Daedalus and Heracles, Io and Europa show a range of possible ways in which myths and heroes might travel with Greeks between east and west. Daedalus travelled above all with Cretans, and it is unlikely that his name derived from an earlier Greek translation of a word in a Near Eastern language, one applied to their Bronze Age god of craftsmanship, Kothar. Io and perhaps Europa gained from casual similarities, ‘Io’ from the Near Eastern word for ‘Greeks’, Europa perhaps from the word for ‘west’. Heracles, the supreme traveller, owed nothing to Near Eastern words or stories, but representations of him perhaps owed something to non-Greek iconography when he was first shown wearing a lion’s head and skin. He gained many new homes in the west, probably not before the seventh to sixth centuries BC, except for the furthest and most influential, his ‘Pillars’ in the far west. They were perhaps sited here by a travelling Euboean in the later eighth century, impressed by pillars in the temples of Melqart, the god most similar to Heracles himself.
These mythical figures were sited in new homes abroad because of the misunderstandings and inferences of visiting Greeks. Many other Greek myths would travel abroad subsequently for similar reasons: there was a pattern, and it helps to explain the sitings of the other two Greek mythical travellers who are most temptingly located in the triangle between Cyprus, Cilicia and the Levant. Both were connected with strange or monstrous animals. Perseus killed the monstrous Gorgon, from whose head, some said, the winged horse Pegasus was born. Bellerophon rode on winged Pegasus and killed the fire-breathing Chimaera, part-goat, part-lion and part-snake. Bellerophon’s story first survives for us in the sixth book of Homer’s Iliad but it is told so allusively and with such compression that longer oral versions of the story must have been known to Homer’s audience. Perhaps they featured at other times in Homer’s repertoire. A written pre-Homeric poem has also been suggested as a model, but it has left no trace nowadays.1 In the Iliad, Bellerophon is sent east from the territory of Argos to a kingdom in Lycia in south-west Asia where he is dispatched on deadly adventures, including the killing of the fiery Chimaera. He succeeds, ‘trusting in portents of the gods’, as Homer mysteriously tells us but gives no further details. This silence is curious because Hesiod refers to the well-known story: Bellerophon killed the Chimaera with the help of Pegasus, the winged horse. For Hesiod, however, Pegasus’ origins still floated far away in neverland. He was born from the head of the Gorgon when Perseus cut it off by the ‘streams’ (pēgas) of distant Ocean.2 In later stories Perseus rode Pegasus far and wide and the two of them did great deeds.
After Hesiod these stories acquired specific homes on the map. Bellerophon came to be sited at Corinth, and Pegasus the winged horse became the city’s emblem, eventually typifying Corinth’s coins. Perseus, by contrast, belonged in the royal house of Argos. Bellerophon was eventually very popular in sculptures and on coins in Lycia, the Homeric land of his exploits. Perseus and Pegasus left a clear imprint in Caria in south-west Asia and in coastal Cilicia.3 The Gorgon was thought to have been decapitated on a journey even further east or to have resided in the remote north African desert.
If we apply our pattern to these eastward travels, we can unravel some of the impetus behind their stopping-points. At an early date Greeks may simply have invented a winged, flying horse called Pegasus. If they needed a model for him they may have found one in objects and images derived from further east. Winged horses are known to us on Assyrian seals c. 1200 BC and Greeks in the Mycenaean age may have seen them in the Near East or elsewhere at second hand. Winged horses are also depicted in north Syrian art, including at Carchemish c. 900 BC: Greek visitors could also have seen them there, reinforcing ideas they had already had.4 What is striking, however, is that in Hesiod (c. 710 BC) one function of Pegasus is to carry Zeus’s lightning in heaven. In southern Cilicia we know of a local Luwian–Hittite weather-god ‘Pihassassi’, who is represented with thunder and lightning.5 This god was not the origin of Pegasus: a storm-god is not the origin of a horse. However, he had a like-sounding name and Greek visitors to Cilicia may have connected their existing Pegasus with Zeus’s lightning after hearing about this ‘Pihassassi’ and his functions and assuming, wrongly, he was their own Pegasus in a foreign land.
Bellerophon, too, may have begun as a local Greek champion, whose name meant ‘killer’ (-phontes) and was perhaps the killer first of a serpent, then of a hybrid goat-monster somewhere in ‘neverland’.6 Travellers by sea to Lycia in southern Asia and the Gulf of Antalya then became aware of an extraordinary sight in the landscape. As they rounded Cape Gelidonya, they saw the spectacle which has fascinated many sea-travellers since, a conspicuous fire which burns in the mountains beyond the coast. This fire, the Turkish yanar, still burns from natural gases on the slopes of Lycia’s Mount Olympus. In 1902 it was visited by D. G. Hogarth, subsequently the historical adviser to Lawrence of Arabia, who describes how ‘tongues of flame, spirituous, colourless, well nigh invisible in that white glare were licking the mouth of a dozen vents…The largest vent opens almost beneath the main group of ruins which has evidently once been a church, raised with the stones of some older building. A Greek inscription is encrusted in the blistered wall and surely some pagan temple has stood here to the Spirit of the Fire.’7 The Christian church had been built here as a counterweight to a pagan cult-site. We now know from nearby inscriptions that it had been a sanctuary of Hephaestus, the god closely linked to fire, whose cult left a mark on many settlements in the surrounding region.8 He was exactly the god for these flames.
