As to the religious rites of the Cappadocians, we know that they worshipped the god Men, who is called a moon-god, and a female deity, Mene, or Ma. On the Lycus, an affluent of the Iris, at Cabeira, stood the sanctuary of Men in the middle of large precincts; the sanctuary of Mene was at Comana, on the Iris, and was the oldest, richest, and most important sanctuary in the land. Ma, or Mene, was a war-goddess whom Greeks and Romans called Enyo and Bellona; to Strabo she is known as Artemis, and this name is evidence of her relation to the moon, no less than of her position as a war-goddess. That relation is confirmed by further evidence. Comana, says Strabo, is thickly populated; but the inhabitants are effeminate; the greater part are fanatics or religious maniacs, and there is also a number of women who serve the goddess with their bodies, of whom the greater part are dedicated to the temple. Here, twice in the year, the "Exodus of the Goddess" was celebrated. To this festival pilgrims, male and female, came from every side, and in frenzy and ecstasy performed certain sacred customs, which consisted partly in wounding themselves with swords, and partly in sensual excesses. In the south of Cappadocia, on the upper Sarus, there was a second city of Comana, which also possessed a sanctuary of Ma. Here, as at Comana on the Iris, six thousand servants are said to have attended upon Ma.[787] We know the tendencies of the Syrian worship, to bring man, by means of certain services, nearer to the deity to whom the services are performed, and make him resemble the peculiar nature of the deity whom he worships. The maidens who served the maiden goddess in her temples on the Pontus carried weapons like the goddess, and honoured her by dancing in armour.
Out of these armed maidens in the temples of Ma there grew up among the Greeks a peculiar and widely-developed legend—the legend of the warlike tribe of the Amazons. When the Greek colonists landed on the western coast of Asia Minor, they found, in the land of the Lydians, where they built Smyrna, Cyme, and Ephesus, seats of the worship of a goddess whom they compared to their Artemis, and whose attendants were eunuchs and armed maidens ([p. 556]). They next perceived that similar seats of worship were to be found in the East also, on the coasts of the Pontus. Thus the Homeric poems already placed the "Amazons equal to men" on the east of the Phrygians, and represented king Priam as meeting them with his men on the banks of the Sangarius.[788] As natives of Asia Minor the Amazons must have fought with the Trojans against the Greeks. Arctinus represented the Amazons as coming to Troy after the death of Hector, and distressing the Greeks till Achilles slew their queen, the beautiful "Penthesilea, the daughter of the dread, manslaying Ares." The cyclic poets knew the abode of the Amazons more accurately than Homer; they place them at Themiscyra, on the Thermodon;[789] and at this place Pindar represents them as drawing up their army. Æschylus also places the Amazons on the Thermodon;[790] according to Pherecydes the war-god begot the Amazons with Harmonia on the Thermodon.[791] We have seen that the Greeks gave the name Harmonia to Astarte, the moon-goddess of the Phenicians. When the Greeks at the time of Arctinus had founded Sinope and Trapezus in those regions, they believed that they were in the land of the Amazons; and Sinope was thought to have been previously inhabited by the Amazons.[792] The places at which the Greeks here founded a new home were thought to have been named and sanctified long before their arrival, not only by the voyage of the Argonauts, for Heracles, Theseus, and Peirithous were said to have set foot there, in order to perform their mighty deeds against the Amazons. At the command of Eurystheus Heracles had been compelled to bring the girdle from Hippolyte, the queen of the Amazons, for Admete. Theseus and Peirithous had carried off Antiope. Among the Phenicians, as we have seen, Baal-Melkarth looses the girdle of the moon-goddess; the Greeks transferred the legend of Melicertes to their Heracles. Even as early as the thirteenth or twelfth century B.C. the ships of the Phenicians had probably brought the worship of the warlike moon-goddess to the coast of Attica. At any rate, at a later time, tombs of the Amazons, i. e. abandoned seats of the worship of the Artemis of Syria and Asia Minor, were shown there. After the Attic territory was united under the rule of a military monarchy, of which, among the Ionians, Theseus was the embodiment, the Phenicians were driven back from the coasts of the Greeks: Theseus was said to have conquered the Minotaur and the Amazons. In order to establish the existence of Amazons in Attica, Theseus was said to have carried off Antiope. To avenge this wrong, the Amazons marched from their distant home on the Thermodon to Attica; and the Athenians considered it one of their greatest services towards their common fatherland that they had conquered the Amazons, "an enemy who threatened all Hellas."[793]
