161 For Rome in the sixth century BC see Cornell 1995, 198–214.
162 We are once again indebted to the diligent sleuthing of Polybius, who found the bronze tablets detailing this treaty and two subsequent accords with Carthage in the Treasury of the Aediles at Rome (3.22.3). Polybius even complained of the difficulty of understanding such archaic Latin (3.22–3). For a cogent study of the treaties between Carthage and Rome see Serrati 2006.
163 Polybius 3.22.
164 Cornell 1995, 215–41.
CHAPTER 3: THE REALM OF HERACLES–MELQART: GREEKS AND CARTHAGINIANS IN THE CENTRAL MEDITERRANEAN
1 Dion 1977, 3–82; Malkin 1998, 156–257.
2 Malkin 1998, 156–77; 2002.
3 Particularly in regard to the murder of their leaders. This was true of the southern Italian towns of Croton and Locris (Jourdain-Annequin 1989, 280–81). To spare embarrassment on either side, this was usually explained as being a terrible accident in which the victim had been killed by a mistake while trying to restrain a father-in-law or some other relative who was intent on fighting Heracles or stealing his cattle.
4 Jourdain-Annequin 1989, 311. It was said that the Celts were descended from Heracles after he had slept with the daughter of the king of Galicia and produced a son variously called Galates, Keltus or Kelta, and it was also claimed that he had sired a number of children in Spain and Gaul who had gone on to be kings of various regions there. Such was the popularity of Heracles across Italy that one first-century-BC Greek historian of early Rome wrote, ‘In many other places also in Italy precincts are dedicated to this god [Heracles] and altars erected to him, both in cities and along the highways; and one could scarcely find any place in Italy in which the god is not honoured’ (Dionysius 1.40.6).
5 Jourdain-Annequin 1992, 35; Malkin 1994, 207.
6 Fabre 1981, 274–95.
7 Malkin 2005, 238–9; 2002, 157–8.
8 Jourdain-Annequin 1989, 273–4.
9 In fact a version of the Geryon story certainly existed in Greece by the eighth and seventh centuries BC. Heracles and Geryon both appear in the work of the eighth-century-BC Greek poet Hesiod (Theogony 279.979), and by the seventh century BC a version of the tale was well known enough for vase painters on the island of Samos to use it as a subject. Geryon is portrayed on pottery and texts in a number of different terrifying forms. Stesichorus described him as winged, with six hands and six feet (Stesichorus, Geryoneis Fr. S87). Apollodorus (2.107) describes him as having ‘the bodies of three men joined into one at the belly, but splitting into three again from the flanks and thighs down’.
10 Malkin 1994, 210.
11 For a detailed account of the development of the Heraclean Way, see Knapp 1986. For Heracles as an ever-evolving phenomenon in the West see Fabre 1981, 274–95; Jourdain-Annequin 1989, 221–300.
12 Dionysius 1.35.2–3; Diodorus 4.22.6, 23.1; Pausanias 3.16.4–5. For the links between Stesichorus and Heracles’ Sicilian jaunt, see Malkin 1994, 206–11. The travels of Heracles in Sicily reflected the myriad different experiences and challenges faced by the Greeks who settled on that island. Some scholars even think that the stories of Heracles in Sicily probably contain distant memories of the Bronze Age, when Mycenaean incomers clashed with the local population (Jourdain-Annequin 1989, 282–97). Many of the local leaders whom Heracles fought with could be local indigenous gods. For other possible links between the route of Heracles and the Bronze Age see Martin 1979, who points out that Heracles’ journey through mid and southern Italy mirrors the supposed migration route of the Sicels to the island of Sicily.
13 Herodotus 5.43; Diodorus 4.23.2–3; Pausanias 4.36.3.
14 Malkin 1994, 207–8.
15 Herodotus 5.42.
16 Malkin 1994, 192–203; Krings 1998, 189–95.
17 Herodotus 5.43–6; Diodorus 4.23; Pausanias 3.16. 4–5; Krings 1998, 161–215.
18 Malkin 1994, 212. Krings (1998, 202–4) expresses doubts about any self-conscious links between the two expeditions.
19 Krings 1998, 93–160.
20 Malkin 1994, 181–7.
21 Ibid., 186–7. In this case reality self-consciously followed legend (Diodorus 4.17.4–5; Pliny NH 5.35). Fifth-century Cyrenean coinage shows Heracles with a Hesperid maiden. Others would argue that in fact the garden of the Hesperides was located much further west, around the mountains of Mauritania. Heracles was also said to have founded a city called Hecatompylon, which had gone on to achieve great success and prosperity until the Carthaginians captured it (Diodorus 4.18.1–4).
