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Throughout we are confronted, not only by the systematic biases and distortions that the ethnographical genre ipso facto brings with it, but also by the extent of Herodotean ventriloquism and imposition of Herodotean explanatory frameworks, and by the sheer fun which Lucian is having with his Herodotean imitation. Let us consider an example of each.

With all ethnography Lucian shares the practice of interpretatio graeca, whereby non-classical deities are equated with classical ones and given Greek names. But where Herodotus had used both Greek and indigenous names (sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes both), DDS only ever gives us the Greek, even where it tells us expressly that the Greek is not in local use (§§31–32 assures us that Zeus is an absolutely compelling identification – but is not what the Hierapolitans call him). The goddess is Assyrian Hera, or simply Hera, throughout, although as far as we can see this is a rare and exclusively literary identification (Lightfoot 2003: 81). No more than in any other work of ethnography is the principle on which it rests discussed, though it is only partly iconographical; §32 tells us that although the goddess is Hera “in the main,” she also has “something of” a slew of other Greek goddesses (Athena, Aphrodite, Selene, Rhea, Artemis, Nemesis, the Moirae), so many that they succeed only in obfuscating rather than clarifying her appearance. When we move outside the temple (past the statues of “Zeus,” “Apollo,” “Atlas,” “Hermes,” and “Eileithyia”) things only get worse, since the courtyard contains a whole rogues’ gallery of sculptures identified with figures from the Trojan Cycle as well as Philomela, Procne, Tereus, and others (§40). The untheorized nature of the connections between classical and non-classical deities is always a problem, wherever we find it; in a place like Roman Syria it also seriously obscures the extent to which classical culture had penetrated the region. Were any of these identifications accepted locally, and if so how do we know which ones – and by whom?