Cingitur, interdum longâ trabe rectior exit.
This is but a poetical description of the circle and the avenues at Abury.
You have this same action of the heroes represented in some Tyrian coins: Cadmus is throwing a stone at a serpent. That of Gordian III. in Vaillant’s colony coins, vol. II. p. 217. Another of Gallienus, p. 350. The author quotes Nonnus’s Dionysiacs IV. reciting the history of his breaking a snake’s head with a stone. And he thinks those other Tyrian coins belong to this same history, as that p. 136, where a snake is represented as roll’d about a great stone.
I. A coin of Gordian III. Vaillant’s colon. II. p. 217. which the learned author adjudges to Cadmus. Another of Gallienus, p. 350. Both struck at Tyre.
II. A coin of the city of Tyre in Vaillant’s colon. p. 136, 147. The learned author says a stone and serpent is the symbol of Cadmus. The truth is, they regard Cadmus founding serpentine temples.
It was from the city of Sareptha that Europa was carry’d off; ’tis in the country of Sidon; and I apprehend, from the name of it, here was originally a serpentine temple. Sareptha is the serpent Ptha. I have an ancient coin of this city, in brass. A palm-tree on one side, a leopard’s face on the other, which refers to the wine here famous: of which the learned Reland in Palestina.
Conon, in his narration 37, gives us the origin of the greek fable of Cadmus’s men, the Phœnicians, springing out of the ground armed, for before then helmets and shields were unknown. Hence they were call’d Spartæ.
That these armed men sprung out of the ground upon sowing the serpent’s teeth, means our Hivites making a religious procession along the avenue of their serpentine temples on the great festival days, when they sacrific’d. We see a like procession of armed men, carv’d upon the temple of Persepolis in Le Brun’s prints. And Ovid calles a Bœotian, one of Cadmus’s people, Hyantius, III. v. 147. Strabo vii. writes, they took that name from their king Hyas, which is the same as Hivite. Pliny iv. 7. observes the Bœotians were so call’d anciently.
In the next book Met. iv. ver. 560. we have an account of Melicerta our Melcarthus and his mother deify’d: and of the Sidonian women their companions, some turn’d into stones, others into birds, for grieving at their fate. This seems to mean their building temples after some of the modes we have been describing, and that which is to follow [Chap. XVI.] near the sepulchres of heroes and founders of states; as was the custom of old: what we observed by Silbury-hill and Abury. For these temples were prophylactick, and a sacred protection to the ashes of the defunct. So we read in Virgil by Anchises’s tomb, Æneid V.