Out of these elements the Greeks framed a circumstantial history of the Amazons. Even among the historians, their home is the land of the Thermodon. Here the Amazons dwelt, according to Herodotus, Diodorus, and Strabo, and here, as Diodorus tells us, they offered splendid sacrifices to Ares and Artemis Tauropolus. Their first queen is said to have been the daughter of Ares, and she built the great city of Themiscyra; the second queen extended the dominion of the Amazons as far as Syria; and finally queen Myrina reduced the whole of Syria, and received the voluntary submission of the Cilicians.[794] It is obvious that the Amazons founded all the cities where the worship of the maiden war-goddess flourished or had ever existed. Roused by the crime of Theseus, they marched to the west, founded the sanctuary of Ephesus, where "they set up the image of the goddess under the trunk of an elm, and, armed with shields, danced the war-dance, so that their quivers sounded."[795] Then they marched to the north, and founded Smyrna, Myrina, and Cyme.[796] Analogous rites proved that they were also in Lesbos and Samothrace. Through Thrace and Thessaly, and finally across Eubœa, they are said to have marched to Attica; tombs of the Amazons were shown at Scotussa and Cynoscephalæ, in Thessaly, and at Chalcis, in Eubœa.[797] After returning home, the Amazons next marched to the aid of the Trojans, and were conquered by Achilles. When the Greeks had founded Cyrene on the coast of Attica, and found, among the Libyan tribes of the surrounding district, the worship of a female war-goddess—when they found the Libyan women wearing corslets of goatskins, they came to the conclusion that the Amazons once dwelt on the Tritonian lake in Libya.[798]
A nation of heroines was certainly never found by the Greeks on the Thermodon. On the other hand, they received accounts of the warlike queens of the Saces and Massagetæ, of Zarinæa, Sparethra, and Tomyris, who fought against the Medes and Persians; and on the coasts of the Black Sea, in the colonies of the Milesians, they heard of the riding, the archery, and hunting of the women of the Sauromatæ. Hence the Greeks resolved to make the Amazons the ancestors of the Sarmatians. They were represented as taking ship from the Thermodon across the Black Sea to the coast of the Mæotis, because here, in the Crimea, on the "promontory of the maiden," a cruel maiden goddess, who was also called Artemis Tauropolus by the Greeks, was worshipped. Herodotus, and after him Ephorus, tells us that the Amazons fled over the Pontus from the Thermodon, and landed on the shore of the Mæotis. Here they took the young men among the Scythians, who, according to Herodotus, were settled between the mouths of the Danube and the Don, as their husbands, and with them marched eastwards over the Tanais (Don), beyond which river and north of the Caucasus lay, according to Herodotus, the dwellings of the Sauromatæ, whom later writers call the Sarmatians. Hence the Sarmatian women still preserved the customs of the Amazons; they carried bows and javelins, and wore the same clothing as the men, sat on horseback, and rode with or without their husbands to the chase or to battle, and no maiden married till she had slain an enemy; "so that some never married at all, because they were unable to satisfy this rule." The language of the Sauromatæ was the same as the language of the Scythians, but they spoke it badly, because the Amazons had never perfectly learned it. These statements, and especially the assertion that the Sarmatian women fought as long as they were maidens, were repeated by Greek writers—in other respects very trustworthy—in the fifth and fourth century B.C. Others also maintained that the women were rulers among the Sarmatians.[799] Poetry and plastic art had stamped the legend of the Amazons so firmly on the Greeks that they could not break loose from it. Several of the historians of Alexander of Macedon tell us that the queen Thalestris, with 300 Amazons, sought out Alexander from a great distance, and made a proposal of marriage to him, on his return from Hyrcania,[800] a story which has perhaps arisen out of the fact that the satrap Atropates of Media sent 100 mounted women to Alexander.[801] When at a later time Pompey fought in the Caucasus, and women were found among the wounded, it was thought that the real Amazons were at last found;[802] and the story was now told that the Amazons dwelt northward of the Gelen (in Ghilan), on the southern foot of the Caucasus. In order to solve the difficulty of their propagation of the race, the story was invented that for two months in the spring they met the Gargareans—a neighbouring tribe—on the mountains by night, and associated with them, as accident might determine. The boys were then sent to the Gargareans, who brought them up in common; the daughters were retained by the Amazons.[803] In order to explain the name Amazon, which in Greek can mean "without a breast," the story was invented that they burnt off the right breast of the maidens, so that they might use the right arm better, and draw the bow—a story which Hippocrates had already told about the daughters of the Sarmatians.[804] On the monuments of plastic art the Amazons have both breasts; the older period represents them with a broad girdle, an ample robe, and a Phrygian cap, a crescent shield (the symbol of the moon-goddess), a bow, and a battle-axe. In later sculptures the Amazons, when they had been connected with the Scythians and the Sarmatians, were generally represented on horseback, in a Doric tunic, with naked arms and thighs, a helmet on the head, and a spear in the hand.
