Читать онлайн "Jews and Greeks in ancient Cyrene" - Эпплбаум Шимон - RuLit

It may be assumed that the small Greek settlement found its first foothold on the hill of the Acropolis,[40] and the community’s weakness and isolation no doubt compelled its pioneers to find an accommodation with the Libyan natives. Marriages with Libyan women are indeed alluded to in several later sources.[41] Some scholars have believed that Battus is a Libyan word,[42] mainly since the first king of Cyrene had another name, Aristoteles[43], and Herodotus says explicitly that Battus meant ‘king’ in Libyan.[44] This would mean that his royal status was acquired under the influence of Libyan neighbours, and that the name itself subsequently engendered the story of his stammer (βατταρίζειν, to stammer).[45] Schafer however thinks that the personal name, Battus, became a synonym of “king” among the Libyans, an idea finding support in the fact that Arkesilaos, the name alternating with Battus among the subsequent Battiad kings, also relates etymologically to the functions of a monarch.[46] Whatever the case, Herodotus emphasizes the mutual influence between the people of Cyrene and the neighbouring Libyan tribe, the Asbystae, who taught them to drive the four-horse chariot and themselves adopted Greek customs.[47] On the other hand various traditions, which are difficult to authenticate, point to conflicts between the Greeks and their Libyan neighbours in the city’s early period.[48]

Battus I was seen by the Cyreneans as the founder of the city’s cults. In this he may have been assisted by one Onymastos of Delphi,[49] whose part in the drafting of the religious law of Cyrene in its earliest period may reflect the great influence of the Oracle on the cults of the new settlement. But generally it would seem that Battus discharged the duties of king and high priest simultaneously. The steadiness of the city’s cultic development, indeed, is demonstrated by the building of the temples of Apollo and Artemis in the middle of the 6th century,[50] and of the small shrine of Opheles, a deity of healing, in the Agora during the last quarter of the 7th[51] South of the Acropolis across the Wadi bel Gadir which defends the city on that side, the temenos of Demeter may have existed already a generation after the first settlement.[52]

But if the Temple of Apollo was really erected as late as the middle of the 6th century, this is contrary to the tradition that Battus I built it, or that here there burned the fire brought from Thera,[53] since the tumulus identified with the king’s burial place was dated in the first quarter of the same century. The Temple of Apollo, nevertheless, appears to have been the ancient prytaneum of the city,[54] later transferred to the Agora. The initial identity of the prytaneum and the temple indicates the unity of the functions of government and cult characteristic of the archaic community. The building of the Temple of Apollo, which required means and technical skill, relatively soon after the settlement’s foundation, is a measure of Cyrene’s progress, of the growth of its population and the improvement of its economic condition, and the building’s erection was accompanied by that of the Temple of Artemis. The Temple of Apollo’s plan can be paralleled in the same period in Sicily, in Magna Graecia and in the Peloponnesus; but the nearest parallel is that of the Temple of Hera at Olympia.[55] The closest analogy to Artemis’ shrine is to be found in the temples of Gortyn and Prinia of Crete and in the archaic temples of Sparta.[56]

Battus I was known not only as the founder of cults, but also as the maker of the rockcut processional way described by Pindar[57] It is not clear if the road leading from the Acropolis to the Agora, where the city founder’s tomb has been allegedly found,[58] is meant, or whether it should rather be sought in the rockcut way descending from the north side of the Acropolis hill to the Sanctuary of Apollo. As Pindar, immediately after mentioning the rockcut road, continues: “And here he (Battus) lies since his death, at the end of the Agora”, scholars have inclined to the first view, and Stucchi[59] regards the matter as settled, since the King’s tomb was identified, in his opinion, at the south-east corner of the latter. It must however be observed that the road connecting the Acropolis with the Agora is not rockcut. Attention should in any case be directed to the three rockcut tombs in the northern cliff face of the Acropolis hill over the rockcut road to the Sanctuary, since according to Pindar, Battus I was buried apart (δίχα) in the Agora, whereas the other kings were laid to rest “before the palace”[60] (προ δομάτων).[61] Tombs of archaic type are also to be found in the gorge that separates the Acropolis from the city’s eastern hill, south-west of the Acropolis over Wadi bel-Gadir, and north-eastward in the Wadi el-Kenassiyeh near the road going down to Apollonia. This topographical distribution may confirm the supposition that the nucleus of the oldest settlement centred on the western hill.

Of the reign of Arkesilaos I, Battus’ successor, we only know the length — sixteen years.[62] His son Battus II, therefore, succeeded about 599 B.C. He utilized the good offices of the Delphic Oracle to bring new settlers to the city, under the slogan of “equal rights and the distribution of land”,[63] chiefly — to judge from the tribal division later introduced by the reformer Demonax of Mantinea — from Peloponnesus, Crete and the Aegean Islands. Subsequently during the 6th century, when Cyrene’s first inscribed coins appear, they elicit the influence of Samos, Rhodes and Cyprus.[64] Excavated pottery reveals trade contacts with Thera, Corinth, Athens, Laconia Rhodes, Chios, Ionia and even Syria and Sardis[65] in the 7th-6th centuries. During the 6th century the Cyrenean treasury was set up at Olympia, and if it is the smallest of the treasuries there, it is nevertheless the oldest.[66] The earliest Cyrenean coins, known from about 560, were modelled on the famous Athenian “owls”, but bore Cyrene’s symbols.[67] The form of the silphium plant appears on the obverse of all of them from the first,[68] showing that it already formed a significant if not the principal, source of the city’s wealth. There may also be evidence of early building activities on the city’s eastern hill, where, north of the later Temple of Zeus, an archaic shrine would appear to have been found by Smith and Porcher;[69] here an archaic monolithic columnshaft, closely resembling those of the 6th-century Temple of Apollo in the Sanctuary, was observed by the writer. If this hill is the hill of Zeus Lykaeos (οχθος Δίος Λυκαίου) mentioned by Herodotus,[70] it was still outside the city walls at the end of the 6th century, as the Persian army encamped on it; the connection of Zeus Lykaeos with the Peloponnesus might give reason to suppose that here an altar in the god’s honour was consecrated at the time of the second wave of settlement under Battus II.