Around the same time, however, Virgil portrays Dido in a very sympathetic light, makes much less of the Byrsa incident, and not only brings the founder of the Roman people into the story as well but as Arnaldo Momigliano observed, “came near to transferring ‘Punica fides’ to Aeneas” (Momigliano 1975: 5, with Gruen 2011: 234–36). More dramatically than with Plato’s “Phoenician” lie, Aeneas’s treachery toward the Carthaginian queen on his account must call into question the Phoenician stereotype itself, as well as raising the question of whether the Romans were more like the Carthaginians than their politicians might care to admit.
The picture in Greek writers of the high empire can be very derogatory about Carthaginians and Phoenicians in general (e.g., Plut. Mor. 799d). At the same time, however, a new genre of writing in Greek on Phoinikika—Phoenician matters—emerges, at least to our view, from the first century ce, suggesting a new level of interest in the Phoenicians in Greek, as well as Latin literature (Joseph. AJ 1.107, cf. 8.144 and 9.283; Joseph. Ap. 1.112; Tatian, Ad Gr. 37; Ath. 3.126a; Steph. Byz., s.v. Ake, Doros.) (for the “Phoenicians’ revival” in later Roman times, see chapter 45, this volume). Little remains of these works beyond the names of their authors: Dios, Menander of Ephesus, Mochos, Hestaios, Hieronymus, Theodotus, Hypsykrates, Sanchuniathon, and Claudius Iolaus. We do not know when most of these authors were actually writing, but a significant proportion of the surviving fragments contain stories taken from Greek literature and the Hebrew Bible, suggesting that they were at least not primarily based on local or Phoenician sources. There is nonetheless an interesting set of questions about the relationship between these and the second-century ce Phoenician Enquiry of Philo of Byblos, a Greek text written or compiled by an author from a Phoenician city. Philo, who is often treated by scholars as a Phoenician voice, is certainly a sympathetic commentator on the exotic local tales of the Phoenician past (on Phoenician-Carthaginian literature, see chapter 18; and on the Hebrew Bible, see chapter 43, this volume).
Phoenician characters and settings also play a significant role in the Greek novel, a new genre that appears in the second century ce. One work by Lollianus is actually called Phoinikika, although it is so fragmentary that we don’t know where its tantalizing tales of human sacrifice, cannibalism, ghosts, and orgies were set. The Ephemeris Belli Troiani is presented as a translation of a Phoenician original, the work of a soldier who fought at Troy called Dictys of Knossos and found in his tomb on Crete (Ní Mheallaigh 2012). Most vividly, the Alexandrian Achilles Tatius’s romance Leukippe and Klitophon begins in Sidon (Ach. Tat. 1.1), has a hero from Tyre (Ach. Tat. 1.3), as well as a lengthy description of that city (Ach. Tat. 2.14), and both this novel and Heliodorus’s third- or fourth-century ce Aethiopika make a point of surveying various different meanings of phoinix (Ach. Tat. 1.17.3–5 and 3.25; for Heliodorus, see Bowie 1998; and Whitmarsh 1998). Heliodorus, moreover, “signs” the end of his novel as “a Phoenician from Emesa.” Whether or not this colophon is meant seriously, it may well reflect contemporary interest and pride in Phoenician roots, however distant; Emesa is in inland Syria, a long way from the historical land of Phoenicia, but much is made in the early third century of the Phoenician associations and customs of the teenage emperor Elagabalus, who was also from Emesa (e.g., Hdn. 5.3.2–4, 5.5.9–10).
Both positive and negative attitudes to Phoenicians continued well into late antiquity. In the early fifth century ce, Julian of Aeclanum, leader of the Pelagians, abused Augustine, bishop of Hippo, as a “Punic disputer,” a “Punic preacher,” a “Punic orator,” and a “Punic writer” (August. C. Iul. 3.32; C. Iul. imp. 1.7, 1.48, 1.73; cf. Secundinus, Epistula ad Augustinum, 2–3; Augusr. C. Secundinum 3). Julian does not of course mean that Augustine, who was originally from Thagaste in Numidia, is of Levantine descent; elsewhere he calls him a “Numidian” (August. C. Iul. imp. 6.6). Instead, he must use the adjective poenus in these cases with its alternative meaning of “African,” a usage still found in contemporary writing, as when Augustine himself calls the Phoenician language “Punic, that is, African” (August., In Epistolam Ioannis ad Parthos 2.3). Julian’s point, then, is to dismiss the African provincialism of Augustine and his works with a term that also evoked an older sense of untrustworthiness, of “Punic faith”—or in a Christian context, of paganism (Weber 2003: 81).
