Durable Ethnicity
Symbolic ethnicity has both its limits and its critics (Anagnostou 2009). It views as “choice” what may in fact have been constrained by social and cultural contexts, and it privileges forms of expression and behavior that are agreeable to the mainstream and nonconfrontational. In our case, it also privileges case studies and modalities linked to social elites, who would have had the luxury to play Phoenician games within their secure Greco-Roman context. Unfortunately, our evidence is not such that we can look outside their narrow circles, especially after the apparent disappearance of the Phoenician language in the early first century. Did identities exist that were not inflected versions of the mainstream, but were substantively different?
One author we might point to is the first-century ce geographer from Spain, Pomponius Mela, whose Description of the World, although in Latin, has been read as Punic-centric. Greek and Roman hierarchies, orientations, and point of emphasis are set aside here, even “reacted against,” in favor of Phoenician ones. The author draws attention to his Hispano-Phoenician origins (2.96; Batty 2000). A more famous case is Philon of Byblos (early second century ce). Philon’s career and intellectual profile is entirely that of a mainstream Greco-Roman scholar of his time, except that in his Phoenician History (in Greek) he not only polemicized against the Greeks on behalf of the Phoenicians but also discussed at length religious and theogonic material that could only have come from ancient Canaanite sources (Kaldellis and López Ruiz, in BNJ 790). The format in which he presented this material, including Euhemerism, comparisons with Hesiod, and bogus claims to have translated ancient tablets, owed much to Greek conventions, but there was definitely something “alien” lodged in the heart of his polemical project. It would, however, be too risky to assume that other Roman-Phoenicians shared Philon’s anti-Hellenic stance.
Another case is discussed by the periegete Pausanias. When he was at Aigion (in the Peloponnese) he met an argumentative Sidonian (eis antilogian) who claimed that Phoenicians knew more about religion than Greeks and allegorized Apollo as the sun who generated Asklepios, the air. Pausanias agreed, but also responded that such arguments were no less Greek than Phoenician (Paus. 7.23.7–8; Habicht 1998: 156–59). The Sidonian’s desire to make a distinction is significant, but so is Pausanias’s inability to see it. Interpretatio graeca and allegoresis were effacing cultural differences, making it harder to pinpoint authenticity. The god in question was Eshmun: had he effectively “become” Asklepios? Much later (ca. 500), that connoisseur of local paganism, the Platonist Damaskios, was able to recount the story of Eshmun-Asklepios of Beirut (Isid. E212). Possibly he was drawing on Philon, or else local traditions, which are otherwise beyond our reach. We know two other “Phoinikika” from this period (BNJ 792–93), but nothing about their contents. Such antiquarian local histories (the patria) were popular throughout the empire.
Tyre minted some coins with legends in Phoenician down to the third century, naming the city, Pygmalion (a figure of local significance), and Dido-Elishar (Howgego 2005: 14). On the one hand, the use of the native script pointed to Kadmos’s gift of letters to the Greeks, but on the other hand, it kept alive a memory of the non-Hellenic native past. And in the second century, an inscription was set up at Tyre (in Greek and Latin) by Lepcis Magna, honoring Tyre as its metropolis (Millar 1993: 118), which shows that identities and relationships were at least partially constrained by the past; they were not purely imaginary, mythological constructions. And accommodation between the empire and provincials went both ways, reaching down beneath the elite level. After the universal grant of citizenship in 212, Ulpian of Tyre opined that legally binding responses could be given in Greek or Latin, and perhaps in Punic or Aramaic, given that “all tongues can produce a verbal obligation, provided that both parties understand each other’s language.” Likewise, fideicommissa “may be left in any language, not only Greek or Latin but Punic, Gallic, or that of any other nation” (Dig. 45.1.1.6, 32.1.11.1). Contrary to common perception, it was not necessary to speak Greek or Latin to be a Roman in the later empire.
