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A Babylonian Writes Greek
We do not know much about Berossos’s life. His name looks like a Greek transcription of Akkadian Bēl-rē’ûšu (pronounced Bērōš), or perhaps Bēl-rē’ûšunu.1 Most likely he was a contemporary of Alexander the Great and the first two Seleucid kings.2 He will have spent much of his adult life in Babylon, where he was attached to the main temple complex of the city, the Esagila. Vitruvius suggests that he later moved to the Greek island of Cos (then under Ptolemaic rule) to found a school of astronomy (BNJ 680 T 5). This has often been doubted, but Vitruvius’s claim is not intrinsically implausible: Theocritus mentions an “Assyrian” expert in his second Idyll (Id. 2.162), and we know of at least one Babylonian intellectual, Sudines, who relocated to Pergamon not long after (Rochberg 2010: 8–9). Pliny reports that the Athenians erected a statue in Berossos’s honor (BNJ 680 T 6), while Pausanias makes him the father of the Chaldaean Sibyl (BNJ 680 T 7).This last piece of information takes us into the realm of myth and suggests just how little was known about Berossos already in antiquity.