 66,
245; paternity myths of, 8, 65–66,
68–71, 72, 130; restoration of tem-
ples, 13n30; and Sesoösis, 178, 180;
at Siwah, 65n135, 66, 181; temples
of, 45; at tomb of Achilles, 248;
view of kingship, 14–15
Alexandria: bilingual government in, 46,
241; bureaucracy of, 13, 46,
234n19; civic identity in, 243, 244,
251; cults in, 142, 244; Egyptian ar-
chitecture of, 240; ethnic diversity
of, 173, 240; festivals of, 153, 155,
167–68, 246–48; foundation myths
of, 8, 181; foundation of, 65, 67,
277
278
Alexandria (continued)
72; foundation poetry of, 187n40;
geographic importance of, 239;
Greek-speaking population of, 240,
242–43; harbor of, 15n43, 240n10;
Hellenism of, 243; heterogeneity of,
73, 242–45, 249–50; intellectual mi-
lieu of, 21; Jews of, 243n18, 244;
Library, 249–51, 257; material ad-
vancement in, 240n9; Museum, 12;
site of, 181–82. See also Greeks,
Alexandrian
Amasis (pharaoh), 13n30
Amazons, 185n37; in Dionysius Scyto-
brachion, 41, 175
Ambrosia, 154
Amenhotep III (pharaoh), 54
Ammianus Marcellinus, 2, 3
Ammon (Greek): in Alexander Romance,
65, 72; in Dionysius Scytobrachion,
41, 42, 175; snake manifestation of,
66n137, 71. See also Amun (Egypt-
ian); Zeus Ammon
Amun (Egyptian), 50; as divine father,
53–54, 56; festival of, 45n78; temple
at Siwah, 66. See also Re
Amphitryon: Egyptian affiliations of,
131; in Heracliscus, 128, 134, 135,
141, 156, 157
Amycus (Argonautica), 216n119
Anaphe (island), 209, 224, 233n177,
236, 237, 255
Animal sacrifice, 27
Animal worship, 15; Manetho on, 46
Antagoras of Rhodes, Hymn to Eros, 80,
81, 82
Antigonus of Carystus, 4n11
Antimachus, 110n108, 217n122, 224
Antinoe papyrus (of Theocritus), 124n4
Antipater of Thessalonica, 84n33
Antiphanes of Berga, 38n55
Anubis (god), 154
Aphrodite: in Argonautica, 200, 201; as-
sociation with Arsinoe, 181; co-
templing with Berenice, 153–54
Apiculture, Egyptian, 3n7, 107n98
Apidanians, 110n108; in Argonautica, 190
Apis (god), 4; Alexander’s sacrifice to,
245; as Epaphus, 8–9
Apollo: aretai of, 117; in Argonautica,
210, 211–12, 216n119, 233–35;
birth of, 17, 57–58, 114; cults to,
237; defeat of Pytho, 11n23, 117,
118, 119; and Helios, 237; identifi-
cation with Horus, 7, 20, 104, 114,
209, 236, 237; slaying of Tityos,
211n101; youth of, 213, 237
Index
Apollodorus, 224
Apollonius of Rhodes: audience of, 181;
compositional technique of, 235; as
court poet, 171–72; and Dionysius
Scytobrachion, 40; ktiseis of,
187n40; literary precursors of, 218;
role in Museum, 12; as royal tutor,
248n40. Works: Argonautica: —,
Aeetes in, 176, 193, 205, 206,
214–15, 228; —, aetiology in, 184,
189, 190, 192, 193, 203, 235; —, as
anti-epic, 218; Aphrodite in, 200,
201; —, Apollo in, 210, 211–12,
216n119, 233–35; —, barbarians in,
175–76, 179; —, celestial references
in, 221n136; chthonic powers in,
197, 210, 218, 222, 232; —, Circe
in, 193–94, 204, 222, 227; —, com-
position of, 62n1, 180, 198n64,
228; —, cosmology in, 197–99, 208,
218–19; —, crime and punishment
in, 201; —, —, cult in, 251–52; —,
cultural heterogeneity in, 11-12,
195–96; —, cultural relativism of,
187; —, Cyclopes in, 200; —, dawn
in, 234–35, 256; —, description of
Egyptians in, 110n108; —, dragons’
teeth in, 205, 206, 215; —, Egyptian
cosmogony in, 209–10, 236; Egypt-
ian themes of, 8, 182–83, 204; —,
foundation stories in, 188–89, 190;
—, geographic exploration in, 185,
222; —, geographic markers in,
204–8; —, golden fleece in, 185,
215, 216, 218, 222, 225–26; —,
Greco-Egyptian culture in, 196–208,
219; —, Greek cosmogony in, 197,
198, 255; —, Greek gods in,
178n18; —, Heracles in, 178, 185,
186–87, 195, 235; —, Hera in, 229;
—, Hesperides in, 186–87, 194, 218;
—, homonoia in, 211n97; —, Hyp-
sipyle in, 186, 215n117; —, —, as
katabasis, 218; —, kingship in,
202–3; —, Libyan earth in, 179,
180, 192, 194, 202, 208, 209, 223;
—, magic in, 197, 205, 212, 217,
218, 222, 225; marriages in, 200,
224; —, narrative strategies of, 183,
185n37, 224, 235, 257; —, new
order in, 208–18; —, origin myths
in, 254; —, Orpheus in, 197–99,
201, 210; —, Phrygians in, 188; —,
primeval hills in, 209; —, primordial
nature in, 204–6; —, psychological
realism in, 185; —, Ptolemaic con-
text of, 18, 171, 173–83, 195; —,
Index
quest in, 183–237; —, romantic en-
counters in, 184, 191, 192–93; —,
serpents in, 187, 194, 210–12,
216–17, 225, 231; —, Sesoösis in,
177, 189–90, 207; —, socio-political
context of, xi, 237; —, sources of,
220, 223, 227; —, time in, 228; —,
transculturation in, 191, 231n172;
—, Triton in, 194, 207, 208; —, Ty-
phon in, 216; —, unity of, 171n1; —,
use of Hecataeus of Miletus in, 223;
—, use of Hymn to Zeus in, 198,
204n82; —, use of myth in, 185; —,
use of Pherecydes of Syrus in, 198,
199, 201; —, use of Pindar in,
178–80, 181, 195, 208, 223, 224; —,
use of underworld books in, 223,
225; —, Zeus in, 178n18, 200. See
also Apsyrtus (Argonautica); Argo;
Argonauts; Jason (Argonautica);
Medea (Argonautica)
Apophis (serpent), 60–61, 199, 210; bat-
tle with Horus, 216n119, 217; as
chaos, 225; defeat by Horus, 119;
mutilation of, 228; and voyage of
Re, 219, 232
Apotheosis, 37, 38
Apsyrtus (Argonautica): murder of,
215–16, 218, 222, 226–29, 230;
mutilation of, 193, 216n118, 229
Aratus, 82n27, 88n46, 110n108; constel-
lations in, 126; use of Eudoxus,
30n29
Arcadia: as birthplace of Zeus, 79, 80,
81, 84, 91–96, 103, 108, 200, 257;
irrigation of, 91, 95–98, 116, 164,
203; as primordial place, 81, 108,
113
Arcadians (Argonautica), 190
Architecture, Egyptian, 15. See also
Monuments, Egyptian
Ares, 118n125
Arete: of Apollo, 117; cultural values of,
150n86; Homeric, 253; in Hymn to
Zeus, 109; of Ptolemy II, 150
Argo: as constellation, 221–22; solar
journey of, 221n136
Argo (Argonautica): on Lake of Fire,
229, 231; night voyage of, 229,
233–34; return voyage of, 182n29,
224–37; serpent imagery of, 194,
231
Argonauts: Dionysius Scytobrachion on,
40, 174n6, 175; early accounts of,
174; in Pindar, 179
Argonauts (Argonautica): ancestors of,
209; as civilizers, 187; ephebic status
279
of, 218; Libyan journey of, 186,
223, 231; magic skills of, 197, 205,
222, 225
Argos: aridity of, 117n124; connection
with Egypt, 8–9; irrigation of, 25,
96–102
Ariadne, 192n50
Aristaeus, 3n5
Aristotle: advice to kings, 31; on Epi-
menides, 88; influence of Eudoxus
on, 30n29
Arrian, 15n39, 248; on Alexander’s an-
cestry, 69
Arsinoe (mother of Ptolemy I), 129
Arsinoe I (wife of Ptolemy I), 118n125
Arsinoe II (wife of Ptolemy II), 118n125,
126, 162, 168; death of, 147,
182n27; divinity of, 153n93; identi-
fication with Isis, 153n93, 155; pre-
vious marriage of, 163; temple at
Zephyrion, 181
Assmann, J., 234
Asteria (island), 115–16, 117–18
Athena: in Callimachus, 75; in Dionysius
Scytobrachion, 41, 207n88; identifi-
cation with Neith, 51; Tritonian,
206, 207, 208
Athenaeus, 246
Athens: drama of, 249, 251; Egyptian in-
fluence in, 247
Azania, 98, 99
Bakhtin, M. M., 171n2
