Fig. 7 is a representation of Atergatis on a medal coined at Marseilles. It shows that when the Phœnician colony from Syria, by whom that city was founded, settled there, they brought with them the worship of the gods of their country.
Atergatis was worshipped by the Greeks as Derceto and Astarte. Lucian writes[ [39] ]:—"In Phœnicia I saw the image of Derceto, a strange sight, truly! For she had the half of a woman, and from the thighs downwards a fish's tail." Diodorus Siculus describes (lib. ii.) the same deity, as represented at Ascalon, as "having the face of a woman, but all the rest of the body a fish's." And this very same image at Ascalon, which Diodorus calls Derceto, or Atergatis, is denominated by Herodotus[ [40] ] "the celestial Aphrodite," who was identical with the Cyprian and Roman Venus. Of all the sacred buildings erected to the goddess, this temple was by far the most ancient; and the Cyprians themselves acknowledged that their temple was built after the model of it by certain Phœnicians who came from that part of Syria.
Thus the worship of Noah, as the second father of mankind, the repopulator of the earth, passed through various phases and transformations till it merged in that of Venus, who rose from the sea, and was regarded as the representative of the reproductive power of Nature—the goddess whom Lucretius thus addressed:
"Blest Venus! Thou the sea and fruitful earth
Peoplest amain; to thee whatever lives
Its being owes, and that it sees the sun:"
and to whom refers the passage in the Orphic hymn:
"From thee are all things—all things thou producest
Which are in heaven, or in the fertile earth,
Or in the sea, or in the great abyss."
Under this latter phase—the impersonation of Venus—the fish portion of the body was discarded, and the cast-off form was allotted in popular credence to the Tritons—minor deities, who acknowledged the supremacy of the goddess, and were ready to render her homage and service by bearing her in their arms, drawing her chariot, etc., but who still possessed considerable power as sea-gods, and could calm the waves and rule the storm, at pleasure.
