Читать книгу A Companion to the Hellenistic and Roman Near East онлайн

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Although there are cosmogonies where divine beings precede (or accompany) the emergence of the physical structure of the universe, and cosmogonies which culminate in the emergence of man, it is a consequence of the Euhemerism of the present treatise that humans must precede gods. The argument depends on the mortal origins of the gods, and so the technogony is followed, rather than preceded, by a theogony. Despite its placement, this section in fact has much in common with Hesiod and with other succession myths telling of the origin of the present divine order. Its very structuredness gives pause for thought. What it offers is a series of divine generations whose best parallels are not, in fact, the Ugaritic myths (which concentrate on just the two generations of El and of Baal), but the Kumarbi story and, still more, the Hesiodic version, in which the succession is from father to son, and in which female deities have a role in every generation. In fact the father-to-son succession is not easy to parallel outside Hesiod himself, so that when we find it again in Philo, we wonder how faithfully he represents Phoenician mythology, and how much he owes specifically to Hesiod – whom he mentions by name (ironically, as one of the others blamed for travestying the original truths of religion, 1.10.40). Philo concentrates on the three generations of Elioun-Hypsistos, Ouranos, and Cronos, after whom the scheme peters out in a succession of minor figures. Hesiod has three major figures as well, though he begins with Ouranos and ends with Zeus, who in Philo features passim in various local forms, but not as the culmination of the scheme. But Philo’s and Hesiod’s Ouranos are very alike (both hostile to their children, among whom Cronos leads an uprising), and so are their portraits of Cronos (dethrones his father, marries his sister Rhea, is hostile to his children, castrates his father in an ambush – although in Philo it takes place in an attempted uprising by his father some time after Ouranos’s deposition).

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