The flames were ‘invisible’ to Hogarth by daylight, but by night, as many previous sea-travellers had attested, they are clearly visible to crews off the Lycian coast. In Semitic languages the root of the word for fire was chmr, resembling the Greeks’ word for their goat-monster chimaira. This discovery may have enhanced their idea of a chimaera’s nature. Mixed animal-and-human monsters are known in various combinations in sculptures, seal-stones and plaques from north Syria: a goat-headed hybrid is now known on a seal found near Adana in the Cilician plain, dated c. 700 BC.9 Such foreign eastern pictures may already have helped the Greeks’ imagination of the creature, but it was perhaps only after travelling along the Lycian coast that they made their hybrid goat-monster into a breather of fire too. Its name ‘chimaera’ seemed to be reflected in the descriptions of fellow-seafarers, Phoenicians who talked of the chmr along this coast. A fiery chimaera thus found its home in Lycia, before Homer’s reference to it there: perhaps it was located by east Greeks who were travelling on the coast before c. 750 BC. On the local Mount Olympus in Lycia, it then emerged from later research inland that Bellerophon had defeated the ‘fire-breather’ and buried it. The ‘monster’ turned out to be safely underground, breathing flames and nothing more. The surrounding earth is still bare, but around it the shrubs and plants are brilliantly green, as if the chimaera’s powers are strictly limited.
The two Greek travelling heroes enjoyed a vigorous local afterlife. Bellerophon became the hero of noble Lycian families inland in Lycia and took root at places which claimed to occupy the sites of his exploits in Homer. According to Homer, he then died somewhat mysteriously while ‘wandering in the Aleian plain’, the broad Cilician plain round Tarsus. As a result Bellerophon became sited here too by ambitious antiquarians. He had fallen from winged Pegasus and landed on Cilician soil, founding ‘Tarsus’ (in Greek, the sole of the foot) where his foot had first struck the ground.10
Perseus and Pegasus were even more widely appropriated. They became popular in coastal Caria; they penetrated Lycia; they flourished, too, in Cilicia where Tarsus was also attributed to the touch of Pegasus’ foot or to the swift foot of Perseus himself. Far into the early Christian period Perseus continued to watch over Tarsus as a visiting hero, and his popularity was helped here by the competitive urges of non-Greek cities in the Cilician plain to claim Greek origins.11 As an ancient Argive, Perseus was a prestigious ancestor. These proliferating locations belong in the rich history of local mythographers, antiquarians and scholarly poets, especially in the Hellenistic age. They took Bellerophon, Perseus and their winged horse far and wide, but like Io and Europa they were not based on an insider’s knowledge of any Near Eastern myth or cult.
Awareness of such a myth or cult is what we want to ascribe to travelling Euboeans when they settled in the Near East in the eighth century BC, but what channels were there, we begin to wonder, through which genuine foreign knowledge could pass? In his study of wisdom which was ‘alien’ to Greece, Arnaldo Momigliano even diagnosed a signal ‘fault of the Greeks’: they were monolingual, he believed, speaking only their own language and were thus unusual because most peoples elsewhere in their world were bilingual.12 We have seen from Greeks’ Near Eastern loan-words that some of them were a little more flexible in Cilicia, Cyprus and the Levant during the tenth to eighth centuries, but our impression so far is that Greeks made little effort nonetheless and generally understood what they saw only in their own Greek terms. The underlying content was ‘lost in translation’. Their example was followed by Greek successors in Egypt, who magnificently called the country’s great monuments ‘buns’ (pyramides) and ‘skewers’ (obeliskoi), Greek words from which our English words for the buildings derive.
Should we think instead of Near Easterners as a possible source, people who diligently learned Greek and came west to visit parts of the Greek world, bringing ‘alien’ Near Eastern wisdom with them? By c. 500 BC we can detect in Greek religious practice a few ways of seeking omens or cures which derive from Near Eastern practices. These borrowings are not unduly prominent in most Greeks’ ways of approaching their gods, but they had to have been borrowed directly across the language-barrier: they involved practical, working techniques.13 Did Near Eastern religious experts travel west and pass them on, healers and diviners who came as ‘migrant charismatics’ to bring such skills directly in translation to the monolingual Greeks? Support for this idea has even been detected in Homer’s Odyssey where the humble pigman Eumaeus reminds Penelope’s suitors on Ithaca that ‘nobody goes in person and invites a stranger from elsewhere, unless…he is a diviner or a healer or a carpenter or a divine singer who gives pleasure by his singing: these are the men who are invited over the boundless earth’.14
6. Travels of Mopsus (italicized) and Adonis
These lines of Homer, at least, are irrelevant to the argument. Eumaeus does not say that these diviners or other craftsmen are non-Greeks whom other people go all the way from Greece to invite. The mention of ‘singers’ implies that in Homer’s mind the travelling experts here are Greeks from other Greek settlements. The Near Eastern visitors whom we infer securely from our archaeology are craftsmen whom Homer does not mention: metal-workers and jewellers who are credited with objects found in Crete and elsewhere. Champions of the influence of foreign prophets and diviners need evidence other than Homer. No travelling religious expert from the east is known to us by name in early Greek history but nonetheless ‘the migrant diviners’, it is suggested, ‘have left their mark on mythology’. It became imprinted, on this view, at a significant point in our triangle in the east Aegean: ‘Greek myth establishes a connection between Greece and Cilicia precisely around the figure of the migrant seer.’15 If such a ‘channel’ existed here in real life, it would have important implications. So far from picking up stories through their own visits to the east, Euboeans and other Greeks could have received them from migrant experts who came directly to them from Cilicia. These ‘migrant seers’, however, have quite other roots. So far from subverting our model of Euboean travellers who went eastwards and drew their own conclusions, they are a cardinal item which reinforces it and the pattern of Greek thinking which accompanied it.
