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This chapter deals with three literary texts which seem to offer more than familiar topoi and routine ethnographic sound bites. One is written in Greek; another claims to be a Greek translation of a Phoenician original; the last is in Syriac, which a Greek original may or may not underlie. None escapes classical influence, but all offer the tantalizing possibility that an insider perspective might somehow be preserved alongside the intellectual structures of the Greek or Greco-Roman literary genre in question.

The first text is Lucian’s On the Syrian Goddess (De Dea Syria, or DDS from now on), and it is a hybrid in various senses. It is a short treatise which offers itself as a detailed eye-witness account of the temple of Hierapolis (modern Membij) not far from the Euphrates in northern Syria, and its cult of the Syrian Goddess. The Syrian Goddess is Atargatis, a deity with a long and complex history whose antecedents, if we believe that diachronic surveys can shed light on a god’s character in the here and now, can be found in the female consort of the north Syrian thunder-god in the second millennium BCE (Lightfoot 2003: 1–85). By the time we encounter her here, she seems to be a multi-purpose “great goddess” figure, not, as far as we can see, as strongly linked with eroticism as her Semitic counterparts Astarte and Ishtar, but certainly of a nurturing disposition, delighting in her doves and sacred fish – but also, perhaps, with an appetite for the shedding of blood which recalls (as does her iconography) her Anatolian cousin whom the Greeks called Cybele, Rhea, and the Great Mother. DDS manages to be highly informative about the temple and its practices yet elusive and indirect about the goddess herself. Its opening chapters advertise the temple and offset it against various Phoenician temples, none of which match it for holiness. A couple of set-piece sequences follow, the first concerning myths of its divine founder, in which other variants are set aside in favor of the one that connects it with Dionysus; the second discusses the present temple’s connections with Stratonice, wife of Seleucus I and later of his son, Antiochus. Then we learn of its topography and layout, working inwards from its position in the city to the innermost Holy of Holies with the cult statue; and the last section is a tumble of miscellanea on priests and cult personnel, festivals, rituals, and bits and pieces of devotional practice.