22 Asheri 1988, 755.
23 De Angelis (2003, 135–6) thinks that the temple could be a temple of Apollo. For other connections between Motya and Selinus there is the wonderful tufa statue of two lions bringing down a bull at Motya. Some scholars have speculated that it may have formed part of the decoration for the gates of the fortifications. Stylistically it bears such a close resemblance to the metope of the goddess Artemis and Acteon on the famous Temple E at Selinus that many have thought that they must have been created by the same craftsmen.
24 Moscati 1986, 57–8. Their popularity was such that these figurines were soon being manufactured in large numbers in Sardinia and North Africa.
25 Acquaro 1988, 17; Moscati 1986, 51, for the two sarcophagi found at Cannita near the city of Solus and thought to have been made locally sometime in the sixth or fifth century BC. At Cannita a seated goddess flanked by sphinxes was also discovered. Thought to date to the sixth century BC, it too displays clear Greek stylistic influence.
26 Moscati 1986, 72.
27 For Punic attitudes to the nude form see Maes 1989, 22. This interpretation would certainly fit much better with what we definitely know about the statue, namely that it was found in a Punic city. For a discussion of some of the lively scholarly debate surrounding the Motya ephebe, see Lancel 1995, 322–5.
28 Herodotus 2.44.
29 Ibid. Although no archaeological evidence has been found for the Phoenician occupation of the temple of Heracles on Thasos, other Greek authors state that the worship of the hero/god on the island had Phoenician precedents. Indeed, a later Greek travel writer, Pausanias, suggests that the Thasians openly alluded to their own and Heracles’ Phoenician origins: ‘The Thasians who are Phoenicians by descent, and sailed from Tyre and from Phoenicia generally . . . dedicated at Olympia a Heracles, the pedestal as well as the image being of bronze. The height of the image is ten cubits and he holds a club in his right hand and a bow in his left. They told me that they used to worship the same Heracles as the Tyrians but that afterwards, when they were included among the Greeks, they adopted the worship of Heracles the son of Amphitryon’ (5.25.12). Heracles was not the only Greek deity claimed to have had Near Eastern precedents. Pausanias (1.14.6–7) alleged that the worship of Aphrodite was started by the Assyrians, the Paphians of Cyprus and the Phoenicians. Pausanias, an apparently open-minded man, was well aware of the close links between Greek and Phoenician religion (e.g. 7.23.7–8).
30 Pausanias 7.5.5–8. There was a certainly a strong sense of the duality of Heracles/Melqart in later periods. The third-century-AD Greek writer Philostratus (Apollon. 2.33.2) wrote about a gold shield which Heracles had lost while campaigning in India, which ‘shows that it was the Egyptian rather than Theban Heracles that reached Gadeira and was the surveyor of the earth’.
31 Jourdain-Annequin 1989, 133–45; Karageorghis 1998, 65–159, contra Yon 1986, 147–9, who suggests that in Cyprus the major associations during this period on the island may well have been between Heracles and the Phoenician warrior gods Reshef and Eshmoun (the latter of whom in the Greek world would come to be identified with Asclepius, the god of healing), as well as the Egyptian deity Bes. This clear symbiosis between Heracles and Melqart might explain the strident alacrity with which some later Greek writers aggressively dismissed Herodotus’ explanation of the Tyrian origins of the cult of Heracles as nothing more than the perverse prejudices of a writer who had spent too much time with an
d studying barbarians–in essence, any person who was not a Greek. Yet the fact that these writers felt that they had to address these issues so forcefully hints at grave disquiet over the ambiguous origins of Greater Greece’s favourite hero. For instance, see the extraordinary attack on Herodotus by the later Greek writer Plutarch (De Herodoti malignitate 13–14), who accused him of ‘philobarbarism’–of being a lover of barbarians and a self-hating Greek.
32 Malkin 2005, 246–7.
33 KAI 47. Amadasi Guzzo 2005b, 47–8.
34 Malkin 2005, 245.
35 Amadasi Guzzo 2005b, 50.
36 Pausanias 10.17.2.
37 Bonnet 2005, 23–5; Bernardini 2005, 130–33.
38 CIS i.256; Bonnet 2005, 25.
39 Grottanelli 1973.
40 Amadasi Guzzo 2005b, 49–50, for arguments which relate the epithet not to Tyre but rather to the outcrop on which the temple at Antas was built. However, this still does not detract from the likelihood that it was a reference to the Tyrian heritage of the god.
