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Philo of Byblos was born in the time of Nero and lived at least until the reign of Hadrian (Suda f 447; Baumgarten 1981: 32–35), on whose reign he wrote a monograph. The Suda, which calls him a grammatikos, mentions also works on bibliography and on famous men and their cities, and Eusebius quotes from a monograph on the Jews. It is also Eusebius who quotes excerpts from his most important work, the Phoenician History (in what follows, citations are by chapter number in Eusebius).

Philo presented his work as a “translation” into Greek of the ancient Phoenician writings of Sanchouniathon (1.9.20),² and it was as a translator that he was cited by Porphyry, who pressed him into service in his attack on the Christians (1.9.21, 30). We hear of other Greek translations of Phoenician arcana (FGrH 784, Mochos/Laitos), but it is less reassuring to reflect on the numerous classical writers who appeal to ancient documents, especially priestly records, for self-promotional reasons (Baumgarten 1981: 80; Fehling 1989: 172–173); such writers include Leon of Pella, Hecataeus of Abdera, and Euhemerus, all of whom rationalize the gods’ origin in the same way as Philo. We are also dealing with an attempt by a non-Greek people to explicate their own traditions, in Greek, to a Greek readership (compare Berossos, on whom see ssss1, or the Egyptian priest Manetho) – save that Philo went beyond self-assertion and positively attacked the Greeks for having obfuscated the original, “true” doctrines of the Phoenicians.³ As a native exegete of indigenous traditions in the Greek idiom to Greeks, Philo also forms a loose counterpart to the narrator of DDS. But whereas the one hijacks the voice of a Greek literary celebrity, the other appeals to a native source supposedly predating the Trojan War (1.9.21). Philo trades on the Phoenicians’ reputation as one of the Near Eastern peoples whose archival records went back to remote antiquity (Joseph. Ap. 1.8).