Even symbolic neo-Phoenician identities were not constructed in a vacuum. In addition to past glories, there were prejudicial stereotypes attached to the Phoenician name, including child sacrifice, thieving merchants, and aggression against Rome (cf. “Punic faith”). Punic-Romans had to cope with all that. They were not starting from a clean slate to build feel-good identities. To give an example that is not well known, in the early empire, cunnilingus was widely regarded as a (disgusting) Phoenician habit, which could be implicated in ethnic polemics (AP 11.329; D.Chr. Or. 33.41; Gal. 12, p. 249; Luc. Pseudol. 28). Stereotypes lay at hand to condemn Syrian or Phoenician religion when it was politically advantageous (see later for the emperor Elagabalus), even though Greco-Roman paganism had well-entrenched analogues. More serious in the western context was the baggage of the Punic Wars for Romans of North African and possible “Punic” origin. Consider Septimius Severus (first century), probably the emperor’s grandfather. In a collection that referred elsewhere to Hannibal’s “Libyan hordes,” the poet Statius turns to address his patron from Lepcis Magna and affirm his Roman credentials: “Are you really from Lepcis?” No, “your speech is not Punic, nor your dress; your mind is not foreign: you are Italian, Italian!” (Stat. Silv. 4.5, 45–46; Birley 1988: 19–20).
Judging from his career, the emperor Septimius Severus (193–211) was likewise thoroughly acculturated to Roman norms. His regime conformed to conventional profiles and did not make pronounced ethnic gestures; accordingly, his Punic-Libyan origins did not harm his career. Some of his coins featured Liber Pater and Hercules, the Latin versions (from Lepcis Magna) of Phoenician Mlk-strt and Sdrp’. But while they could be recognized as Punic, these had long been normalized at Rome (Rowan 2012: 41–42) and fell well within the scope of local inflection and diversity that emperors could mine. Severus was secure enough to pay homage to Hannibal by building a tomb for him in Bithynia (Birley 1988: 142), unmistakably and perhaps even provocatively the action of an inflected Punic-Roman. But it had been four hundred years since Zama, and Hannibal was admired by Romans too (cf. Nepos, Hannibal; Stocks 2014). Given how minor these gestures were in the full range of his imperial representation, we cannot say that Severus played up his Punic side, nor that he hid it, and his son and heir Caracalla (r. 211–217) would experiment in a different direction, with a Macedonian image. Still, we have to wonder if we are getting the full picture. Severus probably spoke Punic (fluently according to the Epitome de Caesaribus 20.8), and the literature of the age and public media would have tended to normalize an emperor’s image.
Anthropologists have studied groups possessing a dual identity, an official or “classical” one for use in some public contexts and a different vernacular one for use “at home” (e.g., Herzfeld 1986). Severus’s enemy Pescennius Niger is said to have called him a “Punic Sulla” for killing senators (HA Pesc. 6.4). It is tempting to imagine whether, if Severus had lost the civil wars, a polemical ethnography of his Punic side would have dominated his later image (cf. Mark Antony as a Hellenic degenerate, Maximinus as a Thracian barbarian, etc.). The grammarian Oulpianos (Ulpian) of Tyre appears in Athenaios’s Dinner-Sophists (ca. 200 ce) as a typical product of a Hellenist education, obsessed with Greek lexicography, but in one passage (3.100) another speaker refers to esoteric aspects of his native Phoenician culture that one might learn from Sanchouniathon and Mochos, and not from mainstream Greek texts; from a different source, we happen to know the former as the alleged source of Philon’s Phoenician History. Interestingly, it is not Oulpianos who mentions these authors, so we cannot know whether he identified with the culture they evoked. But it is interesting that someone else would have “branded” him by association with those markers of Phoenician identity: a foreignness could be detected, or postulated, behind an otherwise mainstream façade.
Emesa
In the third and fourth centuries, the city of Emesa (Homs) is labeled as
Phoenician by a number of texts. Emesa had not been part of the old Phoenician world. It entered the scene in the first century bce under a dynasty that ancient sources label as Arab, and there is no sign that the Phoenician language was spoken there. Emesa’s inscriptions are in Greek, with a few in Latin, and if a Semitic language was spoken there it would have been Aramaic (Millar 1993: 300–309). It was annexed to the province of Syria, but when the latter was broken up, Emesa went to Syria Phoenice. Thus, to a degree, it was “Phoenician” according to the “pseudo-ethnic” language of identity enabled by Roman imperial institutions (Icks 2012: 46); it could equally be called “Syrian,” and was. But it is nevertheless striking how frequently contemporary sources opt for the Phoenician label, though none of them are “official” civic sources, or necessarily even local ones.