The most prominent of the migrant seers has been the most enigmatic, both for the ancients and for modern scholars. The seer Mopsus is a person whom Homeric epic never mentions, but he is connected with specific sites in southern Asia, especially Cilicia. He is connected there with other Greek seers who came to the same area, but Mopsus is the only one whose name appears to be attested in both Greek and Near Eastern languages. The impression of an underlying reality has therefore been strong.
In antiquity too, Mopsus the seer surprised scholars and historians by the number of his home addresses. In Greece itself Mopsus was at home in Thessaly where the place name Mopsion recalled his own. He was the son of Ampyx and was known as a fighter and athlete, as we can see from the earliest surviving evidence for him, inscribed on the strap of a soldier’s shield, found at Olympia and dated to c. 600–575 BC. He was also connected with the Argonauts. He competed at the funeral-games of Jason’s father; he was a Lapith who fought against the Centaurs; he acted as a seer during the Argonauts’ journey, as we happen to know from the poet Pindar, c. 460 BC. It is only an accident of survival that no earlier evidence exists for this Thessalian hero, athlete, Lapith and seer in one.16
Mopsus also turns up in Asia Minor at the great oracular shrine of Claros near the Aegean coast north-west of Ephesus. Here, he was said to be the founding prophet of the sanctuary of Apollo and Artemis and his family was enhanced accordingly. At Claros, Mopsus was represented as the son of a daughter of the seer Tiresias and, some said, of Apollo himself, or at least of a marriage agreed at Delphi. This strongly oracular pedigree befitted the prophet of Claros’s oracular Apollo.17 His change of parentage and address distinguished him from Mopsus son of Ampyx in Greece, so much so that modern scholars of mythology usually identify Claros’s Mopsus as a separate person.
Claros’s Mopsus then turns up far further south in a most unexpected place. He is rooted on the southern coast of Asia Minor, both in cities of Pamphylia and further east in the broad Cilician plain around Tarsus and Adana.18 He even becomes connected with north Syria and the Levant. Mopsus’ fame lived on in the civic mythology of cities in Pamphylia and Cilicia and in two place names in the Cilician plain. One was Mopsoukrene, ‘Mopsus’ spring’, where Mopsus had an oracular site. The other was the nearby Mopsouhestia, or ‘Mopsus’ hearth’. Its citadel is still visible at modern Misis, where it looks down on the ancient bridge across the broad Pyramus river (the Ceyhan).
Mopsus’ double Asian domicile, both at Claros and near the southern coast, already puzzled the ancients. From the mid-fourth century BC onwards, we can watch intelligent Greek historians trying to make sense of his southern extension. They were not inventing or assessing a recent tradition; they were trying to smooth out the oddities in myths which went back long before their own time. The double domicile was matched by another duplicate: in both places, Mopsus became involved in a quarrel with a famous rival. At Claros he was said to have confronted another ‘migrant charismatic’, the famous Greek seer Calchas. Calchas had given distinguished advice to the Greeks at Troy, as described in Homer’s Iliad, but Homer never described how Calchas then stopped at Claros on his way home. He died and was buried there, according to post-Homeric poems on the return of the various heroes from Troy. By the mid-sixth century BC evidence survives for us of the cause of his death. He had been challenged by the resident prophet Mopsus to a contest of riddling questions and answers and when he lost, he died.19
In southern Asia, too, Mopsus was said to have quarrelled, but this time with one of Calchas’ companions. Although Homer never mentioned him, Amphilochus the Argive was also said to have taken part in the Trojan War. He started to travel home with Calchas by land and after Calchas’ death he was said to have pressed on south into Cilicia. Our earliest surviving Greek source for his exploits, c. 500 BC, says that he died here at the hands of Apollo in the coastal city of Soloi. Later storytellers, however, involved Mopsus in his murder. This tradition is attested in the 450s BC and is probably even older. In its fullest form, Amphilochus is said to have entered Cilicia with Mopsus and with him to have founded the famous town of Mallos (near modern Kiziltahta) on the Pyramus river. Amphilochus then returned for a while to his home in Argos but when he came back to Cilicia, Mopsus denied him a share in the city. The pair fought a duel and killed each other, whereupon they were buried in two tombs from which neither could see the other. In antiquity these tombs were pointed out at ancient Magarsos, the modern Karatas, just by the coastline which was the scene of our ‘battle of the Pyramus river’ in 696 BC. The two travelling heroes had become quarrelling heroes.20
Mopsus’ two quarrels and his two locations in Asia are most unusual: how do we explain the migrations of this ‘migrant charismatic’? One influential theory has tried to link him with historical evidence: his exploits in southern Asia reflect, on this view, the deeds of a real Asian or Greek dynast who came to be remembered in later Greek myth. These theories have been built on a continuing supply of newly discovered non-Greek texts, enriched by finds made as recently as 1998. They help to explain the Greek Mopsus’ travels, but how exactly do they link him to history?
