1 Introduction

Among divinities conjured in the ancient imagination, the cult of the goddess Cybele and her paramour Attis has inspired possibly more attention than most in the works of Hellenistic and Roman poets and literary commentators,¹ Christian and polytheist apologists,² and modern scholars.³ These all have responded to the emotionally charged story of Cybele’s relationship to Attis, which has been seen as the theme of a passion play ritually enacted by her eunuch priests, the galloi. The elements of their story resonate in a general way with other, more ancient cult practices attested in the Near East, prompting a wide range of speculation, both scholarly and devotional, about the antiquity and origin of this image of a great goddess.

Here I narrow the focus to the first millennium BCE, and more specifically to the period between the sixth and the third centuries when, as I will argue, the figure of Attis (or Atys or Ates, as the name occurs in various epichoric forms⁴ ) emerged in the rituals of the goddess Matar in Phrygia and Kybebe in Lydia, becoming the familiar consort of Cybele, or the Mother of the Gods as she was most commonly known among the Greeks.⁵ The development that I trace here is thus the background to the more widely familiar image of Cybele and Attis of the later Hellenistic and Roman world, a period in which the mythic narrative of their cult took on features that were not always essential to the meaning and appeal of their earlier cult.

2 The Ritual Background

The Hellenistic and Roman cult of Cybele and Attis is widely recognized as one of the cults of the eastern Mediterranean and Near East whose central drama revolves around the love of a powerful goddess for her mortal darling, whose death plunges the goddess into grief that must be ritually assuaged by her devotees. The drama is known as early as the third millennium BCE in the Sumerian story of the love of Inanna, later Akkadian Ishtar, for her herdsman and prince, Dumuzi.⁶ It is represented in the biblical reference to the Queen of Heaven, probably Phoenician or Canaanite Astarte, who loses her beloved Tammuz.⁷ This in turn is reflected in the myth of Aphrodite and her Adonis attested in Phoenicia, Syria, and Cyprus.⁸ The drama of Aphrodite and Adonis appears in royal ritual in Ptolemaic Egypt, where also the tradition of Isis and the loss and recovery of her spouse, Osiris, provides another manifestation of the motif.⁹

Common to all of these “dying lover of the goddess” themes is the fact that, in story and in ritual, the beloved is not one of the gods but a mortal who becomes the object of divine affection, and therefore deserves the adoration of all who share in this ritualized imagination. All of these cultic and mythic forms, therefore, represent aspects of a yearning for humanity to engage the affection of divinity and thereby secure divine beneficence. The myth and its ritual reflection was articulated variously, according to the cultic traditions of the celebrant communities.

The best attested and also oldest form of this archetypal relationship promoted kingship as the focus of divine affection. Ritual rhetoric of the later third and early second millennium BCE represents Sumerian kings as the sexual partners of Inanna, whose love assures their rulership and with it the fertility and prosperity of their lands and people.¹⁰ Such a relationship was maintained metaphorically by Mesopotamian kings of the first millennium who represented themselves as beloved by Ishtar, or even as children of Ishtar (or one of her hypostases).¹¹ In rare instances the participation of a king in rituals as the spouse of the goddess is actually attested.¹² Mutatis mutandis, the same relationship was represented by the pharaohs of Egypt, who were celebrated as the living embodiment of Horus, the son of Isis, and the imagination of their eternally regenerating relationship was analogous to the desired stability and fertility of life-giving Nilotic lands.¹³

Analogy is identical with efficacy to those who upheld these traditions, and prosperous times reinforce the image that the rituals, and the songs and stories that accompany them, express fundamental truths about the basis of life and the legitimacy of kingship. Prosperity and good fortune are fickle, however, and so kings whose aura of legitimacy depended in large part upon fortune made a considerable investment in the arts of divination, to foresee dangers, and in the arts of propitiation, to avert them.¹⁴ Misfortune, especially as it might be experienced through famine, disease, or war, signified a rupture of the bonds of affection between the king and the gods, a consequence of the unwillingness or inability of the goddess, his chief advocate and intercessor among the gods, to act on his behalf. Such a change of fortune could be seen as a consequence of human fallibility, manifested either by the neglect or mismanagement of the rituals that were intended to secure divine affection.¹⁵

Human fallibility is always compounded by mortality. The death of a king marks an inevitable moment of insecurity in the relationship between humankind and the divine. The goddess has lost her darling (lover or son, depending on the prevalent motif).¹⁶ This is an anxious moment, requiring demonstrative mourning to show that the community shares the grief of the goddess, and requiring a successor to demonstrate that he is invested with all necessary attributes to be the new darling of the goddess. Ritual preparations could make this transition as smooth as possible. But an unexpected death or a contested succession would entail a far greater degree of instability and anxiety as much in theological terms as in social and political realities. Such destabilizing events would require the eventual successor to propagate the message that all had been made well between the king and the gods. Examples of such episodes in the era of Near Eastern kingship under consideration here include the death in battle of the Assyrian king, Sargon II, the struggle for succession after the assassination of Sennacherib, and the struggle for succession that brought Darius I to the Persian throne.¹⁷

3 The Lydian Context

In the absence of so rich a documentary record as has survived from Mesopotamia, among the Lydians we are left to infer the existence of similar beliefs and practices as they relate to kingship. Given that the Mermnad Lydian court was in correspondence with the Assyrian court from the time of Gyges, that a diplomatic marriage was arranged through Babylonian mediation between the courts of Alyattes and Cyaxares of Media, and that Nabonidus of Babylon was an ally of Croesus, it should be assumed that much in the ideology of kingship was common among these monarchies.¹⁸ Herodotus reports a tradition indicating that these ties between Lydia and Mesopotamia were established long before the rise of the Mermnad Lydian dynasty in the early seventh century.¹⁹ This is entirely plausible, given that a community of belief and practice between Mesopotamia and Anatolia was well established by the Late Bronze Age.²⁰

Understanding, then, that the legitimacy of Lydian kingship must have been represented in ritual rhetoric and practice in ways that were generally analogous to the attested practices of contemporary Mesopotamia, we can recognize evidence for these practices in the testimony of Greek sources.