The historian Herodian, who was likely not from Syria, calls the grandmother of the emperor known as Elagabalus (r. 218–222), Julia Maesa, a Phoenician woman from Emesa in Phoenicia. Herodian further says that the locals called the sun-god “Elaiagabalos” in the Phoenician language, that the emperor’s attire was something between Phoenician and Mede, and that the emperor would not touch pork, following Phoenician custom (5.3.1–4, 5.5.4–10, 5.6.9; for the “Phoenician” name of the god, see also Epit. de Caes. 23.2; HA Macr. 9.2). Our other contemporary source, Cassius Dio, says by contrast that Elagabalus was known in Rome as “The Assyrian” for his “Syrian” customs (the two terms tended to be used interchangeably), and accordingly calls him Sardanapalos (80.11; the “Syrian” name of the god, Aur. Vict. Caes. 23). The Phoenician and Syrian labels were not fully interchangeable in Greco-Roman usage, but they did overlap in the ambiguous case of Emesa. Yet it is possible that Herodian reflected local perceptions better. The Thirteenth Sibylline Oracle, written in Syria in the 250s (possibly even in Emesa), refers allusively to the defeat of the invading (Sasanian) Persians by the Phoenicians—that is, by the strongman Uranius Antoninus of Emesa (13.148–154; Potter 1990: 323–27). Emesa is there called “the city of the sun.” The city was identified with its chief cult and as somehow Phoenician.
The regime of Elagabalus did not, as far as we know, make explicit discursive claims to a Syrian or Phoenician identity. The emperor’s chief concern was to promote the Emesan sun-god and integrate him into the imperial pantheon. Had it been done by a less extravagant and erratic ruler, it may have passed with little comment. The “Oriental” aspects of that cult had Greco-Roman analogues and precedents, but were branded as foreign by authors hostile to the emperor. Supposedly, he married his god Elagabal to Athena and then to the Carthaginian deity Urania (a.k.a. Tanit or Astarte, a moon-goddess), thus making an implicit Punic connection. Unfortunately, because of bias in the sources, we cannot know exactly what happened or how the emperor wanted it to be perceived. Cassius Dio even imputes child sacrifice to him to brand him as Carthaginian (80.12; cf. Hdn. 5.6.3–5). Thus it may have been these other sources, more than Elagabalus, who highlighted the Phoenician connection. However, an inscription from Córdoba in southern Spain mentions Elagabal along with Athena Allath and (restored) Kypris Charinaizaia, suggesting that a Phoenician agenda may have been visible to provincials in areas familiar with Punic culture (SEG 4:164; Icks 2012: 32–34).
The identity of Emesa as the Phoenician city of the sun underpinned the philosophical fantasy presented in a now-lost work of the Platonist Iamblichus (ca. 245–325). We know it from the Hymn for King Helios written by the emperor Julian (r. 361–363), a work of technical Neoplatonic theology (Julian. Or. 4). At various places, Julian attributes these doctrines to the wise men of the Phoenicians, calling it all “the theology of the Phoenicians.” He there specifically invokes the cultic practices of Edessa, a city “sacred to the sun since time immemorial” (134a, 150b–c). This has been plausibly emended to Emesa. One study credulously and enthusiastically takes Julian’s attribution to the Phoenicians at face value (Azize 2005), while classicist scholars of his thought are baffled by it (Bouffartigue 1992: 482; Dillon 1999: 114n33). But we do not have to look far. After mentioning Emesa, Julian says that in this work he has followed Iamblichos, his favorite philosopher. Iamblichos was from Syria (and was accordingly known as “the Syrian”), and his teaching activity was linked to Apameia, but he seems to have been descended from the former rulers of Emesa (cf. Phot. Bibl. 181). Within the Platonic tradition, he championed the efficacy of ritual action and barbarian wisdom. Few of his works survive. In De Mysteriis, he assumes the persona of an Egyptian priest and pushes back against the logocentric wisdom of “the Greeks.” But the contents of the work are a variation on late Platonic themes and are steeped in the Greek tradition. Little if any of it is based on Egyptian tradition, and there is no proof that Iamblichos knew any language other than Greek (Clarke et al. 2003: xxxii–xxxiii). His Egyptian, Syrian, and other references are internally constructed props, albeit venerable and authoritative ones. The same was probably true for his lost work on Phoenician philosophy, which gave an Emesan ritual inflexion to the Platonists’ solar obsessions. (They were receptive to pseudo-Chaldaean and pseudo-Zoroastrian works, too.) In his Pythagorean Life, Iamblichos recorded a tradition that Pythagoras was born to Greek parents at Sidon, and later returned to Sidon to be initiated in the mysteries by the “hierophants of the Phoenicians” (2.7, 3.13–14), after which he went to Egypt and Babylon for further study. For Iamblichos, these were all valid sources of eastern wisdom, largely invented and interchangeable.