41 Bonnet 1986, 210–12.
42 Lipiński 1989, 67–70. Bernardini 2005, 125–6, for arguments that this Carthage was in fact either Tharros or another Punic Sardinian city, Neapolis. However, the case for the North African metropolis is still the most convincing.
43 Bonnet 1988, 399–415.
44 Bonnet 1986, 214–15.
45 M. Miles 1998/9, 1–2, 21–5.
46 Bonnet 1988, 272; Krings 1998, 200.
47 Moscati 1986, 101–5; Galinsky 1969, 70–73.
48 On the association of Melqart and Astarte, see Giangiulio 1983. Long after it had become the Roman cult of Venus Erycina, the cult would maintain much of its Punic character through the continuation of the practice of sacred prostitution and sacrificial rites on an open-air altar in a sacred enclosure (Aelian On Animals 10.50; Galinsky 1969, 70–73). Indeed, the site itself had a special connection with another mountain-top sanctuary to Astarte, at Sicca, a Carthaginian-held town in Numidia, where the same religious rites and sacred prostitution took place (Valerius Maximus 2.6.15; Solinus 27.8). It was said that each year the goddess left her sanctuary and travelled to Sicca with the doves that were sacred to her, before returning to Eryx after an interval of nine days (Aelian On Animals 4.2; Schilling 1954, 234–9). The same conflation between Heracles and Melqart is found in the work of the sixth-century-BC Greek geographer Hecataeus of Miletus, who wrote that, on his return with the herd of Geryon, Heracles killed Solous, the eponymous king of the Sicilian Punic city of Solus, and received the assistance of a maiden named Motya in getting his stolen cattle back (Hecataeus of Miletus Frs. 71–2, FGH, I: 18–19; Malkin 1994, 210–11). In the fifth and fourth centuries BC Solus, which was said by the Greek historian Thucydides (6.2–6) to be a Phoenician foundation, minted a considerable number of coins on which Heracles featured (Bonnet 1988, 272–3).
49 Herodotus 4.8. A number of later Greek writers reported that the tomb of Geryon could be seen at Gades, while others maintained that two trees which dripped blood grew out of the tomb (Philostratus Apollon. 5.4). Strabo (3.5.10), citing the second-century-BC Greek polymath Poseidonius, also mentions a tree at Gades which ‘if a root is cut, a red liquid oozes forth’ (Pausanias 1.35.7). Another stop-off, Abdera, on the eastern coast of Andalusia, was also not Greek but a Phoenician settlement (Apollodorus 2.5.10.)
50 For the merging of Melqart and Heracles in the West, and the earlier syncretism between the hero and the Near Eastern god/heroes Gilgamesh and Sandon, see Fabre 1981, 274–6. There is also some suggestion that the great sanctuary to Venus Frutis at the Latin town of Lavinium may have been connected to the sanctuary at Eryx (Solinus 2.14; Strabo 5.3.5). In two of the manuscripts in which Solinus’ work is recorded the designation is not ‘Frutis’ but ‘Ericis’, ‘of Eryx’. Some have simply put this down to a copying error, but the fact is that, whereas Frutis is an unknown, Aphrodite/Astarte of Eryx is well attested (Galinsky 1969, 115–18). A further example of the cultural syncretism that defined archaic Sicily can be found in the final episode of the Dorieus tale. Euryleon, the sole survivor of the ill-fated expedition, had taken refuge at the nearby town of Heracleia Minoa. One might assume, especially with the Heraclean undertones of the tale, that the town’s name was derived from the Greek hero, whereas in fact the Punic name for Minoa was Makara, which simply meant ‘City of Melqart’ (Malkin 1994, 215–16; 2005, 252–3).
51 Hellanicus of Lesbos Fr. 111, FGH, I: 134; Hecataeus of Miletus Frs. 76–7, FGH, I: 19; Pearson 1975, 188.
52 It is certainly the case that the vast majority of the later recountings of the activities of Heracles in Rome emphasize the positive and friendly nature of his relationship with the indigenous locals (Fabre 1981, 287). The one dissenting voice is that of Plutarch, who recounts that in fact Heracles had killed Faunus.
53 Dionysius 1.40.1. There has been considerable debate over the provenance of the Cacus myth. It is generally agreed that it owes much to Greek mythology, particularly the story of Hermes’ theft of the cattle of Apollo recounted in the Fourth Homeric Hymn and dramatized in the fifth century BC by the Athenian playwright Sophocles in Ichneutae. It has also been linked to the story of the theft by Sisyphus of the horses of Diomedes, when Heracles was driving them back to Eurystheus, the king of Mycenae, after the successful completion of his eighth labour (Apollodorus 2.5.8). Dana Sutton (1977) has argued that its most likely source of entry into the Roman mythological canon was through satyr plays written in the early first century BC. However, it is well known that Dionysius heavily used western-Greek Hellenistic-era writers. Taking into account the Greek provenance of the story, one of these authors was surely a more likely source.
