On the Syrian Gods

PREFACE.

...why should I revisit here the booklet On the Syrian Goddess original: περὶ τῆς Συρίας θεοῦ (peri tēs Syrias theou); a work traditionally attributed to Lucian of Samosata, or those things which you read everywhere in Ovid and elsewhere concerning Adonis, or other such matters that are hardly unknown? Of the solemn RITES in the sacred ceremonies, we intentionally include only those which are primarily peculiar to a specific Syrian God. For as for the constructed altars, the oxen, the sacrificed sheep bidentes: a term for sacrificial animals, usually sheep, that have reached the age where they have two prominent teeth, and other sacred rites held in common with the degenerate (as Prudentius Aurelious Prudentius Clemens, a Roman Christian poet of the 4th century says) offspring:

Whatever the dreadful Baal
had cooked in his glowing furnaces:

to have added such things here, what else would it have been than to have repeated the most over-recited trifles of the theater? For example, we pass over the custom of consecrating the first-fruits of hair to the Syrian Goddess, the practice of inscribing names, and other such things regarding her worship; this is both because Lucian—whose work is handled by everyone—has handed these things down in full measure as if from a bursting granary, and because for the most part they are nearly the same as those commonplaces you find in Greek Theology, or at least they are not so very different. Even the first-fruits of hair, which they called the first hair original: κόμην πρώτην (komēn prōtēn), were accustomed to be equally sacrificed to Asclepius, Phoebus, Bacchus, and other gods besides: Lear-