The earliest reference to royal Lydian power and privilege, a much-quoted tag from Archilochus about the tyranny of Gyges, refers to the wealth of the Lydian king and to his involvement in the “doings of the gods” (θεῶν ἔργα).²¹ As vague as this is, it indicates that Greeks were aware that Lydian kingship involved rituals in which the king interacted in some personal manner with gods, a feature of kingship well attested in the ritual rhetoric of Assyria and Babylonia.²² Divination and propitiation are predominant features of Herodotus’ narrative of Mermnad Lydian history, from the kingship of Gyges, whose usurpation of power was justified by oracular pronouncements, through the famous sequence of oracular consultations that make up the core of Herodotus’ narrative about the kingship of Croesus. The fact that the oracles consulted by Gyges, Alyattes, and Croesus according to Herodotus were chiefly Greek, and that they foreground especially the oracle of Pythian Apollo at Delphi, certainly reflects Hellenic pride appropriate to Herodotus’ primarily Greek audience. But that should not lead us to discount these reports as Greek inventions.²³ Herodotus also reports prophecies received by Croesus from indigenous sources,²⁴ and we may presume that dream interpreters lay behind Herodotus’ account of an ominous dream of Croesus, just as seers of the Lydian court must have had a role in expounding the dream of Gyges that was reported to Ashurbanipal.²⁵ These patterns are typical of the institutions of prognostication associated with the Assyrian and Babylonian courts. In sum, it is reasonable to consider that the oracular pronouncements attested by Herodotus involving the legitimacy of succession,²⁶ the appeasement of gods,²⁷ and the righteousness of war²⁸ are entirely characteristic of the practices associated with kingship in contemporary Assyria and Babylonia.

4 Croesus and the Death of Atys

Herodotus’ portrayal of Croesus of Lydia develops the theme of a king who, despite his great wealth and the lavish attention he devotes to securing divine support, cannot avert his fated fall. Before narrating the main sequence of events leading to the capture of Sardis by Cyrus, Herodotus devotes considerable space to the story of the death of Croesus’ son, Atys. This story has no connection to Herodotus’ broader theme of the growth of Lydian power and the imperial ambitions of Croesus, but it serves to foreshadow the theme of the inevitable fate of Croesus himself.

As Herodotus narrates, after being warned in a dream that his son would die by the point of a spear, Croesus arranged to keep his son away from martial activities by detaining him in a marriage. In the course of a ceremony that must have transpired over several days, the report of a wild boar devasting a distant part of the king’s land reaches Croesus. After some debate, Croesus agrees to allow his son to display his valor and to lead the hunt. In the event, Atys is accidentally killed by the spear-cast of his companion. The narration ends with Croesus burying Atys “according to custom,” after which Atys’ companion, weighed down by guilt, commits suicide on his grave.²⁹

The story of Atys and his death in a boar hunt has been described by commentators as a “novella,” a mini-drama that conforms to the narrative conventions of Greek tragedy, and as such it has been regarded as an embellishment of a local tradition if not an outright invention by Herodotus of a story to heighten his depiction of Croesus as a tragic figure.³⁰ It can be shown, however, that Herodotus’ story of Atys follows a pattern of heroizing elite rulers displayed on funerary monuments in Lydian lands. These monuments of the Achaemenid era typically display a marriage scene and a hunting scene, often a boar hunt, as signs of the status of the deceased (see Figure 1).³¹ Herodotus’ story of Atys is constructed around exactly these episodes.

View Full Size

Funerary stele from Ҫavuşköy (Daskyleion area). Late fifth–early fourth century BCE. Istanbul Archaeological Museum 1502

Citation: Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 25, 2 (2025) ; 10.1163/15692124-12341355

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

Herodotus has recast for his own narrative purposes the memorable aspects of the life and death of Atys based on the imagery still to be seen a century after the death of the crown prince. The grave of Atys, prepared “according to custom” Herodotus says, was certainly a monumental tumulus, a symbol, like the great tumulus that Croesus prepared for his father, Alyattes, of the massive scale of mourning devoted to the deceased son of the king.³² The tumulus of Atys has been plausibly identified with the mound known locally as Karnıyarık Tepe, a grand tumulus second in size only to that of Alyattes among the tumuli in the Hermos valley by Sardis.³³ The heroic and, as we will see, also sacral status of Atys was almost certainly represented on a stele showing him in two scenes, one as a partner in a marriage ceremony and another as a noble hunter, in the manner displayed on numerous elite funerary stelae starting a generation after the death of Atys.³⁴

Although no such stele from the Lydian period has survived, a near contemporary reference to it can be recognized in a fragment of the poetry of Hipponax of Ephesus. Hipponax remarks on the royal tumuli of the Lydians as conspicuous features along the way through the Hermos valley toward Smyrna.³⁵ Among them he singles out a “stele and monument of Tos” (στήλην καὶ μνῆμα Τῶτος), giving an otherwise unrecognized name, possibly corrupt in the transmitted text, which has been conjecturally emended as μνῆμα τῶτυος (= μνῆμα τὸ Ἄτυος), “the monument of Atys.”³⁶ Whether this is correct or not, Hipponax certainly attests to the presence of a conspicuous stele on a Lydian monument which must have been set up in the time of Croesus. Writing just over a century after Hipponax, Xenophon of Athens made a point of mentioning a prominent tumulus near Sardis, on which was a stele depicting a man and a woman whose names were inscribed in “Syrian letters” (nominally a description of Aramaic, but possibly also describing a Lydian text).³⁷ Xenophon mentions this stele as evidence for his fictionalized story of a noble king and the love of his wife who both died at the time of Cyrus’ conquest of Lydia. As we will see, monumental tumuli near Sardis were associated with other stories of celebrated love. It is probable that the stele that Xenophon claims is “still to be seen” was in origin the memorial to Atys and his bride.

5 Atys in Phrygia

Atys the son of Croesus was a historical person. We cannot take most details of Herodotus’ narrative as reliable history, however, since they were plainly derived from the heroic archetype that became a conventional pattern for depicting the elite dead in Lydian lands. Nor can we be sure that he actually died in the course of a boar hunt, since this account was probably an inference from his representation as a hunter on his funerary monument. We can be sure, however, that he celebrated a marriage because he produced a son before his premature death. Pythius, the son of Atys, a Lydian reputed to be “the wealthiest man in the world” after the Persian king, is said by Herodotus to have been host to both Darius and Xerxes in their visits to Lydia.³⁸ His great wealth comports with his likely status as Lydian royalty reduced to Persian vassalage.³⁹ Pythius may have enjoyed his favored status as a loyal vassal of the Persians in part out of respect for the sacral status of his father, Atys, a status that Croesus had done much to create, beginning with the name by which his son was known.