On the western slopes of the table-land of Asia Minor, in the river valleys of the Hermus and Mæander, the Lydians were settled. Their land reached from the sources of the Hermus in Mount Dindymon to the Ægean sea, from Messogis and Cadmus in the south to the Temnus range in the north. The valley of the Hermus was exuberantly fertile, and still more luxuriant was the vegetation in the district round the Gygæan lake. The mountain pastures supported herds of powerful horses and numerous flocks of sheep. The Pactolus brought sands of gold down from Tmolus; in the rocks of this range and its western continuation, Sipylus, rich veins of gold are said to have been found.[805]
But little has been preserved of the legendary accounts of the Lydians about their rulers in the earliest times. About the middle of the fifth century B.C. the Lydian Xanthus, the son of Candaules, wrote the history of his people in four books, in the Greek language. Of this some fragments have come down to us, which can here and there be supplemented by the statements of Herodotus. From both we learn that the Lydians traced back the origin of their royal house to the gods. Atys, the son of the god Manes, was the first sovereign of the Lydians; after him came his son Lydus, who gave the name to the people. From the brother of Lydus, whom Xanthus calls Torrhebus, and Herodotus Tyrsenus, the tribe of the Torrhebians or Tyrsenians was derived. The territory of the Torrhebi lay on the upper Cayster. From Asius, the son of Cotys, the son of Atys, sprang the tribe of the Asionæans, who inhabited the Asian meadow.[806] From Atys, their progenitor, the first king, his successors, the first house of Lydian kings, were called Atyads. Among the successors of Lydus the most pious and just was Alkimus. During his reign there was peace and quiet in Lydia; every man lived securely and without fear, and all things prospered. After him reigned king Akiamus, who sent Ascalus with an army to Syria. There Ascalus founded the city of Ascalon. After this, as Herodotus narrates, a lion was born to king Meles from his concubine, and this lion, in obedience to an oracle, he caused to be carried round the walls of Sardis, his metropolis, in order that they might be impregnable.[807] According to Xanthus, Meles, who was a tyrannous and cruel king, was overthrown by Moxus, a very just and brave man, after he had vowed to the gods that, in gratitude for their deliverance, the Lydians should henceforth offer to them a tenth of all their animals. Then Moxus marched to Syria, and there took Atargatis captive, with her son Ichthys (fish). As a punishment for her rebellion she was thrown into the lake of Ascalon, and eaten by the fish. Then king Cambletes reigned, who sacrificed his wife, and ate her, and then slew himself with his sword before all the people. After him Jardanus, who had been an enemy of Cambletes, ruled over Lydia.[808] Jardanus was followed by his daughter Omphale.[809] To avenge the insult which had been paid to her before she ascended the throne of Lydia, she compelled the maidens of the land to give themselves up to the slaves at an appointed place, and slew the strangers whom she entertained, when she had lain with them.[810] After Omphale, Tylon reigned, who died from the bite of a snake, but was again restored to life by a marvellous herb.[811] But with the slave-girl of Jardanus, according to Herodotus, or, according to others, with Omphale, Heracles begot Alcæus; the son of Alcæus was Belus; the son of Belus was Ninus, and the son of Ninus was Agron. With the accession of Agron the dominion of the Atyads came to an end, and that of the Heracleids commenced, who then continued to rule over Lydia for 505 years.[812]