In a long-known, but fragmentary, Hittite royal letter written in cuneiform script we have a reference to one ‘Muksus’ in connection with events in western Asia.21 When first studied, this text was dated by scholars to c. 1200 BC. In 1946 a similar name was discovered in the important neo-Hittite–Luwian inscriptions at Karatepe in northeastern Cilicia. Long bilingual inscriptions had been cut into the stone blocks of the two gateways by order of its ruler: they referred to Muksas (in Luwian–Hittite hieroglyphics) or Mps (in vowel-less Phoenician script, to be pronounced as ‘Mopsu’). The name also occurs in the Phoenician inscriptions which were carved on the site’s big statue of grey-black basalt, the statue of the Storm God favoured by the local ruler.22
These two bits of evidence were of widely separated date: Karatepe’s inscriptions probably belong c. 700 BC. Nonetheless, with a brilliant faith in myth and history, scholars quickly connected this new evidence for Muksas (or Mopsu) with Mopsus the Greek wanderer who was said to have come south after the sack of Troy. The name ‘Muksus’ in the Hittite letter was even claimed to be the name of a historical Greek immigrant: the personal name ‘Mo-qo-so’ is known in tablets from Knossos and Pylos back in Bronze Age Greece. The geography of the movements of this ‘immigrant’ seemed to fit too: Karatepe’s inscriptions belonged in just the area, Cilicia, to which Mopsus was said to have travelled. Best of all, the dates seemed to fall into place. When ancient scholars calculated a numerical date for the fall of Troy they placed it in a year which we would count as 1184 BC. Mopsus, then, would have wandered south in the 1180s, and wondrously, in one later Greek compilation just such a date for him survived. In c. AD 320 the Christian bishop Eusebius set out the parallel chronologies of biblical, Greek and Roman events. In the year 1184/3, his lists tell us, ‘Mopsus reigned in Cilicia’.23 Eusebius himself had no independent interest in the dates of remote Greek history, but he relied on the texts of earlier Greek scholars. Their work on problems of chronology drew on scholarly studies which had begun in the third century BC.
With their support, the Greek and the Hittite sources appeared to converge on the same individual and the same era: Mopsus, or Muksas, it seemed, was not ‘simply a Greek fiction’, but ‘he is shown to have been a historical person…he emerges as the first character from the mists of the Greek Heroic Age of whom this can be said and who can be dated independently of Greek sources’.24 History, therefore, underlay this Greek myth, as the real Mopsus appeared to be known to Hittite contemporaries and then to have moved south, when Troy fell, to rule in Cilicia and to found a dynasty in the 1180s BC with which the rulers at Karatepe later connected themselves. The conclusion, if true, would be extremely important for the relationship between facts and myth. If Mopsus’ movements are based on history, who is to say what facts may lie behind the tales of travelling Odysseus or even the myths of migrating Moses and Abraham?
These neat conclusions are too optimistic. On the Greek side, the name ‘Mo-qo-so’ is unlikely to have become the Muksus (or Muksas) in the two eastern texts: phonetically its likely rendering would be ‘Ma-ka-sa’, or Maksa. The ancient date for the fall of Troy is also irrelevant. It was the attempt of ancient scholars to fix a date for a mythical event and is evidence only of their misplaced learning. The date of 1184/3 for Mopsus’ reign in Cilicia was based on this same vain calculation. Greek chronographers knew that Mopsus was said to have wandered south after the Trojan War and so they dated his southern kingdom to the year after their date for Troy’s fall. Their precision began from a false premise and tried to make facts out of fictions.
On further consideration, the Hittite sources for Muksus–Muksas have become equally problematic. The Hittite letter which mentioned Muksus in western Asia has been redated by scholars before 1400 BC, about seven hundred years, then, before the mention of Muksas at Karatepe.25 The exact date of the Karatepe inscriptions (c. 760 or 700 BC) is not crucial for the argument because they refer to the ‘house’ or dynasty of Muksas (Mps, in the accompanying Phoenician text). For them it was an existing entity, like the royal ‘house of David’ or our modern ‘house of Windsor’. Its founder, Muksas (‘Mopsu’) thus lived earlier than c. 700, but he cannot possibly have lived and ruled near Karatepe as early as 1400 BC.
A historical Muksas or Mopsus, wandering and ruling in the twelfth century BC or earlier, is not the answer to the oddly widespread locations of the Greek Mopsus myths. A different approach is needed and the example of Io, Cadmus or Europa helps us to see the right way forward. The one surviving fact is that in southern Asia, a ‘house of Muksas’ (Mps) was indeed a reality before 700. It went back to a founder of that name who had ruled perhaps as early as the ninth or even tenth century BC. The inscriptions at Karatepe reveal that this ‘house of Muksas’ (Mps) ruled at Adana in the broad plains of eastern Cilicia: it is also likely to have controlled neighbouring sites, including Tarsus. The Karatepe inscriptions give the personal statements of one Azitawattas, a powerful man who connects himself with the ‘house of Muksas’. He was not a member of it himself, but he acknowledges the importance of ‘Awarikus’, a king of Adana and a member of the ‘house of Muksas’ by whom he seems to have been helped to power: in the accompanying Phoenician text he is called ‘Aw(a)rk(u)’.26 Most remarkably, since 1980, at least three other local inscriptions have revealed similarly named rulers. One was found on the west slope of the Amanus mountains, the eastern border of Que, about 15 miles south-east of Karatepe (a Phoenician text also naming Aw(a)rk(u)).27 Another lay far to the west (a Phoenician text, naming Waryk(u)) near to Rough Cilicia’s boundary with Pamphylia.28 The third is a Luwian–Hittite and Phoenician bilingual text found in 1998. It names ‘Warikas’ (the likeliest reading) in Luwian hieroglyphs, the grandson (in Phoenician, the ‘descendant’) of ‘Muksas’. This bilingual text was found on the stone statue of a ruler, surely Warikas himself, sculpted as if riding in an ox-drawn chariot: it was discovered only about 20 miles south of Adana in the Cilician plain.29 The date and exact readings of each of these texts are not certain, but they refer to closely similar names. The likeliest view is that the third, the bilingual, refers to a kinsman of the similarly named ruler attested at Karatepe. The second text, the furthest to the west, may refer to a grandson of the same name; the first, furthest to the east, refers to Karatepe’s ruler himself. There may even be a fourth, north-west of the plain, but not fully published, which may mention the ruler himself too. On any view, a realm of descendants of Muksas–Mopsus is now soundly attested around Adana and is datable to the eighth century BC.