Atys bore a name that had a long legacy in both Lydia and Phrygia. Herodotus reports that an ancestral Atys was the father of Lydus, who gave his name to the Lydians.⁴⁰ This legendary Atys was also said to be the father of Car, eponym of the Carians, of Mysus, eponym of the Mysians, and of Tyrsenos, eponym of the Tyrsenoi.⁴¹ Regardless of the authenticity or distortion of ethnic and linguistic relations among the Anatolian peoples represented in this tradition, it most likely was an account propagated by the Mermnad Lydians, likely by Croesus himself (who had a Carian mother), in order to represent an ancestral unity among the peoples of western Anatolia that he and his father, Alyattes, had brought under Lydian sway.⁴²

Within this ancestry, the connection with Phrygia is especially notable.⁴³ Atys the father of Lydus was said to be the son of Manes, and both Manes and Atys are names with strong connections to Phrygia. Manes, besides being a popular moniker for Phrygian slaves among the Greeks, is widely attested in Phrygia as well as in Lydia and elsewhere in Anatolia.⁴⁴ The name Atys, with variant forms, both geminated (Αττας, Αττης, Αττις) and ungeminated (Ατας, Ατες, Ατης, Ατις, Ατυς), is also widely attested, occurring in Phrygia at least as early as the eighth century.⁴⁵ Atys/Ates/At(t)as is a Lallname, probably meaning “father,” just as Attis, the deified hero, is also called Papas, “father,” according to some sources.⁴⁶ In light of the prominence of this name (or title) in Phrygia and the significance of Atys son of Manes in the ancestry of Lydian rulers, it appears that the name given by Croesus to his son and heir was intended to identify him as the king-to-be of a kingdom that embraced all the peoples represented by the eponymous sons of the legendary Atys, with special emphasis on his Phrygian heritage. The reason for privileging Atys’ connection with Phrygia in this vision of imperial destiny was to associate him with the reputation of the great King Midas as the ruler of the peoples of Asia.⁴⁷

At the high point of Lydian power under Alyattes and Croesus, archaeological evidence reveals a strong Lydian presence at Gordion, the former royal citadel of Phrygian King Midas.⁴⁸ Contemporary with this period of revival and prosperity at Gordion, in the highlands west of Gordion that formed the headwaters of the Sangarius river, a series of monumental rock-cut facades was created to honor the goddess known in Phrygian as Matar.⁴⁹ The most impressive and famous of these facades is the Yazılıkaya, commonly known as the Midas Monument after the dedicatory inscription above its face. The association of Midas with the Phrygian goddess is reinforced by the names of Midas and Matar inscribed in the monumental niche of the façade, where once a statue of the Phrygian Matar stood. The dedication in the Phrygian language to Midas was made in the name of Ates.⁵⁰

The Midas Monument was almost certainly created during the reign of Croesus, and the dedicant, Ates, can hardly have been anyone other than his son, Atys.⁵¹ The prominence of this Ates at the greatest of the Phrygian facades, and at a site that, like Gordion, preserves clear evidence of an official Lydian presence,⁵² strongly suggests that this was a monument dedicated by the son of Croesus to the numinous memory of the great Midas, in a shrine of epiphany for the Phrygian Matar, the goddess whom later tradition identified as the mother of Midas.⁵³ The Midas Monument, in other words, should be seen as evidence that Atys, the son of Croesus, was invoking the powers of kingship that had been manifest in the great Midas, who is called lawagetas, “leader of the host,” and vanakt(s) “lord” in Ates’ inscription. By doing this, Ates (Atys the Lydian) was also associating himself with the great goddess of Phrygia, the divinity who had endowed the great Midas with a memorable kingship.⁵⁴

Elements of this association of Attis with Midas and the conflation of his Lydian and Phrygian identity are clearly present in the later Hellenistic accounts of Attis, the beloved of Cybele, or the Mother of the Gods.⁵⁵ Already within Herodotus’ story, the close connection between Atys and the legacy of Phrygian royalty is attested. Atys in Herodotus’ story met his fate accidentally by the hand of a Phrygian of royal ancestry, Adrastus son of Gordias and grandson of Midas (a later bearer of the famous dynastic name).⁵⁶ Adrastus had been assigned by Croesus to be the protector of his son, and the implication of this association between the son of Croesus and the house of Midas is consonant with the evidence of the Midas Monument. In Herodotus’ telling, Croesus welcomed Adrastus when he came as a suppliant to Sardis, saying, “All of your family are friends to us, and you have arrived among friends.”⁵⁷ Adrastus in this story had come to Sardis as an exile, having killed his brother, and he was granted a ritual purification by Croesus, which Herodotus notes was similar to the customs of purification observed by the Greeks.⁵⁸ That Atys met his fate at the hand of this Phrygian, Adrastus, may be an embellishment of the story by Herodotus or his source, but the Phrygian connection has plausibility. Herodotus is quite specific about the ritual that invoked the highest divine power, that of Zeus, to sanction the bond between the Phrygian and the household of Croesus, and so it is not improbable that within the testimony gathered by Herodotus was the memory of the performance of a ceremonial union between these royal lines. The Midas Monument would be a plausible setting for such a ceremony. Herodotus’ telling of story highlights the irony of the fact that Adrastus, a Phrygian of royal descent, was the one who brought Atys to his fated end despite all of the elaborate ritual measures taken by Croesus to integrate the Phrygian into his household and to charge him with protecting his favored son. Irony would be thematic in the memory of Atys even outside of Herodotus’ telling, given the prominence of the measures taken by Croesus to invest his son and heir in the legacy of the great Phrygian king, Midas.

6 The Sacred Marriage of Atys

In Herodotus’ account, Atys was involved in a marriage ceremony that lasted for several days. As described above, this element of Herodotus’ story derives from the depiction of a wedding on the funerary monument of Atys, the representation of a symbolic union that became an archetypal image on heroizing funerary monuments in the generations immediately after Atys’ lifetime. Royalty implied a sacral status, as Archilochus indicates when he refers to the Lydian tyrant’s involvement with the “doings of gods.”⁵⁹ As an essential feature of royal legitimacy, the achievement of sacral standing had to become known, and this was represented by the ceremony and imagery indicating that the king, or king-to-be, was the object of the erotic affections of a goddess of sovereign power. His marriage, in other words, bound him to a woman who represented this goddess, and who was therefore invariably praised for her incomparable beauty. Among Near Eastern kingdoms of the first millennium we find this ideological relationship represented both in prophetic rhetoric and ritual practice.⁶⁰ The divine protector and mother of kings in Assyria was Ishtar, often invoked in one of her many local hypostases, such as Mullissu or Tašmetu.⁶¹ In Lydia she was Kybebe (Lydian Kuvav-), whom Herodotus identifies as “a local goddess” at Sardis, and whom the Greeks knew as Aphrodite among the Phrygians and Lydians.⁶² The love of this goddess for her mortal consort represented kingship itself, a metaphorical relationship that is amply attested in the stories of the kings of Lydia related by Greek sources.

