An east-facing aspect, bathed in the dawn, was not peculiar to Egypt’s piety. It made old Memnon speak; it revealed the sun god at Talmis. Throughout the ancient world, it was the holiest aspect for anyone’s prayers. Pythagoras and Socrates were thought to have prayed to the east, as were the contemplative Jews whom Philo described in first-century Egypt. Wise men in India were said to favour prayers at dawn, a habit which was shared by the elephant. From India to Africa, elephants were believed to honour the rising sun: in sixth-century Byzantium, beasts which had been captured from Persia would bow to the east when they filed past a church. Then they made the sign of the Cross with their trunks, an amazing fact, which, said John of Ephesus, “we have often seen with our own eyes.” From their Jewish origins, Christians inherited the gesture, and Tertullian complained that the Christians were misunderstood because they turned to the east and prayed at dawn. Pagans sometimes believed that they were worshipping the sun.1
In the late second or third century, prayer to the east found an unexpected home which leads us directly to the language of the gods. The small city of Oenoanda lies in the Lycian uplands of southwestern Asia Minor and remains one of the best-preserved witnesses to the spread of civic life in the Hellenistic age. By the year 200, the men of Oenoanda had their squares and colonnades, a well-cut theatre, an imposing set of baths and a shrine to Asclepius which a successful doctor had donated.2 Through the city’s centre ran a “vast wayside pulpit of stone” which was the gift of a certain Diogenes. Its blocks were faced with a textbook statement of the Epicurean philosophy which contemporaries often reviled for its atheist views.3 In his old age, Diogenes bequeathed it, a hundred yards long, “for the salvation of men, present and future.” “The philosopher,” it told his fellow citizens, “does not want the power and authority of Alexander.” Men must “realize what disasters have befallen others through the ambiguity and intricacy of oracles’ replies.” On a recent estimate, some twenty thousand words of text remain to be found, but the search for them has not been easy. By the 260s, Diogenes’s heirs were pulling his sermon to pieces and using the stones for rebuilding their city’s walls. Parts of it ended up in their west gate. Not everyone agreed with their donor’s faith in Epicurus, and on the value of oracles, we have recently learnt, there were those in the city who disagreed.
At a steep point of approach to the outer circuit of their walls, men in Oenoanda chose a block of the Hellenistic masonry and shaped its central boss into the outline of an altar. They cut four lines of hexameter verse onto this altar’s face and allowed two more to spread into the smoothed space below. The stone stood high to the right of a doorway which led back into one of their wall’s defensive towers and looked out over a sharp drop below the wall. It was noticed, however, and copied by the early modern travellers in Lycia, but it was not understood until a second inspection was risked from the end of a rope in 1966.4 Since then, study of the text has continued at the highest level.5 In this primary home of Epicurean wisdom, we now have words from a god on the city wall, which run in hexameter verse as follows:
Self-born, untaught, motherless, unshakeable,
Giving place to no name, many-named, dwelling in fire,
Such is God: we are a portion of God, his angels.
This, then, to the questioners about God’s nature
The god replied, calling him all-seeing Ether: to him, then, look
And pray at dawn, looking out to the east.
The text had been carefully sited. It was carved high on the wall’s northeast aspect at a point which catches the first dawn sunlight along the rise and fall of the perimeter. The site was suited to the message of the god.
Two courses of stone below the text stood a second altar with a ledge for a lamp.6 It was dedicated to the Most High god by Chromatis, a female name which tended to be borne by former slaves or their children. At Oenoanda, paganism takes a novel turn and it begins to seem as if all religions flow eventually to similar themes. Unshakeable, without one name, an all-seeing god was master of the angels, while beneath stood a lamp for the hours of darkness. Like Zoroastrian villagers in far-off Persia, people in Oenoanda rose early in the half-light to tend a flame and pray to the east, while the sunlight struck the text on their city wall. The text described God in a style which Jews and Christians could well understand. The inscription is not unduly handsome and it is only one among the many which survive elsewhere on matters of religion. However, it deserves its fame. Its implications have been brilliantly studied, but its origin and vocabulary can still be explored with profit. They are a thread to pagan oracles, in each of which we can hear the gods.