Barbarians: in Argonautica, 175–76, 179;
identity of, 183. See also Non-
Greeks
Barbarism: association with Egypt, 29;
Greek triumph over, 174–75, 187
Basileia (festival), 78, 125
Basileia (goddess), 41, 42, 43
Battiads, 108n101, 179, 180
Bees: and baby Zeus, 107; on cartouches,
plates 1-2; Euhemerus on, 107n95;
in hieroglyphic writing, 1–3; in Pin-
dar, 108n101; royal symbolism of,
1–4, 107–8; spontaneous creation
of, 4; as symbol of rebirth, 4, 5
Berenice I (wife of Ptolemy I), 118n125,
137; benefactions of, 167; co-
templing with Aphrodite, 153–54;
cult of, 147n79; deification of,
153–55, 157; in Encomium for
Ptolemy, 152–53; marriage of, 155;
offerings to, 153n95
Berenice II (wife of Ptolemy III), 182n29
Berenice’s Lock (constellation), 228
Bes (dwarf god), 134n42
280
Bevan, E. R., 13n29
Bing, Peter, 7n14, 241n11; on Hymn to
Delos, 114n117, 115; on inunda-
tion, 98n74; on Niobe myth,
118n125
Birth shrines, 56–57, 156
Bn-bn (hill), 59, 60
Bnw-bird, 59, 60
Book of the Dead, 47, plate 4; Horus in,
213; mutilation in, 228; negative
confession of, 48; night voyage of Re
in, 232; solar hymns in, 60. See also
Underworld books, Egyptian
Book of Two Ways, 226n151
Boötes (constellation), 126
Burkert, Walter G., 130, 246n34
Burton, A., 32n35, 62n128
Busiris, 26–27; Isocrates on, 28–30, 38;
murder of, 131; in vase painting, 62
Cadmus, 205, 206
Calame, C., 179n21
Callimachus: allusions of, 76; aporia of,
84; audience of, 113; on Battiads,
180n22; chronology of, 12, 76–77;
court poetry of, 74, 75, 127, 170,
171; cult in, 251; cultural codes in,
254; dedicatory epigrams of, 10; dis-
placement in, 77n6; Egyptian themes
of, 8, 104–5, 114, 127; on Euhe-
merus, 38; geographical markers of,
84, 92–95, 204n82, 207, 208;
humor of, 74–75; intertexts of, 76;
on kingship, 75–76, 254; modern
readers of, 169; on night realm of
sun, 222n140; origin myths of, 254,
255; performative traditions in,
77n7, 250; political context of, 169;
predecessors of, 76; preference for
Hesiod, 163; realism of, 74; theogo-
nies of, 163; use of Eudoxus, 30n29;
use of Euhemerus, 90–91, 106; use
of Hipponax, 254; use of Io myth,
8–9; use of Works and Days, 111.
Works: Aetia, 187; —, Anaphe in,
237n186; —, Argos in, 99; —, chaos
in, 87; —, composition of, 224n143;
—, scholia on, 39n60; —, use of
Hesiod, 254; Hecale, 254; Hymn to
Apollo, 169n135, 210–11; Hymn to
Delos, 75, 114–21; —, as birthday
hymn, 115, 127; —, chaos in, 164,
165, 224; —, composition of, 114,
115n118, 147, 164, 198n64; —,
Egyptian motifs in, 114, 211; —,
and Encomium for Ptolemy, 147,
164–65; —, Hera in, 116; —, and
Index
Homeric Hymn to Apollo, 115, 116;
—, and Hymn to Zeus, 116; —,
kingship in, 117, 147; —, mutiny of
Gauls in, 114–15, 117, 119, 139,
165, 228, 254; —, Niobe myth in,
118; —, prophecy of Apollo in, 116,
117, 118, 119–21, 139, 144; —,
Ptolemy II in, 116, 118, 119, 121;
—, serpents in, 118; —, structure of,
76; —, as theogony, 121; —, use of
Herodotus in, 114; Hymn to Zeus,
43, 75–76, 77–114; —, Apollonius’s
use of, 198, 204n82; —, Arcadia in,
79, 81, 85, 91–96, 103, 108, 200,
257; —, aretai in, 109; —, bees in,
107; —, birth of Zeus in, 77,
79–108, 113; —, chronology of,
77–78, 127; —, concluding prayer
of, 77; —, Crete in, 79, 89, 91–94,
100, 103, 257; —, Egyptian myth in,
104–5; —, and Encomium for
Ptolemy, 148; —, Gaia in, 103; —,
growth to manhood in, 105, 106,
108; —, and Hymn to Delos, 116;
—, invocation of, 77, 87; —, king-
ship in, 17, 18, 79, 92, 109, 127,
200; —, omphalos in, 103–4, 106;
—, prosperity in, 150; —, Ptolemy II
in, 78, 79, 105, 108, 112–14,
148–51, 204; —, Rhea in, 91–92,
95, 96, 97, 105, 163–64; —, scholia
on, 90; —, self-referentiality of, 150;
—, serpents in, 134; —, use of
Homer in, 95; —, use of Theogony
in, 76, 85–87, 89, 95, 102–14, 127,
146, 149, 158, 208, 252, 253; Lock
of Berenice, 9n18, 154, 228n162,
254; Victory of Sosibius, 99
Callisthenes, use of Homer, 95, 233n177,
252, 253–54
Callixeinus, On Alexandria, 246n29
Calypso, island of, 96, 126, 233n177
Cameron, A., 77n7, 87n39, 250
Cassander (king of Macedon), 37
Chaos: in Adoniazusae, 167; Apophis as,
225; Callimachus on, 87; defeat by
rulers, 120, 138; in Egyptian cos-
mogony, 51, 198–99, 209; in Hymn
to Delos, 164, 165, 224; Pytho as,
118; Seth as, 51, 119; struggle with
maat, 199, 255
Chemmis (Delta), 23n9, 56, 116;
Herodotus on, 57–58; as place of
bees, 107. See also Achmim (Chem-
mis, Upper Egypt)
Chemmitae, 23; games of, 26; Herodotus
on, 47; Perseus worship of, 56n109
Index
Chephren (pharaoh), 159n114
Childéric (Merovingian king), 4, 5,
110n106
Chiron (centaur), 212n103
Chremonidean War, 115
Chronos, 199
Chrysippus (doctor), 30
Cippi (apotropaic plaques), 134–35, 136
Circe, in Argonautica, 193–94, 204, 222,
227
Clarysse, W., 7n14, 241n14, 242n15
Clauss, J. J., 77n7, 78, 113, 127n19,
204n82
Cleanthes, Hymn to Zeus, 82
Cleitarchus, 65
Colchis: as Egyptian colony, 33, 175,
177, 204, 214, 222–23, 226, 235; as
foundation of Sesostris, 176, 214;
mixed marriages in, 192; as night re-
gion of sun, 222
Colonization: civilizing process in, 195;
Greek, 191
Conception, divine, 52–54, 128, 130
Concord, temple of, 178
Constellations, 228; Argo as, 221-22; in
Heracliscus, 126
Conte, G. B. 76n4
Copresence, in Ptolemaic culture, 195,
196–208
Corybantes, 88, 89, 106
Cos: in Encomium for Ptolemy, 158,
159, 162; as primeval island, 116;
Ptolemy II’s birth on, 17, 97, 114,
116, 119, 127, 158, 165; relation-
ship to Delos, 165
Cosmogony, Egyptian, 11, 58–59; in
Argonautica, 209–10; chaos in, 51,
198–99, 209; and Hymn to Zeus,
100; primeval hill in, 100–101;
sunrise in, 233–34, plate 6; syn-
cretism in, 51; voyage of Re in,
218–22
Cosmogony, Greek, 81; Apollonius’s use
of, 197, 198, 255; of Diodorus Sicu-
lus, 199n71; and kingship, 86
Cosmology, Egyptian, 200; in Argonau-
tica, 197–99, 208, 218–19; chaos in,
119, 202; night voyage of the sun in,
218–37; Seth in, 139
Cosmology, Greek: Empedoclean,
197–98, 200; of Pherecydes,
199–200, 201
Couretes, 88, 89, 90, 92, 105, 106
Court poetry, Alexandrian: audience of,
140; emerging monarchy in, 249;
Greek models for, 250; Heracliscus
as, 125, 143; humor in, 75, 170
281
Courts, Hellenistic: encomia in, 148n84;
poetry of, 171n1
Creation myths. See Cosmogony
Cretans, as liars, 83n28, 85, 88, 89, 92,
113
Crete, as birthplace of Zeus, 79, 80, 84,
89, 91–94, 100, 103, 257
Cronus, 41, 90; in Theogony, 102
Cults: in Alexandria, 142, 244; of Apis,
245; to Apollo, 237; chthonic, 101;
of Demeter, 142n63, 247; Dionysiac,
83; of dying gods, 246n34; of Great
Mother, 107, 188, 203–4; of Greek
Alexandrians, 244; of Isis, 4, 15n41,
142; at Memphis, 239; Ptolemaic,
15–16, 38, 45, 152n91, 162, 247;
role in Greek identity, 251–52; ruler,
38; of Sarapis, 15–16, 142, 247; syn-
cretistic, 8, 247; of Theoi adelphoi,
39; of Theoi Soteres, 152n91, 162
Cultural assimilation: aetiology in, 18,
72; by Alexandrian Greeks, 7–8, 21;
of Herodotus, 8; by Ptolemies, 16