The royal citadel at Sardis was founded by King Meles, who carried a lion around the circuit of its walls, as Herodotus tells the tale. The lion, he notes, was borne to him by his unnamed concubine (παλλακή).⁶³ As the sexual partner of the king, and a woman who endowed him with a symbol of kingship, this woman can be seen as an avatar of a goddess of kingship. When Gyges later assumed the kingship of Lydia, in Herodotus’ account, he did so by slaying Candaules the king and marrying his wife, who was reputed to be “far the most beautiful of women.”⁶⁴ Another version of the story of Gyges told by Xanthus of Lydia also involved Gyges slaying the king and marrying his bride-to-be.⁶⁵ Clearchus of Soli, author of Erotica, recounted that Gyges was so enamored of the woman to whom he owed his rulership that after she died he had all the people of Lydia build her a tumulus, which “still today is known as the Courtesan’s Monument” (τὸ νῦν ἔτι καλούμενον τῆς Ἑταίρας μνῆμα).⁶⁶ The designation of the woman loved by Gyges, presumably the former wife of Candaules, as a “courtesan” is the conventional translation of the Greek, hetaira, which could also and perhaps more appropriately be translated here as “companion,” which was an epithet of Aphrodite in the realm of the Lydians.⁶⁷ The tumulus that Xenophon identifies as the monument of a heroic king was also the burial place of his wife, Pantheia, “All-divinity,” reputed to be “the most beautiful woman in Asia.”⁶⁸ Pantheia’s beauty was indirectly responsible for Cyrus’ victory over Croesus, in Xenophon’s romantic narrative, as love for her inspired her husband to give his life fighting heroically in battle for Cyrus. Finally, another erotic encounter was said to have enabled Cyrus to overcome Croesus and become ruler of Sardis. According to Parthenius in his collection of tales of love, Nanis the daughter of Croesus offered to betray Sardis to Cyrus “on the condition that he make her his wife according to Persian custom.” Nanis kept her promise, but Cyrus did not keep his.⁶⁹ This Nanis is otherwise not attested, but may have entered the lore of Sardis as a memory of Nanaya, or Nanâ (Aramaic nny or nn’), the Ishtar-like goddess of Babylon and Susa attested in theogamic rituals in the first millennium.⁷⁰

These storied examples of a woman, usually considered to be supremely beautiful, who enabled her consort (or in the case of Xenophon’s Cyrus, the man who revered and respected her great beauty) to become king at Sardis certainly reflect the underlying ritual pretense that the bride of the king, or king-to-be, embodied the powers of the goddess of love and kingship. In other words, she was an avatar of Ishtar, whose hypostasis at Sardis was Kybebe, a goddess known to the Greeks as the name given by Lydians and Phrygians to Aphrodite.⁷¹ To the Greeks of Ionia, neighbors and subjects of the Lydians, Aphrodite was known to be both a lover and a mother of princes, Anchises and Aeneas, reflecting her role in the ideology of Lydian monarchy.⁷² The ritualized association of Atys, the Lydian prince, with both the Lydian Kybebe through his bride, and with the Phrygian Matar in her cult monument, reveals that both of these ethnic types of a goddess of power could be considered aspects of what the Greeks would describe as Aphrodite among Lydians and Phrygians. This reveals the essential identity of Lydian Kybebe with the goddess who came to be known as Cybele.⁷³ To Lydians and to Phrygians in Croesus’ time, Atys was her newest darling.

7 The Funeral of Atys

Croesus was known for sponsoring elaborate funerals, most notably that of his father, Alyattes, whose tumulus is described by Herodotus as “the greatest construction after those of the Egyptians and Babylonians.”⁷⁴ The probable tumulus of Atys, his favorite son and heir apparent, is second only to the tumulus of Alyattes in size, and must also have been the focus of massed devotions on the occasion of his funeral.⁷⁵ The scale and duration of mourning for Atys is suggested also by the fact that, as Herodotus reports, Croesus “sat for two years in deep grief” (ἐπὶ δύο ἔτεα ἐν πένθεϊ μεγάλῳ κατῆστο) over the loss of his son.⁷⁶

Croesus’ period of mourning is to be understood as more than a sign of his private grief. Conspicuous enough to be remembered more than a century later, mourning for Atys must have been a very public affair.⁷⁷ It may have been enacted ceremonially at court by professional mourners, like the GALA priests of Mesopotamia, but it also surely involved massed events in which the populace was expected to participate. Herodotus reveals the magnitude of funerals for kings in Anatolia when he compares them to the funeral customs observed for kings of Sparta:

Besides these public marks of distinction during his lifetime, special ceremonies are also observed upon a king’s death. News of the death is carried by riders all over Laconia, and in the city women go the rounds beating cauldrons. This is the signal for two people, one man and one woman, from every free household to disfigure their appearance – which they are compelled to do under penalty of a heavy fine. There is a custom observed by the Lacedaemonians on the occasion of a king’s death which is the same as that observed by the barbarians in Asia; for the majority of the barbarians practice the same custom when their kings die, and that is, when a king of the Lacedaemonians dies, not only Spartans but a certain number of the country people from all over Lacedaemon are forced to attend the funeral. A huge crowd assembles, consisting of many thousands of people – Spartan citizens, country folk, and helots – and men and women together strike their foreheads with every sign of grief, wailing as if they could never stop and continually declaring that the king who has just died was the best they ever had.⁷⁸

The customs of the “barbarians of Asia” described here are the customs that were observed on the occasions memorialized on the funerary stelae described above, which were common in northwestern Anatolia in Herodotus’ day. They represent the custom of ritualized lamentation that must have been most memorably instituted on the occasion of the death of Croesus’ son.⁷⁹

In Herodotus’ account, Croesus’ period of mourning was followed by the most extravagant of sacrifices attested in antiquity. The gold that Croesus sent to Delphi has attracted most attention from commentators, ancient and modern.⁸⁰ More significant here is Herodotus’ report of the wealth consumed in a massive pyre at Sardis: “He sacrificed three thousand of every kind of sacrificial animal; he heaped up a huge pyre and burned couches inlaid with gold and silver, golden cups, and purple cloaks and tunics … and he commanded every Lydian to add to this sacrifice all that they could.”⁸¹ Although this pyre sacrifice has not been recognized as funerary in nature, it is characteristic of destructive funerary sacrifices and should be understood as part of the continued ritual response of Croesus to the loss of his son, his most valuable possession.⁸² Herodotus describes this as Croesus’ effort to win the favor of the god of Delphi, but Apollo at Delphi was not necessarily the only god who might respond to this massive sacrifice at Sardis. The consumption of an enormous quantity of luxury goods, including the golden offerings sent to Delphi, was a gesture of abnegation of all good things with the expectation that divinity, soothed by the display of sympathetic grief, would grant compensation. Gold and silver, among the precious items consigned to the pyre, were not consumed by the fire as the perishable items were. In order that these precious metals might truly be sacrificed, they would have to be sent so far away that Croesus and the Lydians could have no use of them.