Manes and Atys are already known to us as deities of the Phrygians; they must therefore have been worshipped by the Lydians also. Lydus, the second king of the land, is taken from the name of the nation. The prosperous, peaceful reign of the good king Alkimus is no doubt founded on some conception of an early happy age. The story of the lion of Meles obviously goes back to the relations in which the lion was placed, in the religious rites of the Syrians, to the sun-god, who was also worshipped with zeal by the Lydians. We learn from a Lydian that the name Sardis was given to the city in honour of the sun-god.[813] The coins of Sardis which have been preserved regularly present the image of a lion and a bull.[814] The vow of Moxus is intended to explain the blood-tithe, which we have already found in use among the tribes of Syria. Still more definite are the references to Syrian rites in the supposed marches of Moxus and Ascalus to Syria, and the prominent position of Atargatis[815] and the temple of Ascalon, and the children of Atargatis, the fish. We know Atargatis, the Astarte of the Assyrians, as transformed into Hera, and the temple at Ascalon, the city of the Philistines, as the oldest and most famous sanctuary of the Syrian goddess of fertility. The name of the king Jardanus does not differ from "jarden" (river), and if Omphale is said to have forced the maidens of the land to prostitute themselves at a fixed place, we have already found this prostitution in the worship of the Syrian goddess of birth and the Babylonian Mylitta. The new dynasty which ascends the throne of Lydia after the Atyads with Agron is again derived from a god, according to the accounts of the Greeks, from Heracles and Omphale. The Greeks narrated that Omphale carried the lion's skin and club of Heracles, and that she clothed the hero in a transparent female robe of scarlet, and caused him to card wool and spin as her slave.[816] Lydian coins exhibit a female form with the lion's skin and the bow.[817] It was shown above that the Greeks connected Melkarth (Melicertes) with their Heracles, and that according to the mythus of the Syrians, the sun-god finds and overpowers the moon-goddess; that after the holy marriage, the god on his part succumbs to the goddess, and changes his nature with her; he assumes the female nature, she the male; she carries the weapons, while he performs woman's work. We saw that the Syrians symbolised the pre-eminent nature, the unity of the deity, in this amalgamation of the sexes—this female manhood and male womanhood. Johannes Lydus tells us that the Lydians worshipped the sun-god under the name Sandon, and adds, that because Sandon had lived as a woman, the men at the mysteries of the god clothed themselves in women's clothes, and put on transparent crimson garments, coloured with vermilion.[818] Thus the Greeks put their hero in the place of the Lydian sun-god, who overwhelms the lion, and changes his nature with the goddess; and if they farther tell us that Omphale gave her love to strangers, but also slew all who lay with her, this also is a trait which had already met us in the Syrian Astarte, in the nature of Ashera-Astarte, which at one time grants the enjoyment of love, and at another brings destruction.