In this same eighth century, Greek pottery, as we have seen, was reaching this plain of eastern Cilicia with Greek visitors, especially with Euboeans. They were followed by Greeks who settled new towns here, especially Greeks from Rhodes who founded Soloi c. 700 BC on the western edge of the Cilician plain.30 These Greek visitors, including Euboeans, found themselves in the kingdom which was known locally as the lands of the ‘house of Muksas’, or ‘Mopsu’ as Phoenicians pronounced his name. When they heard where they were, a wonderful notion dawned on them: their own hero Mopsus had been here before them. The Greek visitors did not invent a new mythical hero Mopsus in order to fit this ‘Mopsu’ into their own past. In their Greek myths they had such a hero already, the Mopsus who came from Greece and Claros. The names were irresistibly similar and the connection did not require great learning. Like so many Greek travellers after them, whether Herodotus or the soldiers of Alexander the Great, these Greeks in the eighth century BC made brilliant sense of what they heard abroad in terms of heroes who had travelled with them in their minds.
Some of these Greeks were Euboeans and the very place names of this kingdom made sense too. In its heartland, just to the South-east of Adana, the site of modern Misis acquired the Greek name ‘Mopsouhestia’, or Mopsus’ hearth. It is a very curious name, but it persisted nonetheless for more than a thousand years.31 Although it first appears for us in Greek texts of the mid-fourth century BC, its first surviving attestation is not its origin. The naming of a place after a hearth is unparalleled in Greek topography and has never yet been explained. The neo-Hittite connections of the ruling ‘house of Muksas’ can now provide the answer. In old Hittite, a hesty is a site of religious ritual, patronized by the ruling family.32 At modern Misis, overlooking the Ceyhan river, the ruling ‘house of Muksas’ will have had such a hesty or religious centre: Greek visitors interpreted the name in Greek and called the hesty of Muksas ‘Mopsouhestia’. This ‘hearth of Mopsus’ continued to glow on the Greek map throughout antiquity: its embers deserve prompt excavation.
Not far from his ‘hearth’ Mopsus also acquired an oracular spring, at Mopsoukrene near Mallos. We can still see why: the main feature of this site is the fine freshwater spring at modern Güzeloluk which has served through the ages as a watering place for travellers and their horses on the road southwards from Adana. In the time of Plutarch (c. AD 80–120) it could still confound a Roman governor who had otherwise been inclined to dismiss the claims of oracles to be speakers of the truth.33 Before Greeks visited the site, there had probably been a simple place of divination at the local spring. Greek visitors then ascribed it to their prophetic Mopsus’ care.
There was also, we now know, a familiar sound to one of the dynasty’s local titles. In the bilingual inscription found south of Adana in 1998, ‘Warikas’ the ‘grandson of Muksas’ describes himself as the ‘king of Hiyawa’, a land of ‘the plain’. The Phoenician scribes rendered this ‘Hiyawa’ land by their own word for Adana and its people, evidently its correct reference.34 However, to Greek-speakers the place names had a very different resonance. They sounded just like their own ‘Achaia’, the land of Homer’s Achaean Greeks. In earlier texts of the Bronze Age Hittite empire, an ‘Ahhiyawa’ people had been located somewhere west of Asia; almost certainly they were Achaean Greeks. In the ninth and eighth centuries the ‘Hiyawa’ land of southern Asia was quite unrelated, but the verbal resemblance caught on with Greek visitors, just as it has caught on too quickly with modern scholars since this text’s recent publication. The resemblance also caught on locally. By the early fifth century, some of the Cilicians, as we know from Herodotus, had exploited the resemblance and were calling themselves ‘Hypachaioi’, or sub-Achaeans, in order to attach their non-Greek origins to the Greeks’ own family of peoples.35
When a ‘Mopsu’ ruled in ‘Hiyawa’, what visiting Euboean Greek in the eighth century BC could doubt the natural inference that their own Mopsus and some Achaeans had once been there before them? The extent of the real house of the kingdom of ‘Mopsu’ must not be underestimated. Some of its descendants ruled in western Rough Cilicia (to judge from the recently found epigraphic evidence), but there are also signs that they had ruled even further west in adjacent Pamphylia. At Karatepe, the strong man Azitawattas refers to his dominion as far as ‘the setting sun’. It may indeed have run far west, as far, even, as the fine site of Perge in Pamphylia, the ‘Parha’ of previous Hittite texts.36 Here, many centuries later, Mopsus is known to us in a series of remarkable sculptures. The Hellenistic walls of the city of Perge’s main gate contain niches for nine statues which date to the early second century AD: their subjects are known to us from the Greek inscriptions on their bases and derived from some spectacular antiquarian scholarship. Seven of them are mythical figures, including ‘Mopsus son of Apollo from Delphi’, who is one of those named as the city’s founder.37 The ‘house of Muksas’ had evidently ruled as far away as ‘Parha’ or Perge. The memory of them lived on and so either Greek visitors or Greek-speaking citizens of Perge presented their ancient historical link with Muksas (Mps) as a link with the Greek Mopsus the travelling prophet. It dignified the city in an increasingly Greek age.