54 Bradley 2005, 138–40.
55 Most recently, ibid., 141–143. For the original hypothesis of the Greek roots of Italian, Etruscan and Latin Hercules/Hercle, see Bayet 1926.
56 In other parts of central Italy Heracles was also assimilated with various deities (Bradley 2005, 132).
57 The earliest representation of Cacus is on an Etruscan mirror dated to the fourth century BC.
58 Ritter 1995, 18–23; Bonnet 1988, 296–302.
59 Clear links between the Sant’ Omobono temple and Etruria exist through an ivory plaque inscribed with the Etruscan name Araz Silqietanas Spurianas, which was found among the archaeological deposits from the temple (Forsythe 2005, 90). For an overview of the archaeological evidence for temples and sanctuaries in archaic Rome see Smith 1996, 158–65.
60 Forsythe 2005, 90–91.
61 Jourdain-Annequin 1989, 635–6. The identification of the goddess figure has been controversial, with scholars putting forward a number of different deities (on Juno/Hera, see Coarelli 1988, 301–28; on Athena/Minerva, see Colonna 1987). Some have argued that these probable representations of Heracles and Athena, which would have sat on the roof of the temple, were the work of one of the Roman kings who, following the lead of autocratic rulers in mainland Greece, wanted to represent his rule as being divinely sanctioned. They point to a statue in Athens showing the Athenian autocrat Pisistratus as Heracles being introduced to Olympus by Athena, the patron deity of his city, thereby suggesting that he enjoyed divine favour. This might explain the existence of a similar set of statues at the southern Etruscan town of Veii. The later Roman writers Martial (14.178) and Pliny (NH 35.157) both record that Vulca, a sculptor from Veii, was commissioned to produce a sculpture of Hercules by the last Roman king, Tarquinius Superbus (Cornell 1995, 148; Bradley 2005, 130; Ritter 1995, 21 for the connection with Veii). Useful parallels exist between these stories and the sanctuary at Pyrgi, where, within the temple complex where the famous tablets were discovered, archaeologists have pinpointed a specific subterranean space which may have housed the underground tomb of Melqart, before he was brought back to life in the ceremony of the egersis. An inscription was found there dedicated to Uni and Tenia, the chief Etruscan deities. As in the context of this temple Uni was associated with Astarte, who was the consort of Mel
qart, it seems likely that the same kind of religious syncretism was at play here between Melqart and Tenia (Casquero 2002, 89–90).
62 Holloway 1994, 166–7.
63 Van Berchem 1967, 1959–60. There are other similarities, such as the absolute exclusivity of the god in his temple, and the long robes and the crowns of laurels worn on the uncovered heads of the priests (although parallels for these traditions can also be found in the Greek world). It has also been suggested that the Potitii, one of the aristocratic families who were to oversee the cult, were in fact a caste of priests in the Near Eastern tradition (Van Berchem 1967, 311–15). Bonnet (1988, 278–304) is sceptical of the connections between Melqart and Rome. However, her qualifications, although useful, do not discount the appropriation of some of the rites and iconography associated with the god in the archaic city.
64 Torelli 1989, 49–51.
65 Casquero 2002, 86–91.
66 Février 1965.
67 Casquero 2002, 69.
68 At Gravisca, the port of the important Etruscan city of Tarquinii, inscriptions found at a sixth-century-BC temple dedicated to the Greek goddesses Aphrodite, Hera and Demeter show a strong eastern-Greek element (particularly from Samos, Miletus and Ephesus) among its worshippers (Torelli 1989, 48–9; Smith 1996, 146–7). The lack of Phoenician pottery in archaic Roman contexts might argue against the hypothesis of a large Phoenician mercantile presence in Rome (Casquero 2002, 101–2). However, the discovery of large quantities of eighth-century-BC Greek pottery in a deposit underneath the shrine at Sant’ Omobono proves very little, as the Phoenicians were often involved in the transportation of Greek goods (Cornell 1995, 68–9).
69 This model for the introduction of Melqart and Astarte into Italy is preferable to the Bonnet thesis (1986, 29) that sees it as the work of the Carthaginians who brought the cult to Etruria. See Smith 1996, 159–62, for an overview of the general issues and how they relate to the Sant’ Omobono temple.
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