Culture: barbarian, 174; classical, 172;
dynamics of borrowing in, 5; folk-
loric similarities in, 11; priority in,
24, 33, 183, 241
Culture, Egyptian: fragrance in, 154–55;
Hecataeus’s elevation of, 36;
Herodotus on, 27–28; individuals in,
52; influence on Alexandrian writ-
ers, xi, 6–7; literacy in, 49; magic in,
214; solar journey in, 221
Culture, Greek: civilizing role of, 195;
liminality in, 196; literacy in, 49;
and North African culture, 194,
257; triumph over barbarism,
174–75, 187
Culture heroes, 37n53, 38; establishment
of cults by, 248; Heracles as, 145;
Olympians as, 90; Uranus as, 41;
Zeus as, 42, 91
Curtius Rufus, Quintus: on Alexandria,
181n26; on Ptolemy I, 129n25
Cyrenaica: Greek control of, 182;
prophecy on, 208–18
Cyrene: foundation myths in, 179n21;
Greek colonization of, 180, 181; in-
termarriage in, 191n49
Danae, myth of, 25, 26, 128; in Si-
monides, 133
Danaids: Hecataeus on, 33; irrigation of
Argos, 99; kingship legends and, 26
Danaus, myth of, 8–9, 25
Dat, 230; twelve hours of, 221, 231. See
also Underworld, Egyptian
282
Delos: as light, 118; relationship to Cos,
165. See also Callimachus, Hymn to
Delos; Homeric Hymn to Apollo
Delphi: foundation story of, 210; as om-
phalos, 93, 104; temple of Apollo at,
63
Delphyne (serpent), 211n97, 212, 217
Demeter: cults of, 142n63, 247; in
Homeric Hymn to Demeter, 126,
140–41; identification with Isis, 7
Democritus, 32, 146n76; relationship to
Euhemerus, 37n53
Demophoön, 140–41
Demosthenes, 251n46
Demotic language: as administrative lan-
guage, 13; documents in, 241–42; in
Greco-Roman period, 221n132; lit-
erary protocols of, 68; priestly oaths
in, 48
Dendera, temples at, 57
Detienne, M., 86, 114
Diodorus Siculus, 17, 146n76; on the af-
terlife, 47; on Busiris, 62; cos-
mogony of, 199n71; on Dionysus,
84; on Epimenides, 88; epitome of
Euhemerus, 37; epitome of
Hecataeus, 32n35; “foe smiting” in,
62–63; on Giants, 63–64; on Sesoö-
sis, 160–61; on spontaneous genera-
tion, 205–6
Diogenes Laertius: on Epimenides, 88; on
Eudoxus of Cnidus, 30, 31
Diomedes, in Encomium for Ptolemy,
157, 158
Dionysius Scytobrachion, 17, 39–43; on
Amazons, 175; Argonautica, 39–40,
175, 224; on Athena, 41, 207n88;
Dionysus in, 39, 41–42, 43, 175; on
Egyptian deities, 175; on Heracles,
145–46, 175; on Jason, 174n6; on
kingship, 42; Libyan stories, 39,
41–42, 175; on Medea, 40, 193n51;
rationalizing by, 39, 42, 175; reloca-
tion of divinities, 208n92; on Zeus,
97n66
Dionysus: birth of, 82–83, 84; conflict
with Titans, 42; as culture hero,
248; Dionysius Scytobrachion on,
39, 41–42, 43; Homeric Hymn to
Dionysus,82–84; identification with
Osiris, 7, 15, 84, 230, 245–46; in
Ptolemaia festival, 245; Zagreus, 89
Divinity: of Alexander the Great, 70, 72,
130, 152, 155, 157; in Argonautica,
194; of Arsinoe II, 153n93; in
Egyptian thought, 50; Euhemerus
on, 167; Hecataeus of Abdera on,
Index
168–69; of Heracles, 131, 136; in
hymnic tradition, 169
Doliones (Argonautica), 186, 203
Dorians, Egyptian ancestry of, 29n25
Dougherty, C., 187n40
Douris vase, 174n6
Dragons’ teeth, sewing of, 205, 206, 215
Dream of Nectanebo, 68n143
Drepane (island), 230
Edfu temple, 46, 57; description of ritu-
als at, 211n98; friezes of, 56
Education: of Heracles, 123, 137,
142–45, 165; of princes, 35,
142–45, 165
Egypt: and archaic Greece, 21; associa-
tion with barbarism, 29; association
with tyranny, 26; capitals of, 239;
cereal crops of, 238–39; in Euripi-
des, 28; foundation myths of, 45;
Greek immigration to, 8, 20–23,
240, 241; Greek population of, 16,
23, 47; Greek receptions of, 3;
Greek views of, 21–32; Hecataeus’s
account of, 32–36; Hellenization of,
8, 183; influence on Western culture,
5; power structure of, 168n33; as
primordial mother, 207–8; priority
over Greece, 24, 30, 33, 43, 183,
189–90; religious festivals of, 45–46;
shared culture of, 236–37; sponta-
neous generation in, 205–6; stability
of institutions, 176n12, 198n61; as
“Two Lands,” 18, 50, 55, 238–41.
See also Cosmogony, Egyptian; Cos-
mology, Egyptian; Kingship,
pharaonic; Pharaohs
Egypt, Greco-Roman: administration of,
242n15; brother-sister marriage in,
168n32
Egypt, Lower: bee symbolism of, 3n7,
107; geography of, 238, 239; under
Ptolemies, 239
Egypt, Ptolemaic: ethnicity of, 242n15;
priesthood under, 12–13; temples of,
16, 45, 57; underworld books in,
220
Egypt, Upper: geography of, 238–39
Egyptians: bilingual, 46, 241; knowledge
of hieroglyphics, 48; religiosity of,
33
Eileithyia (goddess), 91, 101, 158
Eleusinian mysteries, 146, 166, 247;
Danaids and, 25n17; establishment
of, 141–42
Embalming, Greeks’ familiarity with, 154
Emergence, myths of, 86, 114. See also
Index
Cosmogony, Egyptian; Islands,
emerging
Empedocles, 197–98, 200; conception of
meigma, 205
Empereur, Yves, 15n43, 240n10
Encomia: in Hellenistic courts, 148n84;
and mythic hymns, 148n82; prose,
147, 148
Enemies, ritual burning of, 138n48
Ennead (primal forces), 110
Epic: Hellenistic, 148n84; Homeric, 171;
Roman, 171, 172; temporal frame-
work of, 172–73
Epigeioi (divinized humans), 37
Epigonids: marriages of, 192; philoso-
phers’ advice to, 32
Epimenides of Crete, 40n63, 82, 87–90,
106n92, 112; attributions to, 88n40
Eratosthenes, 15, 226n151; as royal
tutor, 248n40
Eros: as bearded child, 81, 82; birth of,
80–81; as generative force, 81; in
Hesiod, 82n27
Ethnicity: of Alexandria, 173, 240,
242n15
Eudoxus of Cnidus, 23, 30–31, 48n90;
chronology of, 24n14; underworld
in, 221
Euergesia, 159–70
Euhemerus of Messene, 17; on bees,
107n95; Callimachus’s use of,
90–91; on divinity, 167; on Hera-
cles, 145; on kingship, 43; rationali-
zations of, 36–39; Sacred Register,
37; on Zeus, 37, 90, 107
Euhesperides, renaming of, 182n29
Eumolpidae, 247
Euphemus, gift of clod to, 180, 192, 194,
201n74, 202, 208, 209, 223, 255,
256
Euripides: Helen, 27, 28; Iphigenia in
Tauris, 26
Europa, abduction of, 174
Eurydice (wife of Ptolemy I), 118n125,
137
Eustathius, commentary on Dionysius the
Periegete, 97n68
Festivals: Alexandrian, 153, 155,
167–68, 244–48; of Ammon, 45n78;
effect on public opinion, 248;
Genethlia, 125; of Opet, 225n148,
245; of Osiris, 246n34;
Panathanaea, 64; pharaonic, 45–46,
215, 238; Ptolemaia, 245–46; Sed,
215, 238, 246; Thesmophoria,
142n63, 247; of Zeus Basileus, 78
283
Fleur-de-lis, derivation of, 4–5
Folklore, pancultural, 11
Fontenrose, J., 11n23
Footprints, royal, 167
Fragrance, in Egyptian culture, 154–55
Fraser, Peter, 38, 191n49, 243; on hymns
of Callimachus, 78
Froidefond, Christian, 21
Gaia: in Hymn to Zeus, 103; in
Theogony, 102–3
Gauls, mutiny against Ptolemy II,
114–15, 117, 119, 139, 165, 228,
254
Genealogy, Greco-Egyptian, 24–26
Genethlia (festival), 125
Genres: encomia, 149, 172; epic,
148n84, 171, 172–73; epinician,
172; performative, 248; socio-
political milieu of, 7, 10
Geographers, Hellenistic, 184n35
Giants (Greek myth), 62; Diodorus on,
63–64; epithets of, 139