At Aspendos, also in Pamphylia, the traces of Mopsus are even older. The people of this non-Greek city had the custom, foreign to Greeks, of sacrificing boars to the goddess Aphrodite. When they connected themselves to Greek culture and began to use the Greek language, they explained their practice through Greek myth. In a famous poem, the learned Greek poet Callimachus (c. 270 BC) tells how at Aspendos the hero Mopsus vowed to sacrifice to Aphrodite the first animal he encountered. He went out hunting, met a wild boar and killed it: true to his vow he began the sacrificial practice which persisted at Aspendos ever afterwards. Callimachus’ explanation has been detected as far back as c. 400–350 by a brilliant use of evidence from Aspendos itself.38 Silver coins, minted in the city, show on one side a naked horseman, armed with a javelin, on the other side a wild boar on the run. The horseman is Mopsus, out hunting in heroic nudity: the men of Aspendos were already using this mythical Greek hero to explain a barbarian aspect of their religion in Greek terms. They chose Mopsus because they could point to a local connection with him: Aspendos, too, had once been ruled by the ‘house of Muksus’ and its associates. We can support their belief about their past. At Karatepe, the name of the ruler Azitawattas has been convincingly linked to the pre-Greek name of the town of Aspendos itself.39 Perhaps he came from Aspendos or perhaps he refounded it. We can, then, give credit to later Greek sources which claim that the ancient name of all Pamphylia had been ‘Mopsopia’, Mopsus-land.40 There were historical reasons, too, why Greek authors attempted to link Mopsus by marriage or kinship with a mythical Pamphyle and other local namesakes along this part of the south Asian coast. We first meet these namesakes in Greek sources of the mid-fourth century BC, but they go back much earlier to the time when the local Muksas and his dynasty had ruled there, leaving a memory which needed to be explained in Greek terms. That need was first felt by Greek visitors and settlers in the eighth century BC, Euboeans and others who confronted this major coastal kingdom, a power-block which historians nowadays overlook.
The ‘house of Muksas–Mopsu’ may also have had an eastward extension beyond Adana and Karatepe. When Alexander the Great arrived in Cilicia in autumn 333 BC, his learned historian Callisthenes discovered that Mopsus the travelling prophet had also been active in ‘Syria and Phoenicia’.41 One reason may perhaps be that the ‘house of Muksas’ had ruled further east than we yet know, briefly flourishing in a part of north Syria. Other reasons are obscure to us, but we have extracts from an earlier source, the Greek-speaking Xanthus of Lydia’s histories, which were written in the later fifth century BC. Xanthus wrote of ‘Moxos the Lydian’ with due local patriotism and connected this person with one, perhaps two, holy places in the Levant. One was Ascalon on the Phoenician coast and the other (possibly) Mabbug, a famous ‘holy city’ in Syria.42 This ‘Moxos the Lydian’ was a local invention: his name was based on the continuing local use of the like-sounding name ‘Muksas’ in Lydia and Anatolia, a name which even became connected with a ‘Moxos-town’ south-east of Lydia.43 But the stories about his deeds at these Near Eastern cult-sites may have a historical origin. They may go back to Greek visitors’ attempts to explain these places’ non-Greek cult-practices in a Greek way, or even to stories which the non-Greek residents later began for the same purpose. If so, Xanthus then combined all the mentions of Mopsus’ doings into one legendary story about ‘Moxos’: there is probably more to be discovered about the facts in Phoenicia and Syria on which his statements were based.
Whatever those facts were, they were not the deeds of a real Near Eastern ‘migrant charismatic’ who was bringing eastern wisdom to the Greeks. Nor was Mopsus a Greek Aeneas who had escaped from Troy to found a hearth and a city elsewhere. Mopsus’ southern career was the wishful interpretation of Greeks, including Euboeans, who who were impressed by the names which locals in Cilicia told them. These Greeks were traders, not settlers or post-Trojan warriors. It is only a charming notion that ‘Warikas’, a ruler in the ‘house of Mopsu’, was himself a Euboean Greek with the Greek name of Euarchos (attested in eighth-century Euboea).44 That derivation, sadly, is fanciful: a Euboean had not carved out a kingdom for himself near Adana and Misis. Rather, Euboeans found evidence of Mopsus when they traded and travelled in the ‘kingdom of Muksas–Mopsu’ in the eighth century BC.