The most famous declaration of Phoenician identity from this period comes from Heliodoros (i.e., “Gift of the Sun”), the author of the romance novel The Ethiopic Tale (Aithiopika), probably the best of the genre (second–fourth century ce). He claims at the end that he is “a Phoenician man, an Emesene, a member of the race of the Sun, Heliodoros, the son of Theodosios” (10.41). How should we take this? It may refer to the author himself or an invented narrator-persona (the novel itself indulges in misleading identities and disguises). The “race (genos) of the Sun” is otherwise unattested: it may refer to the local priesthood of Elagabal or, following Iamblichos-Julian, a conception of the material world as generated by the sun-god (cf. Julian. Ep. 111). The Phoenician claim here is probably not equivalent to a “Syrian” one, as made by the novelist Iamblichos who wrote the Babyloniaka (pace Morgan 2014: 265–66); Emesa, as we have seen, was associated with specifically Phoenician claims, though the reasons for this are opaque (beyond the name of the Roman province). Also, the novel, while not set in Phoenicia (but, rather, in Greece and Ethiopia), loves word-play on the meanings of phoinik- (red, blood, date, palm, dye, Achilles’s tutor, Phoenicia, and others), which make sense only in Greek and against the Greek tradition (Bowie 1998). The novel, moreover, toys with the racial and cultural markers of Greek and Ethiopian identity, destabilizing them through complex narrative twists (Whitmarsh 1998). So what are its identity politics? “Heliodoros” might be a Phoenician outsider pressing against the boundaries of Greek identity. However, his story is “constructed entirely from within the Classical tradition”; there is no “alien” material in it (Morgan 2014: 269–71). His Ethiopia (and Phoenicia) are not “authentic” but, rather, Hellenic constructs, and the protagonists’ Hellenism helps to overcome the Ethiopians’ practice of human sacrifice at the end. This might be an internal Greek representation of a foreign subject writing for internal consumption, a modality with ample precedent in Greek literature (cf. Iamblichos posing as an Egyptian priest). Is the Phoenician authorial stance, then, a function of being an Emesene (ameliorating the taint of human sacrifice attached to his cultural tradition), or a Greek fiction like everything else in the text, or both?
In Fiction and Religious Polemic
Heliodoros’s authorial persona and narrative games were actually part of a pervasive fascination with Phoenicians in the Greek novel. It is almost as if authors in this genre made a point of working them into their stories and frame devices, as a kind of running gag (complete translations in Reardon 1989; Stevens
and Winkler 1995). The raunchy tale of Lollianos was called the Phoinikika (only a few pages survive, so we do not know why). Antonios Diogenes’s Wonders beyond Thule stars a woman from Tyre whose story takes up much of the book. The dramatic date is ca. 500 bce and the protagonists end up at Tyre and write their story on cypress tablets, appropriate for Tyre and presumably in Phoenician; it was discovered later by Alexander the Great when he captured Tyre, and translated. The motif of the ancient tablets, found and deciphered, was used by Philon of Byblos in his Phoenician History, too (in general, see Speyer 1970). The protagonist of Apollonios King of Tyre is obviously also a Tyrian, though his being from there does not add much to the story, which is set in a vaguely Hellenistic world. However, he is good at solving riddles, a skill for which the ancient king of Tyre Hiram was famous in Hellenistic times (Mendels 1987). The frame narrator of Achilles Tatios’s Leukippe and Kleitophon is a man of Sidon (who gives ethnographic information to establish his credentials) and the story’s protagonist is from Tyre; in a reversal, it is a man from Byzantion who comes to abduct his fiancée from Tyre. We have seen the Phoenician word games and sphragis of Heliodoros in the Aithiopika. Chariton’s protagonist Chaereas is caught up in a war between Egypt and Persia over Phoenicia, focusing on Tyre and Arados (7.2–8.2), and the protagonists of Xenophon’s Ephesian Tale are captured off Rhodes by lusty Phoenician pirates and taken to Tyre (1.13–15).
The Oxford Handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean Page 100