Gods: in Dionysius Scytobrachion,
41–42, 43; dying, 89, 90, 106,
246n34; in Pherecydes, 199; prena-
tal activity of, 120; statutes of, 10
Gods, Egyptian: analogies with Eros,
82n27; in cosmic order, 52; dwarf,
134n42; identification with Greek
gods, 7, 8, 20–21; Manetho on, 46;
syncretism of, 50; trinity among, 53
Gods, Greek: in Argonautica, 178n18;
Euhemerus on, 37–38; identification
with Egyptian gods, 7, 8, 20–21;
kinship among, 53
Golden fleece: in Argonautica, 185, 215,
216, 218, 222, 225–26
Goldhill, S., 172n3, 235n183, 256
Gorgon, 133
Government: Egyptian, 28, 29; Isocrates
on, 28; Socrates on, 29
Gow, A. F. S., 123, 125, 126, 135; on
Encomium for Ptolemy, 147n79,
158–59; on purification, 137
Great Mother: cult of, 107, 188, 203–4;
in Dionysius Scytobrachion, 41; in
Phrygia, 106. See also Rhea
Greece: city-states of, 64, 173, 243, 244;
priority over Egypt, 24, 30, 33, 43,
241
Greeks: colonization of Mediterranean,
191; in Egyptian population, 16, 23,
47; immigration to Egypt, 8, 20–23,
240, 241; intermarriage with non-
Greeks, 191–92, 241n14; knowledge
of Demotic, 48; knowledge of Egypt-
284
Greeks (continued)
ian religion, 21; as successors to Per-
sians, 33; unions with barbarians,
174; views of Egypt, 21–32
Greeks, Alexandrian: accommodation by,
16; collective identity of, 251–52;
cultural assimilation by, 7–8, 21; fes-
tivals of, 244–45; heterogeneity of,
242–45; under legal system, 244
Greene, T. M., 256–57
Griffiths, F., 122–23, 227n157
Griffiths, J. Gwyn, 58, 116–17; on Eu-
doxus, 31n32; on floating islands, 58
Hands, severed, 215n118
Hathor: as Io, 25; as Isis, 50, 56; as nurse
of Horus, 117
Hatshepsut (pharaoh), 53–54, 71n152
Hebe, marriage to Heracles, 126–27, 137
Hecataeus of Abdera, 14, 17, 90; Aegyp-
tiaca, 32–36, 199n71, 205; on the af-
terlife, 47; on benefactions, 166;
Dionysus in, 84, 230n166; on divin-
ity, 168–69; on Egyptian religion, 46;
gods in, 37; on Heracles, 145, 146;
on kingship, 33–34, 39, 43, 143–44,
146, 203; on knowledge of Egyptian,
48n90; on Osiris, 38; political debate
in, 18; purpose of, 36; relationship to
Euhemerus, 37n53; on Sesoösis,
35–36, 120n130, 176, 177–78, 196;
Theocritus’s use of, 144; underworld
in, 221; visit to Ramesseum, 44
Hecataeus of Miletus, 22, 23; Apollo-
nius’s use of, 223; originary myths
of, 24–26; phoenix in, 59n120
Heka (god), 214, 219, 225
Helen of Troy: in Egypt, 27–28; paternity
of, 69
Heliopolis, 10n20, 59; Herodotus’s
knowledge of, 44
Helios: and Apollo, 237; in Dionysius
Scytobrachion, 41; identification
with Horus, 42; as Re, 214
Hellenes, identity of, 183, 242, 244
Hellenism: of Alexandria, 243; in
Alexandrian poetry, 251
Hellenocentrism, 7
Hellenomemphites, 23, 47, 241; burial
practices of, 221n131
Hephaestus, identification with Ptah, 35,
50, 144
Hera: in Argonautica, 229; birth of, 164;
in Danaus myth, 99; in Homeric
Hymn to Apollo, 118; in Hymn to
Delos, 116; marriage to Zeus, 162,
164, 168, 169
Index
Heracles: as ancestor of Alexander, 70; as
ancestor of Ptolemies, 102, 129,
132, 133, 152; ancestry of, 133; in
Argonautica, 178, 185, 186–87,
195, 212, 235; birth date of, 125;
and Busiris, 26, 131; as civilizer, 62,
145; as culture hero, 145, 248;
death of, 141; in Dionysius Scyto-
brachion, 40, 145–46, 175; divinity
of, 131, 136; Egyptian affiliations
of, 62n126, 130–31, 146; in Eleusin-
ian mysteries, 142; Euhemerus on,
145; and golden bowl, 131, 132,
136, 221; Hecataeus on, 145, 146;
humanity of, 141, 142; immortality
of, 141, 142, 145, 146, 166, 186;
labors of, 137, 141, 221; marriage
to Hebe, 126–27, 137; as model
prince, 130, 143n68, 144, 146; as
monster-slayer, 178, 185, 186, 187,
210; Near Eastern affiliations of,
130, 131; paternity of, 69, 129–30,
135, 141; “smiting the foe,” 62,
131, 138
Hermes, 120
Hermes-Thoth, 226n151
Hermippus, 250n43
Herodotus: on birth of Apollo, 114; on
Busiris, 27; Callimachus’s use of,
114; on Chemmis, 57–58, 59;
chronology of, 24n14; cultural as-
similations of, 8, 21; on cultural pri-
ority, 24, 30; on Dionysus, 83n28;
on Egyptian culture, 20; on Egyptian
kings, 27–28; on festivals, 46; on
Helen, 27; on Heracles, 130–31; on
Horus, 59; knowledge of Egypt, 6,
44–48; knowledge of monuments,
48; knowledge of priesthood, 44,
46; on the Nile, 97; on Perseus,
25–26; on Persian war, 174; on
Sesostris, 34, 176–77, 196; sources
of, 44n71; visit to Egypt, 21, 239n4
Hesiod: Alexandrian poets’ use of, 252;
Eros in, 81, 82n27; imitators of, 87;
kingship in, 255. Works: Catalogue
of Women, 25, 99; Theogony: —,
Callimachus’s use of, 76, 85–87, 89,
95, 102–14, 127, 146, 149, 158,
208, 252, 253; —, contest with Ty-
phon in, 21; —, kingship in, 86; —,
Muses in, 85, 87, 88, 112; —, Near
Eastern elements in, 109; —, ompha-
los in, 103; —, proem of, 85; —,
Theocritus’s use of, 158, 159, 253;
—, Typhoeus in, 109–10, 111; —,
Zeus in, 86; Works and Days, 111
Index
Hesperides (Argonautica), 186–87, 194
Hieroglyphic writing, 176n12; bees in,
1–3; Egyptians’ knowledge of, 48;
European interest in, 2; Ptolemies’
use of, 13, 14
Hill, primeval, 58; in Argonautica, 209;
in Egyptian cosmogony, 100–101; in
Hymn to Zeus, 91, 100; pyramids
as, 58; sunrise on, 234
Hipponax, 254
Homer: Alexandrian poets’ use of, 256;
Callimachus’s use of, 76, 95, 252,
253–54; heroic behavior in, 252;
Theocritus’s use of, 163; tragedians’
use of, 251; Works: Iliad, 80, 252;
Odyssey: Argonauts in, 173n5; —,
Callimachus’s use of, 95, 233n177;
—, marriage in, 155; —, narrative
reality of, 185n37; —, romantic en-
counters in, 185, 192; —, supernatu-
ral light in, 136; —, Theocritus’s use
of, 151
Homeric Hymn to Apollo: and Hymn to
Delos, 115, 116; Pytho in, 118, 165;
Theocritus’s use of, 152, 158, 164
Homeric Hymn to Demeter, 136; Eleusin-
ian mysteries in, 141–42; use in Her-
acliscus, 124, 127, 140–41, 146
Homeric Hymn to Dionysus, 80, 82–84
Homonoia, 164, 178; in Argonautica,
211n97
Horapollo, 2, 3, 3n7, 140
Hornung, Eric: on Apophis, 217; on
maat, 51–52, 120; on pleonasm, 50;
on voyage of Re, 220, 234
Horus: and the Amazons, 41; attack of
serpents on, 126n17; beauty of,
212–13; birth of, 98; birthplace of,
59, 100; in Book of the Dead, 213;
on cippi, 134, 136; defeat of
Apophis, 119; defeat of serpents,
119, 126n17, 165, 211, plate 3; in
Dionysius Scytobrachion, 42, 175;
Eudoxus on, 31; festivals of, 46;
Golden, 138–39; as good son, 213;
Herodotus on, 59; iconography of,
55; identification with Apollo, 7, 20,
104, 114, 209, 236, 237; identifica-
tion with Helios, 42; identification
with Perseus, 26, 56n109; as morn-
ing star, 216n119; nurses of, 116; as
order, 51; pharaohs as, 53; revival
of, 134–35; struggle with Seth, 55,
56; succession of, 42
Horus falcon, 159
Horus-in-Chemmis, 107; and Apollo, 58,
104, 114; birth of, 117
285
Horus-the-Child: birth of, 237; and birth
of Zeus, 104–5; Callimachus’s famil-
iarity with, 102; and Eros, 82n27; as
Harpocrates, 15; pharaohs as, 55,
104, 156, 236; Ptolemies’ use of,
