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Where fun does enter into it, at last, is with the narrator’s fixation with phalli and phallicism. The two columns in the temple propylaea are phalli, inscribed as such by Dionysus (§16); later we learn that they are 300 fathoms high, and that a man climbs up one of them every year and remains sleepless on the top for seven days for fear a scorpion will bite him (§28). Both the live human climber and a phallic bronze statue inside the temple (§16) are compared (apparently) to carved wooden marionettes mounted on a phallus pole. This is a romp through the phallicism of Herodotus’s Egypt, specifically through his account of the cult of “Dionysus” (Osiris), which also features phallic processions and jointed wooden marionettes (2.48–49). But the anchor there (Osiris ~ Dionysus) is missing here; what in Hierapolis is “Dionysus” supposed to represent? And what in the world are we to make of the startling 1800-feet-high erections in the temple courtyard?

The complications do not end even here, because at the beginning the narrator tells us he is himself an Assyrian, and at the end that he has been, since boyhood, a devotee of the temple. The result is that we get a double perspective, of outsider looking in, and of local possessed of “insider” knowledge. Hierapolis was not, in fact, a terribly remote or mysterious location; previously in Seleucid territory, it became part of the Roman province created by Pompey in 64 BCE; the city begins to be registered in Hellenistic texts, its goddess and religious practices begin to glimmer in the consciousness of classical writers well before that (Xanthus of Lydia, FGrH 765 F 17a; Ctesias, F 1b (4, 20, 2); Xen. Anab. 1.4.9). But both the specialist monograph and, still more, the Herodotean stance, position the goddess and her cult before us as an exotic “other,” about which we are to be informed and entertained. In practice we are never really offered a perspective other than that of the wide-eyed, credulous, phallically fixated tourist – but briefly at the beginning, and more strongly again at the end, the reversal of perspective teases us with the possibility of more intimate insights, those of a devotee whose youthful lock of hair resides in one of the caskets of precious metal affixed to the interior of the temple.