To the Greeks, a verbal coincidence often seemed like a sign or an omen. When the visiting Greeks heard locally of ‘Mopsu’, it would have seemed to them like a heaven-sent omen, establishing that Mopsus the prophet had been there before them. What, though, of the stories which they developed about Mopsus’ quarrels with other Greek prophets? A quarrel has potential as a structural element in a legendary story, but beneath this role there may be a historical cause: the competing traditions of local Greek communities from c. 700 BC onwards.
At Claros, Mopsus was said to have quarrelled with the visiting seer Calchas. The origins of Claros’s oracle are obscure, but recent finds of pottery from renewed excavations of the site confirm that Greek goods, and probably Greek visitors, were to be found there already by c. 900 BC. It had a local spring and was probably a holy site before any buildings served it. The control of Claros was soon to be disputed between two nearby Greek settlements: Notion, which was settled on the hill overlooking the Aegean sea, and Colophon, which was settled inland up the river.45
At first, the people of Notion appear to have controlled the sanctuary. They were Aeolian Greeks by origin, a small Aeolian enclave among the many surrounding Ionian Greek settlements along the coast. By his origin in Thessaly, Mopsus the hero had Aeolian Greek roots too. He was part, then, of the mythical heritage of the Aeolians at Notion and for local reasons which are lost to us they made him into Claros’s mythical prophet. Inland from Notion, however, the Ionians at Colophon also aspired to control the site of Claros. In the early seventh century BC their own favoured hero is known to us: men from Colophon sailed west to found a new settlement at Siris in southern Italy, and there they claimed to have the very tomb of Calchas the prophet.46 So far from dying in a contest with Mopsus at Claros, he was said by them to be protecting their settlers in a new western home. Relations between Colophon and nearby Notion were never easy and their bitter rivalry may help to explain the story of a quarrel between the two prophets at Claros. The Aeolian Greeks at Notion had a special relationship with Aeolian Mopsus, but the Ionian Greeks at Colophon had a special relationship with Calchas. It was, then, particularly appealing for the Aeolian controllers of Claros to claim that Mopsus had outwitted Calchas and caused his death on the site. Colophon, specially close to Calchas, denied that Calchas had ever died there, but Mopsus’ supremacy had already been celebrated in early Greek poetry. Although Colophon took over Claros and later reduced its old rival Notion to insignificance, the story of Mopsus’ triumph could not be erased from the record.47
In southern Asia, Mopsus had two coastal heartlands, Pamphylia and the Cilician plain, but his relations with each of them varied. Their differing history of Greek settlement may help to explain why. The early contacts of Greeks with Pamphylia are still uncertain in the absence of adequate archaeology but we can probably discount the few late sources which allege an actual settlement there by Greeks. In Pamphylia, conspicuously, there was no tradition of a quarrel involving Mopsus. Instead, as Greek culture spread there, non-Greek settlements inland adopted Mopsus peacefully as a connection between themselves and Greek myth. The people of Aspendos, Perge and other Pamphylians used this convenient hero as a bridge between their non-Greek past and their new claims to a heroic Greek ancestry. Further west along the coastline, just before the fire-breathing Chimaera, there was a genuine Greek settlement in Lycia where Greeks from Rhodes founded Phaselis. In the Hellenistic age Greek antiquarians blended Phaselis’s founders peacefully into Mopsus’ family too, building on a similarity between their respective Greek names. They claimed that Phaselis’s founder had been an Argive companion of Mopsus and that Mopsus’ mother had prophesied their occupation of the site.48
In Cilicia, by contrast, Mopsus was said to have quarrelled to the death with Amphilochus the Argive. Here, the reason for the enmity may be that the traditions of two separate Greek groups of settlers collided on adjoining territory. In the eighth century BC Euboeans and other Greeks located Mopsus on the plain round Adana after encountering the local ‘house of Mopsu’. By 700 BC, however, Greeks from the island of Rhodes had settled in Soloi on the coast just to the south-west of Mopsus’ plain. As self-styled Argive kinsmen these Rhodians were champions of Amphilochus, the Argive travelling hero.49 Inland on the plain, the town of Mallos followed their lead and claimed to be an Argive foundation with an oracular shrine of Amphilochus himself. This kinship distinguished them from Mopsus’ nearby oracular spring at ‘Mopsoukrene’, their local rival. In one group of stories Mopsus then quarrelled with his rival Amphilochus and killed him. This story of a quarrel could have grown up from the competing claims of Mallos, Soloi and Mopsoukrene, local Greek communities with two different heroes as their supposed ancestors.
These competing claims extended eastwards too. In the mid-fifth century Herodotus made no mention of Mopsus, but referred to a link between the Argive Amphilochus and the Greek settlement at Posideion on the borders of Cilicia and Syria: perhaps a Rhodian Greek contingent imposed the Argive story here near the future site of Iskenderun. Later Greek scholars then asserted that Mopsus had been active further south in Syria and Phoenicia.50 Was he, perhaps, the favoured hero of nearby Al Mina, many of whose first settlers were Euboean Greeks, familiar with their ‘discovery’ of Mopsus in the Cilician plain? Did Mopsus rule for Al Mina, whereas Amphilochus ruled for Posideion on the Bay of Issus? If so, the rivalry between the two prophets was replayed on north Syria’s curving coastline.