237
H’r nbw (Golden Horus), 138
Hu (god), 219, 225
Human life, stages of, 219
Human sacrifice, 27, 62, 138, 227
Humor, in court poetry, 75, 170
Hunter, Richard, 140n49, 147n82,
154n95, 161, 173n5; on new order,
209
Hymns: and encomia, 148n82; from Na-
pata, 120; of Philae, 46, 56, 101,
112n114, 120; solar, 60, 234
Hypsipyle (Argonautica), 186, 215n117
Inachus, myth of, 25n17
Insemination, divine, 26, 128
Intermarriage: with non-Greeks, 191–92;
in Cyrene, 191n49; Greek and
Egyptian, 241n11
Io: identification with Isis, 25, 211n101;
myth of, 8–9, 25, 26, 174
Iphicles, 133
Irrigation: of Arcadia, 91, 95–98, 116,
164, 200, 203; in Argonautica, 203;
of Argos, 25, 96–102; introduction
of, 99
Isis: as consort of Sarapis, 15; cults of, 4,
15n41; and Delos myth, 116; Eu-
doxus on, 31; festivals of, 46; in
flooding of Nile, 101; identification
with Arsinoe II, 153n93, 155;
identification with Demeter, 7; iden-
tification with Hathor, 50, 56; iden-
tification with Io, 25, 211n101;
identification with Selene, 42; magic
of, 218; and Osiris, 56, 57, 155,
168; temples of, 45; tricking of Seth,
214
Islands: Calypso’s, 96, 126, 233n177;
Circe’s, 204, 222, 230; emerging,
209, 219, 223, 224, 234–35, 237,
255; floating, 57–58, 115–16,
117–18; primeval, 126n17; speak-
ing, 165. See also Anaphe; Asteria;
Cos; Thera
Isocrates, 21, 22, 23, 27; advice to kings,
31; Busiris, 28–30, 38; encomia of,
147, 148; Evagoras, 31n32;
Nicocles, 31n32
Jason (Argonautica), 184, 191; as civi-
lizer, 212; cloak of, 200–202,
286
Jason (Argonautia) (continued)
211n101, 215n117; encounter with
serpent, 216–17, 225; as ephebe,
227; as Horus, 212; and Lemnian
women, 185, 186; marriage to
Medea, 192, 224, 230, 231; as
model for kingship, 212, 214–15;
murder of Apsyrtus, 215–16, 218,
222, 226–29, 230; mutilation of Ap-
syrtus, 193, 216n118, 229; as other,
193, 216, 227; in Pindar, 179, 201,
212n104; as product of culture,
201–2; sandal of, 196–97, 198;
sewing of dragons’ teeth, 205, 206,
215; on vase painting, 174n6
Jews, Alexandrian, 243n18, 244
Jomard, Edmé: Déscription de l’Égypte,
1, 2
Katasterism, 116n121
Kemp, Barry, 55
Keraunus (son of Ptolemy I), 163
Kingship: Alexander’s view of, 14–15; in
Alexandrian poetry, 11, 12, 16;
Dionysius Scytobrachion on, 42; in
Encomium for Ptolemy, 17–18, 123,
129, 144–45, 160–61, 165; Euhe-
merus on, 43; Hecataeus on, 33–34,
39, 43, 143–44, 146, 203; Hellenis-
tic, 32; in Heracliscus, 17, 18, 123,
127, 129; in Hymn to Delos, 117,
147; in Hymn to Zeus, 17, 18, 79,
92, 127, 200; just, 111–12;
Ptolemies’ view of, 15; role of god-
desses in, 214; Theocritus on, 123,
127, 200
Kingship, divine: in Alexander Romance,
67; in Alexandrian poetry, 12; Euhe-
merus on, 38–39; falcon symbolism
of, 159; rituals of, 45, 57, 225n148
Kingship, Greek: conferral of benefits in,
161; and cosmogony, 86; and
Danaid myth, 26; Egyptian model
for, 43; in Hesiod, 86, 255; limits of,
36; philosophers on, 31–32
Kingship, pharaonic: ceremonies of, 52;
in Encomium for Ptolemy, 161; in
Euripides, 28; falcon symbolism of,
159; festivals of, 45–46; Greek as-
similation of, 64; Hecataeus on,
33–34, 39; iconography of, 51; ide-
ology of, 9, 36, 49–64, 109, 113;
Jason as type of, 214–15; legitimacy
in, 17, 54–55, 155–56; as model for
Greeks, 43; priesthood’s promotion
of, 35; prophecies concerning, 35;
prosperity under, 100, 161; relation-
Index
ship to cosmos, 51; renewal festivals
of, 215, 238, 246; succession in,
129; sunrise in, 256; symbolism of,
1, 2; theocracy in, 12. See also
Pharaohs
Kingship, Ptolemaic, xi; continuity with
past, 68; in Encomium for Ptolemy,
160–61; ideological construction of,
9; legitimacy of, 11; prosperity
under, 159; Theocritus on, 123, 127,
144–45, 166
Koenen, Ludwig, xi, 7n14, 139n55,
239n6; on Heracliscus, 102, 125,
138, 142; on Hymn to Delos,
114n117
Lactantius, 37
“Lamentations of Isis,” 56
Lemnian women, 185, 186, 192
Leto: in Herodotus, 114, 117; in Hymn
to Delos, 115; identification with
Wedjoyet, 117
Letter to Aristeas, 250
Libya: Argonauts in, 186, 223, 231; clod
of earth from, 180, 192, 194, 202,
208, 209, 223; connection with
Colchis, 175n8; as enemy of Egypt,
182n28; Greek idea of, 181–82; in
Pindar, 179–80
Light, supernatural, 136, 141
Literature, Egyptian: satirical elements in,
67
Literature, Greek: discourse on Egypt in,
21; satire in, 68. See also Genres
Lloyd, A. B., 22n4, 58n116
Louis XII (king of France), bee symbol-
ism of, 3–4, 5
Maat, 51–52; in defeat of Apophis, 60;
maintenance of, 53; pharaohs’ main-
tenance of, 61, 100, 138, 166; strug-
gle with chaos, 199, 255
Magas (brother of Ptolemy II), 180n22,
182
Magic: barbarian, 174; in Egyptian
thought, 214; Medea’s, 197, 217,
218, 225; of Thetis, 212n103
Mammisi (temples). See Birth shrines
Manetho (priest), 14, 46; Greek audience
of, 50n96; on human sacrifice, 138;
inclusion in Library, 250n43
Marriage: in Argonautica, 200; brother-
sister, 16, 155, 168, 169, 170, 242;
erotic reciprocity in, 155; between
Greeks and non-Greeks, 191–92,
241n99
Maschalismos, ritual of, 227
Index
Medea: Dionysius Scytobrachion on, 40,
193n51; murder of Apsyrtus, 227; in
Pindar, 179
Medea (Argonautica), 184, 191; ancestry
of, 235; as barbarian, 193–94; de-
feat of Talos, 232; magic of, 197,
217, 218, 225, 228; marriage to
Jason, 192, 224, 230, 231; prophecy
of, 181
Medinet Habu, 63
Meigma, 205
Meliae, Dictaean, 106
Melissae (bee maidens), 107
Melqart (god), 131
Memphis: Alexander the Great at,
65n135, 66, 245; Apis cults of, 245;
as center of cult, 239; Ptolemy I at,
13, 240, 245
Memphite Theology, 51n99
Mendes, ram cult of, 153n93
Mendes stele, 15–16, 213n109
Menelaus, 27, 28
Mercenaries, 251
Merkelbach, R., 7n14, 48n88, 70n149
Merneptah, Israel stele of, 161
Metaneira, 136, 140, 141
Metternich Stelae, plate 3
Milesian tales, 71
Mineur, W. H., 114n117, 115
Minos, 38; tomb of, 90
Minotaur, 119
Monarchs, French: use of bee symbolism,
3–4, 5
Monuments, Egyptian: Greek visitors to,
44–45; hieroglyphics on, 48; maat
and, 166n129; of the Ptolemies, 16,
45, 57, 240n10, 243
Moreau, A., 173n5, 196n57, 197
Mossynoeci (Argonautica), 175
Mt. Ida (Crete), 92–93, 94
Mt. Lycaeon (Arcadia), 93, 94
Mummification, Herodotus on, 47
Murray, O., 36, 143, 145n76, 160n119
Muses: knowledge of truth, 86; in
Theogony, 85, 87, 88, 112
Museum, Alexandrian, 12
Mutilation, ritual, 228–29
Myths: foundation, 8, 45, 179n21; quest,
173; reception of, 58, 59; Theocri-
tus’s handling of, 122
Myths, Egyptian: belief systems in, 49;
foundation, 45; Greeks’ use of, 43,
50; serpents in, 134–35, 210; succes-
sion in, 64. See also Cosmogony,
Egyptian
Myths, Greek: assimilation of Apis into,
8–9; of emergence, 86, 114; origi-
287
nary, 24–26, 209; resemblance to
Egyptian myths, 7; variants in,
49–50. See also Aition; Cosmogony,
Greek
Napoleon, royal insignia of, 1, 2–3, 4, 5
Narmer Palette, 61
Natural philosophy, Greek, 46
Naucratis, Egyptian trade at, 21