While these dedications at distant shrines will have served to impress the Greeks with the wealth of Croesus and his kingdom, at Sardis these actions demonstrated to the gods how the whole land of the Lydians was stricken by the loss of their crown prince, and that they were supplicating the gods, and in particular the divine lover of the deceased prince, to make amends and to restore well-being to the royal family and to the land. In Phrygia, where we can understand that the devotion of Atys to the Phrygian goddess had been celebrated at the rural shrines of the Phrygian highlands, it is likely that these same shrines were now the setting for ritual lamentations. As it had been the aim of Croesus to identify his son as the destined darling of the great goddess of Phrygia, we should expect that all of her rustic shrines became the settings for sympathetic grieving.

8 Lamentations for Atys

In death, Atys, the Lydian prince, became the object of the sort of ritual lamentations that, by long-held custom, had been widely observed in the name of a dying lover/beloved of a great goddess. He became part of the paradigm represented in Mesopotamia by Dumuzi, a legendary king who was also remembered as a legendary shepherd and devoted servant of the deity, and a youth whose beauty inspired the passion of the goddess. Within the lands ruled by the Lydians this paradigm is represented by Anchises the Dardanid, also a herdsman, the lover of Aphrodite, and by her the father of Aeneas, who was destined to be “lord of the Trojans” according to the prophecy of Aphrodite in the Homeric Hymn.⁸³ Paris, prince of Troy, again a herdsman and favorite of Aphrodite, is another instance of this paradigm. In Phoenicia and neighboring Cyprus and beyond, the beautiful and much-lamented Adonis played this role. His name was actually a title, “Lord,” suitable for addressing royalty. This was the title by which deceased Israelite kings were invoked in funerary lamentations. In the prophesy of Jeremiah for King Zedekiah, the king taken into captivity by Nebuchadnezzar (a contemporary of Alyattes), his funeral is described:

They will kindle funeral fires in your honor like the fires kindled in former times for the kings, your ancestors, who preceded you. ‘Alas, my lord!’ (hôy adôn) they will say as they beat their breast in mourning for you.⁸⁴

Within the realm of Lydia, roughly contemporary with this passage from Jeremiah, lamentation in the name of Adonis is attested in the poetry of Sappho, where the goddess Kytherea (Aphrodite) is addressed:

The context for this fragment of Sappho is unknown. It might have referred to the death of a nobleman of Lesbos, or possibly of Lydia,⁸⁶ but it could just as well have been composed on the occasion of one of the seasonal rituals of lamentation attested in Babylonia, Israel, Phoenicia, Greece, and Egypt.⁸⁷ Mourning for Adonis in sympathetic consolation for Kybebe was known in Lydia of Croesus’ day, as the context of an iambic fragment of Callimachus indicates:

Such lamentations, shrieks of grief, beating of breasts, rending of garments, and “striking foreheads with every sign of grief, wailing as if they could never stop,” were customary acts both at actual royal funerals and in rituals of reverence to heroes of the “dying lover of the goddess” type. These outpourings of emotion were demonstrations of orgē, actions that Greek sources refer to as orgia, orgiastika, or orgiasmoi. These induced states of excitement were regularly associated in Greek sources with the music of the Phrygian aulos, as Callimachus attests.⁸⁹ But such orgiastic rites and their music were not uniquely Phrygian. Musically induced laments in women’s voices were as old as the royal funerals of Sumerian kings.⁹⁰ The custom of appealing to the gods in a feminized emesal voice of lamentation is attested in Mesopotamia over a period of two millennia. Incantations and lamentations in emesal voice and with musical accompaniment were deemed essential to maintaining the favorable disposition of the gods, and of Ishtar in particular. As a result, within the hierarchy of functionaries serving the cultic needs of temples, palaces, and the public at large, the practices of supplication and lamentation popularly attributed to women became the professional domain of a specialized class of gender-ambiguous cult officiants, the GALA (Akkadian kalû) priests, and related performers, the assinnu and kurgarrû.⁹¹ We have no direct testimony to the presence of such a class of cult performers in Lydia, but indirect evidence suggests that this likely was the case. Eunuchs certainly were a feature of the Lydian court, as they were in all Near Eastern kingdoms, where they were sometimes identified as cult officiants.⁹² In the period of Achaemenid Persian rule, a eunuch was said to be the high priest of Artemis at her temple at Ephesus, a temple embellished through the endowment of Croesus.⁹³ Eunuchs as mourners in Lydia are a feature of Xenophon’s tale of the beautiful Pantheia and her heroic husband, who died and were buried at Sardis in the time of Croesus.⁹⁴

From this abundance of comparative evidence, and more specifically from the testimony of Sappho, Herodotus, Xenophon, and Callimachus, we can reasonably assume that orgiastic lamentations were customary in Lydia both in seasonal rites of supplication to a great goddess, Kybebe among the Lydians identified as Aphrodite among their Ionian subjects, and for royal funerals, when the deceased would be assimilated to the role of the lamented Adonis of the goddess. In the burial rites for Atys and over the two years of mourning for him observed by Croesus, Atys took on the role of the paramount darling of the goddess. The intensity of Croesus’ grief over his loss, expressed in formalized lamentations by cultic officiants, likely eunuchs of the Lydian court, and especially through the obligatory mourning expected of all of his subjects (Croesus “commanded every Lydian to add to this sacrifice all that they could”), the very real death of a prince who had been the consort of the goddess’ avatar became the new paradigm throughout the lands of the Lydian dominion for lamentations to console the goddess over her loss.