What is certain, but under-appreciated, is that the local balance between these two heroes might have remained unresolved without a subsequent thunderclap: the arrival of Alexander the Great. In the late summer and autumn of 333 BC the young conqueror lay sick with a fever at Tarsus and his army delayed in Cilicia. His retained historical adviser Callisthenes had spare time meanwhile to research old problems of the country’s local heroes by studying them in the field. In Alexander’s company, he had travelled through Pamphylia late in the previous autumn. His rival Greek historian, Theopompus, had recently endorsed Mopsus’ role in Pamphylia, but Callisthenes could now gather evidence on site. The traces of Mopsus were undeniable, so Mopsus and his followers, he decided, must have left Claros, crossed the Taurus mountains and divided themselves up. Some had stayed in Pamphylia, some in Cilicia, but others had gone on as far as Syria and Phoenicia.51 We can now see the sound sources of his reasoning: the connections of Mopsus with Claros, his prominence at Aspendos and elsewhere in Pamphylia, the presence of the commemorative place names in Cilicia, the Greek traces in north Syria and the presence of Mps (Mopsu) in the Phoenician language which sounded so Mopsus-like to Greeks. Callisthenes had worked with his kinsman Aristotle and here, as elsewhere, he based his conclusions on evidence.
While the court historian was confirming the heritage of Mopsus, his young patron Alexander was studiously ignoring it. He visited Perge, Soloi, Aspendos and other cardinal places in Mopsus’ heartland, but he is nowhere said to have honoured Mopsus himself. Instead, he did the opposite. Alexander and his Macedonian ancestors claimed to be the descendants of the revered Greek Argos. When he reached Mallos he found a place whose origins were disputed between Mopsus and Amphilochus. Artfully, the citizens emphasized their Argive ancestry by pointing to the Argive Amphilochus as their real founder. Alexander honoured Mallos for sharing his own Argive ancestors and favoured the city with financial privileges. He even sacrificed to Amphilochus as a hero. One aspiring ‘Argive’ thus benefited others. The ‘Argive’ descent of both the Macedonians and the Cilicians was highly disputed, but in 333 BC they met as kinsmen on a mythical bridge.52
The lesson was not lost on other cities in Mopsus’ lands. Already in the fourth century BC non-Greek Aspendos had begun to emphasize her connection with Mopsus in order to explain her barbarian practices of sacrifice. In autumn 334, however, the legend of Mopsus their local boar-hunter had not saved Aspendos from Alexander’s exactions. Correctly, he treated the Aspendians as a non-Greek community and punished them when they rebelled against his demands. In the decades after his death, however, Aspendos sustained a claim to a nobler origin.
We have the evidence for it at Nemea, in the territory of Argos in Greece, where fragments of a recently found Argive decree give parts of a list of communities whose claims to a kinship with Argos were honoured by the Argives themselves.53 The decree dates to the aftermath of Alexander’s reign, an era (c. 310–300 BC) which was one of continuing prestige for Argos, the supposed mother-city of the Macedonian royal family. The surviving fragments of the decree suffice to show that the list of recognized Argive kin ranged far and wide. They even included the tiny Aegean island of Seriphos: in the Greek myths Seriphos had sheltered the Argive Perseus when he was cast out as a baby from Argos’s royal house. However, pride of place went to Soloi. She was recognized as an Argive city through her connections with Rhodes and the travelling hero Amphilochus. Evidently it had become important for this faraway Cilician city to have her Argive origin recognized again after Alexander’s reign.54
Where Soloi led, other cities in and around Cilicia scrambled to follow. High on the Argive list comes no less of an intruder than Aspendos. Somehow her citizens had persuaded the Argives that they were not, after all, a barbarian community. There were very good reasons why they now pressed this claim. Anyone who had witnessed Alexander’s recent favours to the self-styled ‘Argive’ cities in Cilicia and elsewhere knew that it paid to be seen as Argive in the new age of Macedonian kings. Despite the city’s link with Mopsus, Alexander had punished Aspendos, so she dropped her emphasis on Mopsus and passed herself off as Argive instead.55 She was remarkably successful. By the first century AD Aspendos, of non-Greek origin, appeared to be a ‘foundation of the Argives’ to the geographer Strabo.
From Claros to north Syria, Thessaly to Ascalon, the travels of Mopsus the hero are not evidence for a ‘migrant charismatic’ who was bringing wisdom from the Near East to the Greek world. They are evidence, yet again, for the flexibility of Greeks and their myths as they explained a newly found Asian kingdom, responded to civic rivalries and forged bonds of kinship between unrelated peoples. The Euboeans and other Greeks who visited the lands of the ‘house of Muksas’ in the eighth century did not arrive with empty minds which were waiting to be filled with Near Eastern learning. Guided by their own Greek presuppositions they drew their own conclusions and made their own misunderstandings. As a result Mopsus the mythical hero travelled, quarrelled and found a second homeland, hearth and spring. Homer’s epics ignored him, but Homer’s Greek contemporaries were meanwhile finding evidence of him at every turn. Mopsus then stayed in Cilicia awaiting a final discovery. In 1949 the German archaeologist Helmuth Bossert investigated the ruins of ancient Magarsos, 3 miles to the west of modern Karatas. He was much struck by the existence of two ancient burial mounds which lay near to each another, the one smaller than the other because it had been robbed. Here, he was rightly convinced, were the burial mounds ascribed to Mopsus and his enemy Amphilochus, to which the story of their quarrel had become attached.56 They await excavation, but the heroes are indeed lying where neither can see the other, in a landscape of cotton-bushes, the modern ‘white gold’ of the Ceyhan river’s irrigated plain.