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Philo supports Eusebius’s argument that pagan polytheism is not a natural or an original state of affairs, but a human invention, originating with Egyptians and Phoenicians, which took the place of the less pernicious, but still misguided, worship of the luminaries and elements, when only certain Hebrews were instructed in the notion of a divine artificer of the universe (1.9.1–18). That the gods of the earliest peoples were the heavenly bodies and the elements is a view that can be traced back to the sophist Prodicus, is reflected in Plato, and became the classic position of the so-called Euhemerists who distinguished the natural, celestial gods from those who originated as human beings and were subsequently deified for their good services to humanity (Henrichs 1975: 109–115; Euhemerus Test. 25 Winiarczyk; Diod. Sic. 1.11–13). But Eusebius quotes Philo from two sources, both directly and via Porphyry, and Porphyry’s Philo seems rather different from Philo himself (Nautin 1949). Philo claimed to have translated Sanchuniathon, who had his material directly from the writings of a god, Taautos (Egyptian Thoth), which he had found hidden away apparently in a temple of Ammon (1.9.24, 26; Baumgarten 1981: 77–80). Porphyry’s Sanchuniathon, on the other hand, used civic traditions and priestly writings, apparently including one dedicated to a king and verified by his advisers (1.9.22; Baumgarten 1981: 56–57). In both cases, Philo is equipped with a venerable source. But Philo’s own version stresses that Sanchuniathon had uncovered ancient material free of the contaminating intellectual structures later imposed on it: Philo himself can thus overleap the intervening years of theological mystification and distortion – though the risk (for us) is that his work is untypical of mainstream Phoenician religious ideas.⁴ Porphyry’s Philo, on the other hand, uses civil traditions, rather than arcane and possibly idiosyncratic ones. Of course, we might still want to ask what is meant in this context by notions like mainstream and deviant; whether there was such a thing as a standard. But we might also want to distinguish between a city’s account of its religious life and the views of an individual with a particular ideological bias.