Augustine, however, freely admits to being a Poenus, challenging only the derogatory implication that Julian gives the term, and pointing out that Cyprian, the highly respected third century bishop of Carthage, was also a Poenus:
Do not despise this Poenus who warns and admonishes, puffed up by your geographical origins. Just because Puglia produced you, don’t think that you can conquer the Poeni with your stock, when you cannot do so with your mind.… For blessed Cyprian was also a Poenus, who said “We must boast over nothing when nothing is ours.”
(August. C. Iul. imp. 6.18; cf. C. Iul. 3.32 and C. Iul. imp 1.72)
The exchange highlights the continuing slipperiness of the very notion of Phoenician, from Homer to Augustine. The continuities in the way that the Phoenicians are depicted reinforce the porous nature of their definition as a group, from their identifications with the Greeks and then Romans themselves, to their lasting association with the sea. For all the interest in and even identification with the Phoenicians and Carthaginians among the Greco-Roman writers surveyed here, they are always on the horizon, sailing out of sight.
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Chapter 45
Neo-Phoenician Identities in the Roman Empire
Anthony Kaldellis
By late antiquity, there were no Phoenicians set off from the rest of the population of the empire by language, religion, culture, ethnicity, or political community. We cannot be sure that the Phoenician language was spoken in the east after the first century ce, though Christian exegetes knew that it had once been distinct from Aramaic (“Syrian”) and Hebrew (Origin Cels. 3.6; Theodoretos, Questions on the Octateuch 303). The famous gods and goddesses of the ancient Phoenicians had been assimilated into their Greek equivalents and then eliminated by Christianity. Their cities, too, were absorbed into the administrative structures of the empire, and their identities as Phoenicians altered beyond recognition to accommodate the needs and structures of the new imperial order. Roman citizenship became universal and its apparatus had replaced previous legal regimes. Beirut, for example, was now most famous for its school of Roman law (Hall 2004). By 250, and likely earlier, there was no Phoenician “people,” only Romans living in the provinces called Phoenice. Geographical regions and provincial names then began to generate pseudo-ethnonyms, so that one could loosely be labeled a “Phoenician,” even one by genos and ethnos, just for being from one of the “Phoenician” provinces. These were not ethnicities but, rather, regional labels (Sherwin-White 1973: 438–44). If there had been no institutional entity named Phoenicia before, the Romans now created one, with its own koinon or genos “of the Phoenicians” that acted on the provincial level in a corporate capacity (Dietz 2000).
Distinctive cultural traits lapsed as many provincials identified with the universal normative order of Rome. The Phoenicians were not alone in this: Greek identity also lapsed, its former bearers becoming mainstream Romans (Kaldellis 2007: 111–19). Resistance to becoming a “co-opted nation” required a determined effort to assert and police cultural difference, as was expended for example by the Jewish rabbis, and even most of their constituents in the early empire “felt themselves to be Jewish in the…very attenuated way that some of their coastal neighbors considered themselves Phoenician” (Schwartz 2001). It is, however, difficult to trace the loss of Phoenician cultural distinctiveness in the period between Alexander and late antiquity (Millar 1983, 1993). While it certainly happened, different scholars weigh the balance differently at various stages (see Batty 2002 for the second century). The present chapter surveys the construction of Phoenician identities in the empire, mostly in the east between the second and the fourth centuries ce. It explores various models, navigating between two extreme positions, the first being that Phoenician identities were always artificial and imposed from the outside, and the second that “authentic” Phoenician identities survived for long in the empire. As we will see, authors in different genres and men pursuing elite careers found Phoenician claims useful and constructive: our challenge is to contextualize them and define their existential or cultural scope.