Naucratis stele, of Nectanebo I, 213, 214
Nectanebo (general), 14
Nectanebo I (pharaoh), 13n30; Naucratis
stele of, 213, 214
Nectanebo II (pharaoh): in Alexander
Romance, 64n133, 65–68, 71; and
Eudoxus, 30; exile of, 68; as falcon-
god, 65, 66n136; as father of
Alexander, 8, 14n34; as magician,
66, 71
Neda (nymph), 92, 93, 96, 103
Neikos, and philia, 197, 200, 202, 205,
209, 219, 255
Neith (goddess), 214; identification with
Athena, 51; temple of, 107n98
New Kingdom: capitals of, 239; religious
texts of, 220
Nigidius Figulus, 215n115
Nile: Herodotus on, 97; inundation of,
25, 97–98, 100, 116, 117, 159
Niobe, children of, 117, 118
Non-Greeks: cognitive response to, 184;
Greek encounters with, 183–237; in-
termarriage with Greeks, 191–92;
sacrifice of, 62, 227. See also Barbar-
ians
North Africa, Greek colonization of,
182, 202, 223
Nysa, as birthplace of Dionysus, 83, 84
Obsomer, C., 48n90
Oedipus, 49–50; and sphinx’s riddle,
219n126
Ogdoad (cosmic deities), 56
Old Kingdom, Pyramid Texts of, 55, 220
Olympias, in Alexander Romance, 64,
65, 66, 67
Omphaloi, geographic, 93–94; in Hymn
to Zeus, 103–4, 106; in Theogony,
103
Opet, festival of, 225n148, 245
Ophion, 199; Callimachus on, 199n67
Ophioneus, 110n104, 199, 201
Orestes, 227
Orion (constellation), 126
Orpheus (Argonautica), 197–99, 201,
210
Orphic theology, 81, 106
288
Osiris: boat of, 222; as dying god, 89;
Eudoxus on, 31; festivals of, 46,
246n34; as god of regeneration,
213n105; identification of Dionysus
with, 7, 15, 84, 230, 245–46; and
Isis, 56, 57, 168; judgment before,
48; as Lord of the Dead, 230; as
model of kingship, 33, 34; murder
of, 42; mutilation of, 229n164; sac-
rifices to, 62; struggle with Seth, 63;
tombs of, 113; union of sun with,
230
Osorkon, 156; victory stele of, 154n99,
213, 216n119
Ouranids, defeat of, 109–10
Ouranioi (primal gods), 37, 54, 169
Panathenaea (festival), 64
Panchaea (imaginary island), 37, 107n95
Papremis, mysteries at, 56
Paul, Epistle to Titus, 83n28
Pausanius, 93, 94, 97; on Ptolemy I,
129n25; on Rhea’s cave, 101n85
Pelagus (king), 26
Perseus, 25; ancestor of Alexander, 70;
conception of, 128; identification
with Horus, 26, 56n109; as precur-
sor of Heracles, 133; in Simonides,
133, 135; veneration in Achmim, 26,
133
Persians: in Alexander’s army, 15n39;
Greeks as successors to, 33; restora-
tion of temples by, 13n30; war with,
174
Pharaohs: accountability of, 33, 34; as
antipalon huperteros, 138–39; birth
stories of, 53–54, 56–57, 67, 130,
141; as bringers of order, 61, 62,
120–21, 138; divine conception of,
52–54, 70; as divine intermediaries,
52–53; falcon symbolism of, 159;
footprint of, 167; as Horus-the-
Child, 55, 104, 156; iconography of,
61–62; likeness to divine father,
155–56; maintenance of maat, 61,
100, 138, 166; monuments of, 166;
renewal festivals of, 215, 238, 246;
as son of Re, 176; tomb building by,
141; as unifiers, 238. See also King-
ship, pharaonic
Pharos (island), 181
Pherecydes of Athens, 205
Pherecydes of Syrus, 40n63, 81, 82;
Apollonius’s use of, 198, 199;
Chronos in, 199n69; theogony of,
110n104, 199–200, 201
Philae: Greek inscriptions at, 44; Greek
Index
visitors to, 45; hymns of, 46, 56,
101, 112n114, 120
Philia, and neikos, 197, 200, 202, 205,
209, 219, 255
Philip of Macedon, in Alexander Ro-
mance, 65, 66, 69, 130, 143
Philitas, 230n167, 248n40
Philosophers, court, 31–32
Phoenix, myth of, 59–60
Pietch, C., 171n1, 178n18
Pindar: Alexandrian poets’ use of, 252;
Apollonius’s use of, 178–80, 181,
195, 208, 223, 224; bees in,
108n101; Callimachus’s use of, 115;
encomia of, 74; on infant Heracles,
124, 132, 140; Jason in, 179, 201,
212n104; Libya in, 179–80; on mar-
riage of Heracles, 126n18; Medea
in, 179; Theocritus’s use of, 124; on
Typhoeus, 102, 134
Pithom stele, 14, 236n185
Plato: advice to kings, 31; construction of
Egypt, 21, 22, 23, 176n12; on cul-
tural priority, 24, 33n38; on Egypt
government, 28, 29; on Eros, 81; idea
of justice, 52; influence of Eudoxus
on, 24n14, 30n29, 31; philosopher-
kings of, 29; on Zeus, 97
Pleonasm, in Egyptian myth, 50
Plutarch: on Alexandria, 181n26; on
Eros, 82n27; On Isis and Osiris,
55–56; Life of Alexander, 69, 70;
The Obsolescence of Oracles, 88; on
Osiris, 222; use of Eudoxus, 31
Poetry, Alexandrian: cross-cultural read-
ings in, 9–12; kingship in, 11, 12,
17; modern reception of, 5–6; past
and present in, 252, 256, 257; per-
formative traditions of, 250; socio-
political aspects of, 19
Poetry, Hellenistic: aition in, 88, 187; en-
comia, 148n84; at symposia, 77n7
Poets, Alexandrian: access to Egyptian
ideas, 10n19; audience of, 140; de-
piction of Hellenic world, 251; dis-
cursive matrices of, 9; establishment
of cultural norms, 252; humor of,
170; as image makers, 12, 123, 140,
170, 249; knowledge of Egypt, 20;
realism of, 10n20, 256n56; referen-
tiality of, 76n4; use of Homer, 256
Polydeuces (Argonautica), 216n119
Poseidippus, 181–82
Poseidon, 162–63; anger at Inachos,
117n124
Postcolonial discourse, 18. See also Cop-
resence
Index
Pratt, M. L., 184, 191, 195
Priesthood, Egyptian: Eudoxos on,
30–31; Herodotus’s knowledge of,
44, 46; knowledge of Greek,
69n145; promotion of kingship, 35;
under Ptolemies, 12–13; Saite, 31
Priority, cultural, 24, 33, 183, 241
“Prophecy of Neferti,” 99–100
Prosperity: under just rulers, 111–12;
under pharaohs, 100, 161
Proteus, 27, 28, 101–2, 181
Psammetichus I (pharaoh), 23
Ptah, identification with Hephaestus, 35,
50, 144
Ptolemaia (festival), 245–46
Ptolemais (daughter of Ptolemy), 14n34
Ptolemies: accommodation to Egyptian
forms, 13–14, 240, 242; assimilation
of Egyptian culture, 16; brother-
sister marriages of, 170, 242; build-
ing programs of, 16; burial practices
of, 154n95; creativity under, 252;
cults of, 15–16, 38, 45, 152n91,
162, 247; deployment of past, 251;
divine ancestry of, 129, 132, 133,
152; dual role of, 16; eagle symbol-
ism of, 129, 158–59; Egyptians
under, 244; ethnic identity under,
242n15; fictive past for, 173, 182,
257; heterogeneity under, 73,
242–45, 249–50; Homeric values
under, 253; identification with
Horus, 58, 104, 139n53, 237; legal
system of, 243–44; literary patron-
age by, 249; Lower Egypt under,
239; meritocracy under, 243; patron-
age by, 123, 249; religious cere-
monies of, 45; restoration of tem-
ples, 13; royal titles of, 138, 140,
238n1; temple building by, 16, 45,
57, 243; tutors of, 248n40; use of
foundation stories, 188; use of hi-
eroglyphs, 13, 14
Ptolemy I Soter: administrative structure
of, 12, 13, 14; benefactions of, 167;
cartouche of, plate 1; cult of Sarapis
under, 15; cult of Theoi Soteres,
152n91; divine protection for, 129,
158; Egyptian troops of, 240n7; in
Encomium for Ptolemy, 151, 152,
156, 157, 164; history of Alexander,
248; immortality of, 156, 157, 170;
kingship under, 75; in Memphis, 13,
240, 245; paternity of, 129n25; view
of kingship, 15
Ptolemy II Philadelphus: arete of, 150;
birth on Cos, 17, 97, 114, 116, 119,