9 The Ritual Role of the Beloved Hero

Outside of Herodotus’ tragic tale, Atys the son of Croesus disappears from our sources. His type, the dying hero who has consummated a sacred marriage, appears on funerary stelae of Anatolian nobility from the turn of the sixth to fifth centuries and into the fourth; but these are all different individuals, sometimes named in inscriptions in Aramaic, Phrygian, and Lydian, who are honored by monuments patterned after the Lydian prototype. These exemplify the “kings … of the barbarians of Asia” whose funerals were so impressive, according to Herodotus. Attis, the paramour of Cybele (or the Mother of the Gods or Agdistis, among her many other names), does not appear in our sources until the fourth century, by which time his origin as a Lydian prince has metamorphosed into the generic darling of the goddess, represented (like Dumuzi, Adonis, Anchises, and Paris) as a handsome herdsman or huntsman, a native child of the land presided over by the goddess.

In the interval of nearly two centuries between the funeral of Atys and the appearance of his name, Attis, in the Greek literary tradition and votive iconography,⁹⁵ we can confidently surmise that Atys/Attis became an instrumental figure in arcane ritual texts prescribing the supplication of a great goddess, specifically Cybele, the Phrygian Mother of the Gods, as the dying mortal who maintained even in death the sympathetic affections of the goddess.

The existence of such texts and their circulation through the Greek world is well attested. They are most famously described in a passage from Plato’s Republic, where, Plato’s brother Adeimantus (the setting is late-fifth century) scoffs at the fatuous belief that misfortune could be averted by the “sacrifices and spells” (θυσίαις τε καὶ ἐπῳδαῖς) offered for a fee by “begging priests and seers” (ἀγύρται δὲ καὶ μάντεις), who go door-to-door, presenting their credentials in the form of “a chattering mass of books of Musaeus and Orpheus, offspring of the Moon and the Muses, so they say, according to which they perform their rituals” (βίβλων δὲ ὅμαδον παρέχοντες Μουσίου καὶ Ὀρφέως, Σελήνης τε καὶ Μουσῶν ἐκγόνων, ὥς φασι, καθ’ ἃς θυηπολοῦσιν).⁹⁶ The rites offered by such itinerant “begging priests,” we can infer, were rituals to assuage the gods, and in particular the Mother of the Gods, and to win their favor on behalf of their clients. Aristotle attests that begging priests of the Mother were commonplace when he reports the barb used in a speech by Iphicrates referring to Callias, the daidouchos (a cultic officiant) of Eleusinian Demeter, as a “begging priest of the Mother” (μητραγύρτης).⁹⁷ In a passage similarly dismissive of such begging priests, Antisthenes is quoted as saying, “I don’t support the Mother of the Gods; the gods support her.”⁹⁸ Callias the son of Hipponicus, the daidouchos, and Antisthenes the Socratic were both elder contemporaries of Plato.

We learn of Attis’ role in the texts circulating with these begging priests by virtue of the fascination of poets and mythographers of the later fourth century for esoteric lore and etiological stories which they could discover in such arcane ritual texts.⁹⁹ Some wrote to record the origins of rites and sacrifices, in a manner analogous to the Atthidographers who collected accounts of local Attic traditions, and some wrote to illustrate the varieties of love for poetic purposes. We learn from Harpocration that the Peri Teletōn (“On Initiation Rites”) by Neanthes of Cyzicus (ca. 300 BCE) presented a mystikos logos that described Attis among the Phrygians attached to the Mother of the Gods as her attendant (πρόσπολος, a term that could mean a servant or priest, or, like θαλαμηπόλος attested in another account, an intimate of her bedchamber).¹⁰⁰ Hermesianax of Colophon (also ca. 300 BCE) wrote elegiac poems on erotic themes, and he is cited by Pausanias for writing about the love of the Mother for Attis and its tragic ending.¹⁰¹

The most significant testimony to the place of Attis in the sort of initiation rites attested by Neanthes and alluded to by Plato is found in Demosthenes’ speech On the Crown, delivered in 330 BCE but describing events of a generation earlier.¹⁰² In the speech Demosthenes derides his opponent, Aeschines, for the menial occupations of his childhood and youth, which included serving as an acolyte for his mother in the ritual initiations (teletai) that she performed. Upon entering adolescence, Demosthenes says, it was Aeschines’ practice to assist his mother in conducting night-time initiations that involved reading from texts (τὰς βίβλους ἀνεγίγνωσκες) and other ministrations for the devotees. These involved cloaking the initiates in fawn skins, mixing potions, washing and rubbing down the initiates with prepared compounds, and after this purificatory ritual, standing them up and leading them in the chant: “I fled evil, I have found the better” (ἔφυγον κακόν, εὗρον ἄμεινον), and loudly ululating. By day, Demosthenes reports, young Aeschines led the initiates through the streets, garlanded with fennel and poplar fronds, brandishing snakes over their heads and shouting, “Euoi Saboi!” (Eὐοῖ Σαβοῖ) and “Hyes Attes! Attes Hyes!” (Ὑῆς Ἄττης Ἄττης Ὑῆς), all to the approval of old women.¹⁰³

Demosthenes is here mocking Aeschines and his ritual shouts in a foreign language, which were probably words prescribed in the sacred text that Aeschines was reading. He is also mocking Aeschines by mimicking his effeminate role in this ritual, referring to his ululations and ritual cries and their sympathetic reception by old women. Demosthenes does not dignify the deities involved by naming them, but as his audience would know, and as later commentators report, these were cries in honor of Sabazius, a Phrygian equivalent of Dionysus, and Attis, the companion of the Mother of the Gods.¹⁰⁴ The shouts of “Ὑῆς Ἄττης” echo the cries noted above of “αἰαῖ Ἄδωνιν” and “hôy adôn” for Adonis, either as the dead lover of Aphrodite or as a dead king. They were as much salutations as laments, hailing by name or title the favorite of the deity who is presumed to be mollified by the demonstrative outpouring of orgē on their behalf.

This ritual of initiation, based on texts of the sort that Plato describes, has a general resemblance to the practices described in a set of Akkadian incantation and exorcism texts surviving from the library of Ashurbanipal, attested also in Neo-Babylonian fragments, prescribing rituals for addressing Ishtar and Dumuzi in order to expel ills and malaise of all sorts. These incantation texts represent a long tradition of learning and practice in ritual and cultic matters, examples of the body of cuneiform literature that remained accessible until well into the Hellenistic era. Allowing for the cultic formulas and titularies specific to their Mesopotamian context, they illustrate the general purpose and mode of operation of the “begging priests and seers” with their “chattering mass of books” who offered their services to those in need in Athens, and certainly more widely in the Greek world, in the fifth and fourth centuries. And they illustrate well the essential role played by the dead lover of the goddess in summoning her to heal the afflicted.

