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The whole sequence of historiolae is, in itself, remarkable, for while series of exempla of pagan cults are, in themselves, commonplace in the apologists, they never offer a combination which is as wide-ranging, non-routine, and (especially in the case of Mabug) expansive as this. The range of reference bears a certain similarity to the accumulation of case-studies in Jacob of Sarug’s much later Homily on the Fall of the Idols (Martin 1875: 131–133), again both international and intensely local, but the eccentric Euhemerism and the narrative structures here are absent. The Mabug chapter is remarkable for another reason, for while it runs parallel to Lucian’s reports on the cultic semeion, “Apollo,” and the water-carrying festival in Hierapolis, it presents them from an entirely different perspective, with an alternative interpretatio graeca for Apollo (now Orpheus, presumably on account of the statue’s lyre) and an overall Zoroastrian coloration in which the gods are presented as wonder-working magi. We have yet another reminder of the multi-interpretability of Near Eastern cults – and yet another opportunity to ponder the question whether our élite, idiosyncratic, highly interpreted literary sources represent anything that was recognizable to any constituency of the participants in the cults they describe.