289
127, 158, 165; coregency of, 77, 78,
102, 125, 127; in Encomium for
Ptolemy, 157–63; expansionist poli-
cies of, 162; festivals of, 245; Hor-
nub title of, 138–40; in Hymn to
Zeus, 78, 79, 105, 108, 111–14,
148–51, 204; immortality of, 114,
157, 167; kingship under, 75; legiti-
macy of, 156; marriage to Arsinoe,
126, 147, 162, 163, 168; on Mendes
stele, 213n109; military success of,
157–58; mutiny of Gauls against,
114–15, 117, 119, 139, 165, 228,
254; parents of, 151, 155; pharaonic
ideology of, 14; Sarapis cult under,
15–16; succession to throne, 109,
163; Theoi Soteres cult of, 162; use
of Horus title, 236n185; wealth of,
159, 161
Ptolemy III Euergetes: cult of Theoi
adelphoi, 45; throne names of, 155
Ptolemy IV Philopator, 140, 155–56
Ptolemy V Epiphanes, 14n33, 156; car-
touche of, plate 2
Pyramids: Herodotus’s visit to, 44; as
primeval hills, 59
Pyramid Texts, 55, 220
Pyrrhiche (dance), 203
Pytheas of Marseilles, 38n55, 184n35
Pytho: Apollo’s defeat of, 117, 118, 119;
as chaos, 118, 165; as Typhoeus,
118n125
Ramesses II, 34; Horus falcon of,
159n114
Ramesses III, funerary temple of,
215n118
Ramesseum, 63; Hecateus’s visit to, 44
Raphia, battle of, 239n5, 240n7
Re: and Ammon, 50; and Apophis, 219;
birth of, 234; cattle of, 131; celestial
boat of, 60, plate 5; Helios as, 214;
hieroglyphs of, 59; night voyage of,
131, 218–37. See also Amun (Egypt-
ian)
Red hair, in Egyptian myth, 62
Religion, Egyptian: cosmos in, 51–52;
and Greek natural philosophy, 46;
Greeks’ familiarity with, 21. See also
Cosmology, Egyptian
Rhacotis (Alexandria), 13
Rhea: cave of, 101n85; in Dionysius Scy-
tobrachion, 41, 43; in Encomium
for Ptolemy, 162, 163; in Hymn to
Zeus, 75, 91–92, 95, 96, 97, 103,
105, 163–64; in Theogony, 102. See
also Great Mother
290
Rhuephenie (flowing wealth), 111
Ritner, R., 138n48, 214, 229n164
Romance, in travel literature, 184–85
Rosetta stone, 14n33
Rusten, Jeffrey S., 39; on Argonauts,
40n63; on Dionysius Scytobrachion,
42
Sais (Egypt), 24
Sanctuaries, birth in, 100, 101
Sarapis: cult of, 15–16, 142, 247; tem-
ples of, 45
Satire, in Greek literature, 68
Satrap decree (311 b.c.e.), 13, 144n70
Sed (festival), 215, 238, 246
Selden, D., 9n18; on Arsinoe II, 153n93;
on Callimachus, 77n6; on constella-
tions, 126n17; on Horus, 139n53
Semele, 82, 83
Septuagint, in Library, 250n43
Serpents: in Argonautica, 187, 194,
210–12, 216–17, 225, 231;
Colchian, 216–17; in Egyptian
myth, 134–35; Heracles’ throttling
of, 123, 127, 132–42, 165, 210,
211n100; Horus’s defeat of, 119,
126n17, 165, 211; in Hymn to
Delos, 118; in Hymn to Zeus, 134;
and Seth, 102, 134, 138, 210; as
symbols of regeneration, 220; as
time, 220. See also Apophis; Pytho
Sesoösis, 34–36; and Alexander, 178,
180; in Argonautica, 177, 189–90,
207; city-founding by, 190, 207,
214, 226; education of, 143, 144;
generosity of, 177; Hecataeus on,
35–36, 120n130, 176, 177–78, 196;
Herodotus on, 34, 176–77, 196; as
model of kingship, 160–61; prophe-
cies concerning, 144; Syrian stele of,
48; veteran settlements of, 235. See
also Sesostris III (pharaoh)
Sesostris III (pharaoh), 156; Semna stele
of, 48–49
Seth: and Apollo, 11n23; association
with Typhon, 62, 104, 138, 210; as
bull, 228; as chaos, 51, 119; foreleg
of, 228; identification with Ty-
phoeus, 110; Isis’s tricking of, 214;
murder of Osiris, 42; and night voy-
age of Re, 228–29; ritual mutilation
of, 228–29; serpents of, 102, 134,
138, 210; struggle with Horus, 55,
56; titles of, 139
Sia (god), 219, 225
Simias of Rhodes, 81
Simonides, 79; on Perseus, 133, 135
Index
Skeptics, 32
“Smiting the foe,” 61, 139–40; in
Diodorus, 62–63; by Heracles, 131,
138; iconography of, 63
Snakebite, 134, 135
Solar hymns, 60, 234
Soldiers, Greek, 47; in Alexandria, 251
Sophocles, 232n173; Colchian Women,
174n6
Sphinx, riddle of, 219n126
Spontaneous generation, 205–6
Statues, Egyptian, 23. See also Monu-
ments, Egyptian
Stelae: inscriptions on, 48; Mendes,
15–16, 213n109; of Merneptah,
161; Metternich, plate 3; of
Nectanebo I, 213, 214; of Osorkon,
154n99, 213, 216n119; Pithom, 14,
236n185; of Sesoösis, 48; of
Sesostris III, 48–49
Stesichorus, Geryoneis, 131
Strabo: on Euhemerus, 38n55; on He-
liopolis, 10n20
Styx (river), 96
Sun god. See Ammon-Re; Re
Syncretism: in cults, 8, 247; in Egyptian
cosmogony, 51
Tacitus, 142
“Tale of the Eloquent Peasant,” 100n79
Talos (bronze giant), 217n123, 223,
224n144; as chthonic creature, 232;
destruction of, 225; in Sophocles,
232n173
Tegeates (Arcadians), 93
Teiresias, in Heracliscus, 123, 127, 137,
139n54, 144, 165
Temples, Egyptian: Greek visitors to,
44–45; Ptolemaic, 16, 45, 57, 243,
247n38; restoration of, 13; revenue
for, 36n47; rituals of, 45–46; wealth
of, 246
Thebes (Egypt): aition of, 189n43, 190;
epithets of, 206–7, 208
Thebes (Greece): as birth place of Diony-
sus, 83; building of, 200; epithets of,
206–7, 208
Thenae (Arcadia and Crete), 93, 103
Theocracy, pharaonic, 12, 52; ideology
of, 17
Theocritus: court poetry of, 122, 125, 127,
170, 171, 255; Egyptian themes of, 8,
127, 255; as encomiast, 257; handling
of myth, 122; heroic figures of, 255;
intertextual elements of, 135, 169;
kissybion of, 128, 253; Ptolemaic
kingship in, 123, 127, 166; royal ben-
Index
eficium for, 162; settings of, 122;
socio-political context of, xi, 169–70,
255. Works: Adoniazusae, 167–68;
Encomium for Ptolemy, 147–70, 255;
—, Achilles in, 157, 158, 164; —,
Alexander in, 152, 156, 157, 164; —,
Berenice I in, 152–53; —, composi-
tion of, 123, 147, 164; —, Cos in,
158, 159, 162; —, Diomedes in, 157,
158; —, form of, 147; —, Homeric
language of, 151; —, and Hymn to
Delos, 147, 164–65; —, and Hymn to
Zeus, 148; —, kingship in, 17–18,
123, 129, 144–45, 160–61, 165; —,
marriage of Zeus and Hera in, 162,
168–69; —, mythic elements in, 150;
—, political debate in, 18, 165; —,
Ptolemy I in, 151, 152, 156, 157,
164; —, Ptolemy II in, 157–63; —,
Rhea in, 162, 163; —, ruler cult in,
166; —, use of Hecataeus in, 144; —,
use of Homeric Hymn to Apollo in,
152, 158, 164; —, use of Homer in,
163; —, use of Theogony in, 158,
159, 253; —, Zeus in, 148–51; Hera-
cliscus, 122, 123–46, 257; —, Al-
cmena in, 128–29, 130, 133, 135,
137, 141, 144, 156, 157; —, Amphit-
ryon in, 128, 134, 135, 141, 156,
157; —, composition of, 123,
125–27; —, constellations in, 126; —,
as court poetry, 125, 143; —, domes-
tic elements in, 128; —, education of
Heracles in, 123, 137, 142–45, 165;
—, and Encomium for Ptolemy, 165;
—, ending of, 124; —, kingship in,
17, 18, 123, 127, 129; —, perfor-
mance of, 124–25; —, Ptolemy II in,
123–32; —, purification in, 137; —,
supernatural light in, 136; —, Teire-
sias’s prophecy in, 123, 127, 137,
139n54, 144, 145, 165; —, throttling
of snakes in, 102, 123, 127, 132–42,
165; —, use of Homeric Hymn to
Demeter in, 124, 127, 140, 146; —,
use of Pindar in, 124, 132, 140; Idyll
15, 243, 246–47, 255; Idyll 17,
78–79
Theogamy, Egyptian, 56–57, 130