The Akkadian incantation texts indicate that the most efficacious time for conducting these rites would be “in the month of Tammuz (Du’ūzi), when Ishtar makes the people of the land weep for Dumuzi, her lover.”¹⁰⁵ The preamble to the rituals describes the symptoms it can treat: “In case someone has been seized by the ‘hand of a spirit of the dead’ (qāt eṭemmi), epilepsy (bennu) has afflicted him, [falling] sickness (miqit šamê) has seized him, a Sagḥulḥāza demon has seized him …” (a series of malevolent demons follows, after which the text goes on to specify):

madness has seized him, he suffers from chills, outbursts of rage, anger, resentment from god and goddess is detected in him, his ears are ringing, he has fits of disturbance, he forgets the word he speaks, always talks to himself, is fickle, cannot make up his mind on anything, constantly changes his mind, he suffers losses always and everywhere, terror overcomes him at night, oppressive silence all day long, discord awaits him at home, strife on the street, and he is a burden to those who meet him, he is under the curse of many, and before a goddess (or Ishtar?) he engages in vile thoughts: as for this man, the wrath of the goddess rests upon him. To relieve him and prevent his fears from befalling him, and to remove these illnesses from his body [do the following …].¹⁰⁶

In the extensive ritual prescriptions that follow, there are preparations of appealing food, drink, and incense offerings for Ishtar, all to be accompanied by an assinnu singer, a sinnatu instrument, a flute (embūbu), and “whirling dances” (gūšātu).¹⁰⁷ There are repeated instructions to chant praises and appeals to Ishtar, and prayers that she may be mollified:

Ishtar, Queen, Great Lady! May Heaven and the Watery Deep acclaim you! May Anu and Ea greet your great divinity! May the gods of heaven and earth contribute to the peace of your heart! … Ishtar, Mistress of Heaven and Earth! May Heaven and Earth cheer you; may the gods who dwell in temples and watery depths gladden your heart!¹⁰⁸

The goal of soothing the grieving goddess in order to gain her beneficent favor is clear.¹⁰⁹

A prominent feature of the ritual is the slaughtering and skinning of a choice young goat, the preparation of various poultices applied to the goat skin, and the application of the goat skin to the ailing person with the prayers: “Let him be wrapped in the skin of a kid who has not mated. … Wherever it (the skin) is placed, may it cure the illness of (the sick person’s) body and bring prosperity.”¹¹⁰ The generic curative properties of this animal skin may parallel the use of the fawn skins in the ritual described by Demosthenes.

There are repeated prayers to Ishtar to drive away the afflicting demons, but significant also are the appeals to Dumuzi. These parallel the invocation of Attis in rites that center on appeasing the grief of the goddess over the death of her lover:

He shall recite this three times before Ishtar:

“You are Ishtar, whose lover is Dumuzi, the brave daughter of Sîn, who roams the fields, who loves the shelters, who loves all people, you are! … Intercede for me with Dumuzi, your lover. Dumuzi, your lover, carry away my hardship!”

He should recite this three times before Dumuzi.

“Dumuzi, Lord, Shepherd of Anu, son of Ea you are! Lover of Queen Ishtar, leader of the land, who is dressed in a kusītu garment, carrying a staff, lord of the fold … I, NN, son of NN, whose god is NN, whose goddess is NN, am turning to you here for help. The evil ‘watcher’ (lemnu ḥa’āṭu) who promotes evil, who clings to me and continually pursues me maliciously, the evil ‘watcher’ who promotes evil, or what is in me, hand him over to the mighty HUMba (Humbaba?), the gallû-demon who shows no mercy, may he be separated from me, but instead give me my life (again). Tear him out of my body and lead him away with you!”¹¹¹

Here we gain insight into the paradox that these rituals are devoted to soothing the grief of the goddess over the death of her lover, while at the same time assuming that these outpourings of sympathetic lamentation are able to summon the dead hero up from the underworld. The efficacy of the ritual is premised on the gratitude of the goddess as she and her deceased mortal lover are thus reunited, at least for the duration of the ritual. The ritual concludes with prayers to the hero that he should act for the benefit of his petitioners, a prayer that assumes that he has powers over the demons of the underworld (“Tear him out of my body and lead him away with you!”). The potency of Dumuzi, himself a denizen of the underworld, derives from the intensity of Ishtar’s affection for him and from the fact that the afflicting demons are themselves creatures of the underworld who should now depart with Dumuzi and return to the underworld.

We find exactly this premise underlying the celebration of the Adonia festival in Ptolemaic Egypt, according to the lamentation hymn (τὸν ἰάλεμον) sung for Adonis by a young woman in the tableau depicted in Theocritus’ 15th idyll. After describing the reunification of the goddess, Aphrodite, with her beloved hero, who has “come from the Acheron [the underworld] in the twelfth month,” and praising the abundance that the goddess, in the guise of her living avatar, Queen Arsinoe, has provided as expressions of her pleasure at their reunion, her song concludes:

Dear Adonis, you are the one and only hero, so they say, who visits both Acheron and the world here above. Neither Agamemnon nor mighty Ajax, the wrathful hero, achieved this, … Look on us with favor next year too, dear Adonis. Now we have received you joyfully, Adonis, and you will be dear to us when you come again.¹¹²

Just as “when Ishtar makes the people of the land weep for Dumuzi” in annual rites across Mesopotamia, the aim of this public festival of Adonis was to renew the benevolence of the goddess for the benefit of the whole community. The exorcism incantations in the Akkadian text described here were to serve the same purpose on a personal level, in response to any of a wide variety of psychosomatic ailments. Such incantations were surely the pattern represented in the books that were the basis of recitations by young Aeschines, according to Demosthenes, just as they made up the contents of the books of alleged ancient authority carried around by the begging priests, as Plato recounts.¹¹³ Euripides alludes to a general awareness of this power of the goddess over mental states in his Hippolytus, where his chorus wonders if Pan, or Hecate, or the Mountain Mother (a common title for the Mother of the Gods, or Cybele) might be the source of the mental torment that wastes Phaedra.¹¹⁴ The best-known critique of ritualized responses to mental and psychosomatic disorders is the Hippocratic On the Sacred Disease, which aimed to disabuse the popular notion that they were caused by divinities such as the Mother of the Gods.¹¹⁵ Notably, the so-called “sacred disease” was epilepsy, seen as a sign of demonic possession, and it appears at the head of the list of afflictions that the Akkadian incantation aims to cure.