Symbolic Ethnicity
The assimilation of Phoenicia to the Greco-Roman mainstream is easiest to trace in elite culture, but its sources are self-selecting because they conformed to mainstream norms and survived for that reason. For example, the second-century philosophical orator Maximos of Tyre reveals no affinity with or knowledge of any distinctive Phoenician culture. He mentions the Phoenicians just as he does other ancient peoples, and all his information is drawn from Classical literature; thus, his Phoenicians even appear in a negative light (Johnson 2013: 235–43; Batty 2002). The Platonist philosopher Porphyry of Tyre (ca. 235–305) has been discussed the most in this connection (e.g., Millar 1997; Clark 1999). He reveals in a casual manner that his original name was Malkos, “which means king in the ancestral language.” A colleague changed it for him to its Greek equivalent, Basileus, and later that too was changed to Porphyrios, keeping the royal association (via the color) while alluding also to his Phoenician origin (Porph. Plot. 17, 20–21). These rebaptisms have the air of an antiquarian game, not an existential shift. Porphyry does not seem to have known any language other than Greek and displays no “allegiance to a Phoenician identity” (Johnson 2013: 12, 272). His version of Platonism accommodated the cultic practices and beliefs of many nations so as to overcome ethnicity in a more universal philosophical direction. However, Porphyry’s discussion of the Phoenicians relies on Greek authorities and Philon of Byblos, makes them seem like a people of an ancient world, and is not entirely positive about them (citing instances of human sacrifice and cannibalism [De abst. 2.56–57]). Porphyry was not a Phoenician but a Greek Platonist of the Roman world who was only of Phoenician background. This identity was only a personal curiosity, neither to be hidden nor existentially compelling.
American sociologists have developed the concept of “symbolic ethnicity” to study the particular attachments and identities exhibited by otherwise thoroughly assimilated white ethnics in the United States. These can be expressive and nostalgic; they inflect and differentiate the sameness of American life, but they are also thin, freely chosen, and easily discarded or adjusted. They create local communities but do not threaten or disrupt the mainstream culture—in fact, they loudly proclaim their loyalty to it—and tend to be confined to “harmless” sites such as food, dance, conventional forms of worship, and antiquarian research (Gans 1979). In the empire, placing monuments, festivals, and cult images on coins was a common way of defining local identities in such ways (Howgego 2005). Some provincial communities did so by drawing on the positive symbols associated with their ancestors in Greek antiquarian tradition (Spawforth 2001, for Lydia). On the Phoenician side, the cities placed on coins Dido, Europa, and Kadmos bringing letters to the Greeks (Millar 1993: 286, 292). These highlighted local Phoenician pride but through signs taken from the Greco-Roman repertoire that would have appealed to the imperial mainstream: it was not an “authentic” Phoenician tradition, but a Greco-Roman simulacrum of it. When Hadrianos of Tyre (second century) took up the chair of rhetoric at Athens, he began his inaugural address by amusingly announcing that “yet again, letters have arrived from Phoenicia” (Philostr. VS 587). Of course, these letters were Attic Greek. There is no hint in Philostratos’s biography
of Hadrian of a “native” cultural background. In this respect he differs from Hasdrubal, a Carthaginian of the second century bce who had to be Hellenized (i.e., to be renamed Kleitomachos) in order to become a philosopher (Plut. Mor. 328a–329d). In the empire, it was almost as if Greeks were play-acting at being Phoenicians by using only resources internal to the Greek tradition. In the construction of these Helleno-Phoenician identities, Greek myths had colonized and replaced any native Phoenician tradition. Thus, the emperor Julian (361–363) assumed that an oracle was Phoenician because it mentioned Kadmos (Or. 7.220d; Bouffartigue 1992: 303, 575).
Sidon and Tyre competed over the ownership of Kadmos just like cities in the Aegean competed over Homer. They also competed over the title metropolis like cities in other provinces, sending delegates to the emperor to highlight their reputation and antiquity (as early as Strab. 16.2.22; Souda s.v. Paulos of Tyre). These competitions to win Roman love were a prime mechanism of imperial rule, fueling local pride and linking it closely to the Roman order, thus shaping local identities (Ando 2010). An example of this combination—Roman and provincial—is provided by the Severan jurist Ulpian of Tyre (ca. 170–223). There is no indication that he knew a Semitic language. In a work on taxes (ca. 213), he listed cities that had been given the ius Italicum, starting with “the most splendid colony of the Tyrians, which is my place of origin, outstanding in its territories, of very ancient foundation, powerful in war, always loyal to the treaty it made with the Romans; for the deified Severus and our emperor granted it ius Italicum because of its great and conspicuous faithfulness toward the Roman state and empire” (Dig. 50.15.1; trans. Watson 1985; Honoré 2002: 9, 14). From the imperial point of view, this was an ideal relationship for any Roman citizen’s two patriae.
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