Theogeniture, 168n33
Theogony, Greek: of Epimenides, 88–89;
of Euhemerus, 37; and kingship, 86;
Orphic, 82
Theoi adelphoi cult, 39; introduction of,
45
Theoi Soteres cult, 152n91, 162
Thera (island), 209-10, 223, 255
291
Theseus, 119; and Ariadne, 192n50
Thesmophoria (festival), 142n63, 247
Thetis, 154; magic of, 212n103
Thompson, Dorothy, 7n14, 13n28,
241–42, 244
Thonis (priest), 27, 28
Timaeus, 230n167
Timbarini (Argonautica), 175
Timotheus, 47n86, 142
Titans: defeat of, 109–10, 119; in Diony-
sius Scytobrachion, 41
Tityos, Apollo’s slaying of, 211n101
Travel writing, 184–85
Triton, in Argonautica, 194, 207, 208
Triton (river), 208
Trojan War, 27–28, 182
Truth-telling, and lying, 85–86, 113–14
Typhaon: in Homeric Hymn to Apollo,
118; Zeus’s defeat of, 216. See also
Typhoeus; Typhon
Typhoeus: identification with Seth, 110;
Pindar on, 102, 134; Pytho as,
118n125; Zeus’s defeat of, 109–10,
111
Typhon: association with Seth, 62, 104,
138, 210, 216; epithets of, 139; in
Hesiod, 11n23
Typhonians, burning of, 139n55
Tyranny, association of Egypt with, 26,
29
Underworld, Egyptian, 18; Greek knowl-
edge of, 221; Lake of Fire in, 229,
231; maps of, 226
Underworld books, Egyptian, 216, 217;
Apollonius’s use of, 223, 225; voy-
age of Re in, 220. See also Book of
the Dead
Uranus: castration of, 106; in Dionysius
Scytobrachion, 41
Urban VIII (pope), use of bee symbolism,
3
Ursa Major (constellation), 126, 228
Vase painting: Busiris in, 27; Eros in, 81;
Heracles on, 62, 131, 132; Jason on,
174n6
Vasunia, P., 21, 26n20
Vergil: bee symbolism of, 3n5, 4; on
Carthage, 182; epic form of, 171,
172; romantic encounters in, 185,
191
Wennefer (scribe), 14
West, M. L., 37, 111n113, 130; on Cre-
tan Zeus, 89; on Epimenides, 88n40;
on solar journey, 221
292
Wisdom literature, Egyptian, 31n32
Witchcraft, in Thessaly, 197
Zephyrion, temple of Arsinoe at, 181
Zeus: accession to throne, 113, 163; in
Argonautica, 178n18, 200; birth-
place of, 79, 80, 81, 84, 91–96,
103, 108; contest with Typhon (Ty-
phoeus), 21, 110; as culture hero,
91, 248; defeat of Titans, 109–10;
in Dionysius Scytobrachion, 42,
97n66; as dying god, 90, 91, 106;
eagle of, 158–59; in Encomium for
Ptolemy, 148–51; essena, 107, 108;
Euhemerus on, 37, 90, 107; folk et-
ymology of, 97; growth to man-
hood, 105, 106, 108; and Horus-
Index
the-Child, 104–5; humanity of,
105; Idaean, 89; immortality of, 90;
kingship of, 17, 18, 79, 92, 110,
111, 127, 200, 213; in Lycophron,
199n67; marriage to Hera, 162,
164, 168, 169; Near Eastern ana-
logues of, 105, 107; and
Ophioneus, 110n104; in Pherecy-
des, 199; progeny of, 168; as
Ptolemy II, 105; in Theogony, 86;
tomb of, 89, 90, 91, 112; universal-
ity of, 95; as vegetation spirit, 91,
106. See also Callimachus, Hymn to
Zeus
Zeus Ammon, 84, 181; as father of
Alexander the Great, 130
Zeus Basileus, festival of, 78
HELLENISTIC CULTURE AND SOCIETY
General Editors: Anthony W. Bulloch, Erich S. Gruen, A. A. Long, and
Andrew F. Stewart

I. Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hel-

lenistic Age, by Peter Green
II. Hellenism in the East: The Interaction of Greek and Non-
Greek Civilizations from Syria to Central Asia after
Alexander, edited by Am{ea}lie Kuhrt and Susan Sherwin-
White
III. The Question of “Eclecticism”: Studies in Later Greek
Philosophy, edited by J. M. Dillon and A. A. Long
IV. Antigonos the One-Eyed and the Creation of the Hellenis-
tic State, by Richard A. Billows
V. A History of Macedonia, by R. Malcolm Errington, trans-
lated by Catherine Errington
VI. Attic Letter-Cutters of 229 to 86 b.c., by Stephen V. Tracy
VII. The Vanished Library: A Wonder of the Ancient World, by
Luciano Canfora
VIII. Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind, by Julia Annas
IX. Hellenistic History and Culture, edited by Peter Green
X. The Best of the Argonauts: The Redefinition of the Epic
Hero in Book One of Apollonius’ Argonautica, by James J.
Clauss
XI. Faces of Power: Alexander’s Image and Hellenistic Politics,
by Andrew Stewart
XII. Images and Ideologies: Self-definition in the Hellenistic
World, edited by A. W. Bulloch, E. S. Gruen, A. A. Long,
and A. Stewart
XIII. From Samarkhand to Sardis: A New Approach to the Se-
leucid Empire, by Susan Sherwin-White and Amélie
Kuhrt
XIV. Regionalism and Change in the Economy of Independent
Delos, 314-167 b.c., by Gary Reger
XV. Hegemony to Empire: The Development of the Roman Im-
perium in the East from 148 to 62 b.c., by Robert Kallet-
Marx
XVI. Moral Vision in The Histories of Polybius, by Arthur M.
Eckstein
XVII. The Hellenistic Settlements in Europe, the Islands, and
Asia Minor, by Getzel M. Cohen
XVIII. Interstate Arbitrations in the Greek World, 337–90 b.c.,
by Sheila L. Ager
 XIX. Theocritus’s Urban Mimes: Mobility, Gender, and Patron-
age, by Joan B. Burton
XX. Athenian Democracy in Transition: Attic Letter-Cutters of
340 to 290 b.c., by Stephen V. Tracy
XXI. Pseudo-Hecataeus, “On the Jews”: Legitimizing the Jewish
Diaspora, by Bezalel Bar-Kochva
XXII. Asylia: Territorial Inviolability in the Hellenistic World,
by Kent J. Rigsby
XXIII. The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its
Legacy, edited by R. Bracht Branham and Marie-Odile
Goulet-Cazé
XXIV. The Politics of Plunder: Aitolians and Their Koinon in the
Early Hellenistic Era, 279–217 b.c., by Joseph B. Scholten
XXV. The Argonautika, by Apollonios Rhodios, translated, with
introduction, commentary, and glossary, by Peter Green
XXVI. Hellenistic Constructs: Essays in Culture, History, and
Historiography, edited by Paul Cartledge, Peter Garnsey,
and Erich Gruen
XXVII. Josephus’s Interpretation of the Bible, by Louis H. Feld-
man
XXVIII. Poetic Garlands: Hellenistic Epigrams in Context, by
Kathryn J. Gutzwiller
XXIX. Religion in Hellenistic Athens, by Jon D. Mikalson
XXX. Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradi-
tion, by Erich S. Gruen
XXXI. The Beginnings of Jewishness, by Shaye D. Cohen
XXXII. Thundering Zeus: The Making of Hellenistic Bactria, by
Frank L. Holt
XXXIII. Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora from Alexander to
Trajan (323 bce–117 ce), by John M. G. Barclay
XXXIV. From Pergamon to Sperlonga: Sculpture and Context, ed-
ited by Nancy T. de Grummond and Brunilde Sismondo
Ridgway
XXXV. Polyeideia: The Iambi of Callimachus and the Archaic
Iambic Tradition, by Benjamin Acosta-Hughes
XXXVI. Stoic Studies, by A. A. Long
XXXVII. Seeing Double: Intercultural Poetics in Ptolemaic Alexan-
dria, by Susan A. Stephens
XXXVIII. Encomium of Ptolemy Philadelphus, by Theocritus, trans-
lated with an introduction and commentary by Richard
Hunter
XXXIX. The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Re-
form in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, by
Kathy L. Gaca
XL. Cultural Politics in Polybius’ Histories, by Craige Cham-
pion
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