The power to make things well, to do away with the bad and lead to the good, resides in the erotic affection of the goddess for her lost lover, according to these spells. The intensity of that affection was measured by the depth of grief felt by the goddess at the death of her beloved. Her grief was invoked through sympathetic rituals for the purpose of directing her powers, and the potency of her beloved one as an animate spirit of the underworld, to drive away malevolent spirits.¹¹⁶

To those who were acquainted with this ritual formula, the power of love between Attis and his divine lover was famous. A century earlier than the attestation of this love story in the poetry of Neanthes we find a reference to Attis’ role as the object of erotic affection in a fragment from the comic poet, Theopompus, a younger contemporary of Aristophanes, in his play The Shopgirls, where one of his characters says: “You’ll get yours, and your Attis too!”¹¹⁷ Apparently, someone is threatening a woman and her boy-love, calling him her “Attis.” This offhand remark would only make sense to audiences of the early fourth century if “Attis” was well known as an archetype of a boyfriend, and its comedic bite would be all the stronger knowing the fate that lay in store for such an Attis.

10 From Atys to Attis

Attis’ role as an accessory in personal and private healing rituals was his entrée into Greek cult.¹¹⁸ The stories of Attis and Cybele, or the Mother of the Gods, that come down to us in later authors entered the literary tradition as commentaries on such ritual texts.¹¹⁹ Certain features of the later Hellenistic and Roman foundation myths for the cult of Attis and the Mother must also have come from the indigenous settings of rites for the Phrygian Mother and Lydian Atys. It is highly probable that older Anatolian theogonic myths entered the aetiological tradition of Attis and the Mother as a result of the emergence of Pessinus as their most prominent Phrygian cult center, a novel development under the Attalids in the late third or early second century BCE.¹²⁰ These local legends tell of the birth of the Mother herself as the spawn of Zeus born from a rock, and that she, as Agdistis (named for the rock Agdus), was originally bisexual and that castration eventually fixed her gender as female.¹²¹ These narrative features, ill-suiting the Greek perspective that consistently identified the Phrygian Mother of the Gods as the mother of Zeus (often identifying her as Rhea), have been rightly supposed to reflect themes attested in older Hittite and Hurrian myths.¹²² Likewise, the accounts that Attis was either born from or mated with a tree nymph, daughter of the river Sangarius, most likely evolved from local traditions that sought to represent Attis as a native son of the land, possibly a reflection of the historical Atys’ devotions to the Phrygian Mother in the highlands at the headwaters of the Sangarius River.¹²³

The most notable accretion to the story of Attis is the sensational aspect that his death was the result of self-castration, and the further notion that this act of self-mutilation was regularly imitated as a sign of devotion by the eunuch priests of Cybele and Attis, the galloi.¹²⁴ It has been widely assumed that this was an ancient feature of the Phrygian cult of Attis, but no trace of ritual self-castration has ever been identified in Phrygian or in broader Anatolian antiquity. Among funerary monuments of historical galloi, not one ever recorded castration as a mark of sacramental status, as devotees otherwise did record participation in the taurobolium.¹²⁵ This aspect of the myth and cult of Attis arose from the prominence of the galloi priests and cult attendants of Attis and the Mother, many of whom made displays of self-flagellation and self-mutilation in their demonstrative lamentations, and some of whom at least were castrated eunuchs as a consequence of their servile status.¹²⁶ Their prominence is certainly due to the fact that, from its origin in the funerary rites for Atys the son of Croesus, eunuchs and effeminate mourners such as the kalû, assinnu, and kurgarrû of Mesopotamia, whether they were eunuchs or not, were a conspicuous and even essential feature in rituals of lamentation. By the point in time at which we can recognize an official, royal endorsement of the cult of Cybele and Attis, under the Pergamene kingdom, eunuchs must have taken the leading role as ministers of the cult both because they were well-versed in the ritual formalities of honoring this divine couple in the traditional manner, and because they formed a privileged and specialized class of servants in the households of Hellenistic monarchs, just as they always had among the kingdoms of Asia.¹²⁷

An ungendered status was not, in origin, a quality of Attis himself. But his ability to move between this world and the next likened him to his eunuch attendants to such an extent that their castrated status came to be projected on him. The imagined scenario of the goddess and her lover, like Ishtar and Dumuzi, somehow reuniting with each other when they were summoned by their devotees, involved crossing the boundary between this world and the underworld. In the mythology of Ishtar and her descent into the underworld, the only creatures capable of crossing that boundary with her were her gender-ambiguous cultic attendants, the GALA/kalû, KUR.GAR.RA/kurgarrû, and assinnu, by virtue of the fact that they were neither man nor woman.¹²⁸ And so eunuchs or transgendered ritual performers in that role, the galloi of Cybele’s Hellenistic and Roman cult, were uniquely qualified to minister in the annual summoning of the dead Attis from the underworld.¹²⁹

In the Akkadian rituals and in the Ptolemaic Adonia, the beloved one returns to the underworld gratified by the devotions that he and his divine lover have received, and so bearing goodwill for all mankind in the year ahead. This was certainly the scenario for Attis and his lover, Cybele, in their annual rites of lamentation and celebration, as the myths explicitly state that Attis would not be brought back to life in this world. Attis thus remained a hero of the underworld, but through Cybele’s love he retained an exceptional potency to influence the world above, like other great dying heroes (Asclepius, Teiresias, and Amphiaraus among them). Those who celebrated this erotic bond with so much orgē could expect to receive the continued benefits of his and the goddess’ favor.

11 Conclusion

The fervor of lament, praise, and celebration of this archetypal relationship between a goddess and her mortal darling expressed both the anxiety over, and the hope for, sustaining the favor of the powerful goddess. The social context in which this pattern of worship became formal and institutional was kingship, focusing especially on the anxious moments when the death of a king threatened to disrupt a harmonious relationship between humanity and divinity. The memory of kings, the paramount objects of divine affection in their lifetimes, lived on after them and deserved commemoration in what became annual rites, as “when Ishtar makes the people of the land weep for Dumuzi,” so that the affections of the goddess and their benefits for all should not fade away. And so such kings became heroized archetypes. Atys, the Lydian son of Croesus, devotee of the Phrygian Mother and Lydian Kybebe, was one of the most memorable of them.