The result of these considerations proves that the traits of the Lydian legends, which have been preserved, present us with very little beyond mere mythical elements. The connection of the Lydian worship with the worship of the Syrians comes plainly to the surface, and this connection is confirmed by all that we know from other sources of the rites of the Lydians. The name of their sun-god Sandon[819] recurs on Assyrian monuments, where it appears as Sandan.[820] In the Semitic languages the word means "helper," and is used as an attribute of the god Adar, with whom we are already acquainted as the god of the planet Saturn.[821] It is obvious that the title "helper" could be given not to Adar only, but to any other god, from whom special favour and assistance might be expected. The Lydians gave the title to the good sun-god, who vanquishes the glowing heat—the terrible sun-god—who looses the girdle of the moon-goddess, and changes his nature with her. When the Greek colonists landed on the coast of Lydia, they at first recognised their own Apollo, i.e. their god of light, in the Lydian god. They allowed the sanctuary of the Lydian god at Miletus to remain in the hands of a family of native priests, the Branchidæ. As god of the country and protector of the coast, the Homeric poems give to Apollo the foremost place among the deities who defend Troy. The Lydians also on their side recognised the connection between their sun-god and the Apollo of the Greeks; Gyges and Crœsus send rich presents to Delphi. But when the Greeks of the coast became more accurately acquainted with the nature and the myths of the Lydian sun-god, that side which chiefly corresponded to their Heracles, and the image of Heracles developed under the influence of the Phenician Melkarth, came into prominence. The nature of the female goddess also, whom the Lydians chiefly worshipped, is beyond doubt. Herodotus tells us that all the daughters of the Lydians sold themselves, and in this way collected their dowries; others narrate that they received slaves or foreigners in the groves and porticoes of the temples.[822] As we have seen, tradition connects this prostitution with the rule of Omphale, and Johannes Lydus assures us that the goddess Blatta worshipped in Lydia was the same as the Mylitta of the Babylonians. Hence the worship of Bilit, the Ashera of the Syrians, prevailed also among the Lydians, a fact which the campaigns (already mentioned) of Ascalus and Moxus to the shrine of Derceto at Ascalon also prove. That this goddess of the Lydians was not without her destructive side—the power and nature of Astarte—we could already infer from the bloody acts of Omphale ([p. 562]). At the mouths of the Cayster and the Hermus the Greeks found the shrines of a goddess, whose priests were eunuchs, and who was at the same time honoured with dances in armour by maidens, as the moon and war-goddess of the Cappadocians.[823] This goddess of the coasts of Lydia was called by the Greeks Artemis, and this name distinguishes her as at once a maiden goddess and the goddess of the moon and of war. And if at the same time the image of Artemis of Ephesus was represented with large breasts, the obvious conclusion is that in the goddess of Lydia, as in the goddesses of Babylonia and Syria, the two opposites, of continence and sensual enjoyment, of fertility and of destruction, were united.
The forms of religious worship also would appear to have been in all essentials the same among the Lydians and the Syrians. Mutilation (which we know was practised very widely among the Lydians),[824] and the prostitution of girls, were common to both countries. We found above that the Arabs and Syrians believed their gods to be present in stones, and prayed to them in that shape. Not far from Magnesia on Sipylus, a stone, some twenty feet in height, juts out of a wall of marble, and this in ancient times must have been regarded with veneration as the idol of a native goddess. Even in the Homeric poems we find mention of this stone, and the legend connected with it by the Greek colonists. "I have seen the stone of Niobe on Sipylus," said Pausanias. "At a near view it is a fragment of stone, which does not look like a woman or a person weeping; but from a distance you might believe that you saw a weeping and mourning woman."[825]
The essential result of the examination of Lydian legend and Lydian worship is the obvious and very close relationship between the Lydian and Syrian deities and rites. Moreover, the mountain range which bounds the valley of the Mæander to the south, bears the Semitic name of Cadmus, i. e. "the Eastern;" and at the foot of the range lies the city of Ninoë (Nineveh, i. e. "to dwell.")[826] Again, from one side the languages of the Phrygians and Lydians are said to be distinctly different; on the other hand, most of the Lydian words which have been preserved to us by the Greeks—it is true they are not numerous—can be traced back to Semitic roots;[827] and the national genealogy of the Hebrews enumerates Lud among the sons of Shem, together with Elam, Asshur, Arphaxad, and Aram. Yet, so far as the Lydian language allows us to form an opinion, elements of a different character are not entirely wanting. The gods Manes and Atys, from whom the first royal house was derived, and after whom it was named, the goddess Cybele, whose temple stood at Sardis,[828] do not belong to the circle of Semitic deities. Manes, as well as Atys, we found in Phrygia. Hence, looking back at the connection between the Armenians, Phrygians, and Thracians, already brought into prominence we may suppose that the original population of the river valley of the Hermus was Phrygian, and that Semitic invaders from the east subjugated these Phrygians and absorbed them; but not without adopting on their part some elements of the Phrygian language and worship.