The language of Oenoanda’s text has a precise and familiar origin. It begins with a burst of negative theology which defines God by what he is not. These definitions were a commonplace among Platonist philosophers in the early Imperial period. The vocabulary was characteristic of hymns and the higher theology and we can match most of its language. “Self-born,” or “natural,” had already been used of a god in classical Greek tragedy;7 “motherless” is a less frequent epithet than “fatherless,” but Galen used it for the First Principle and the Emperor Julian applied it to the mother of the gods. In the first century A.D., Philo was familiar with the word’s philosophic use in these same contexts.8 “Giving place to no name, many-named…”: this type of paradox was as old as Heraclitus’s philosophy (c. 500 B.C.) and is well attested in pagan hymns and theology by the first century A.D.9 Among philosophers, we would expect these high epithets to apply to a Supreme god, placed beyond this world. The fifth line, however, called God “all-seeing Ether,” while the second said that he dwelt in fire. This equation was not, in itself, unphilosophic, although we might have expected a higher name for God himself. Aristotle had added a fifth element, Ether, to Plato’s fourth, Fire, and in the second century A.D., several Platonists reconciled the two views “by a certain sleight of hand.” The Stoics had eased the merger, and the result was so familiar that Artemidorus listed “Ethereal Fire” among the major Olympian gods.10 The mention of “angels” raises no problem in a pagan context. Angels occur freely in pagan cults of abstract divinities in Asia Minor;11 however, the tone of this text suggests that it had derived the word from school theology. Platonists used it for the intermediaries between gods and men, while Aelius the orator told how Athena “sits by her father and gives orders to the angeloi,” or lesser gods.
A Platonist of the second or third century might well have been speaking in the first three verses. In fact, says the text, they were the words of a god. In a brilliant study, they were promptly traced to a further context, the books of two Christian authors.12 Shortly before the year 500, the unknown author of ten Christian books, On True Belief quoted a pagan oracle which contained these lines at its further end. It had been given, he said, “to Theophilus” when he asked, “Who or what is God?” Earlier, the Christian author Lactantius had quoted the opening lines in the first book of his Divine Institutes, which he composed, c. 308, shortly before Constantine’s conversion. He made one Christian alteration in the text’s theology and claimed that these lines were the “beginning” of a twenty-one-line text in which a god was agreeing with the Christians. One of the lines earned a third Christian mention, in the work of John Malalas. In the sixth century, he quoted a text which was supposed to be the Delphic oracle’s answer to the Pharaoh of Egypt when he asked, “Who is the first among the gods and the great God of Israel?” The text, alleged Malalas sportingly, “was inscribed on stone and still preserved in the temple at Memphis.” He had no idea of its origin and his text was an obvious pastiche, but it contained the old phrase on the gods as “angels,” a “part” of God.13
Lactantius had been more accurate. The text, he said, had been given by “Apollo at Colophon” when somebody asked him, “Who is God?” Here, Lactantius was probably following the pagan Porphyry, who had recently published a work called Philosophy from Oracles.14 In its preface he had stressed the importance of citing the exact words of the gods, and if Lactantius borrowed them, his view of their origin deserves to be trusted.
Problems remain about the full nature of the response. Lactantius quoted these lines as the “beginning” of twenty-one lines of verse, but the author of On True Belief gave a text in which they stood at the end. His text should perhaps be divided into two: an answer to Theophilus and a separate answer which the Oenoandans received, other pieces of which can then be recovered from verses elsewhere in his book.15 For our purposes, its origin is more relevant. “Apollo at Colophon” is the god of the great oracular shrine at Claros, a major seat of the gods’ wisdom in the second and third centuries which we have come to know through excavation and finds of inscriptions. With their help, we can recapture the course of a consultation, for the ruins of the site support our best ancient description, a paragraph by Iamblichus, written in the early fourth century. He was not writing from personal experience, but he had found a good authority.16
Visitors to the temple at Claros entered the sacred valley and approached through the big triple gate which stood before the shrine. Beyond it stretched the sacred grove, where now there is only dust, and a hundred yards or so to the north stood the altar and Doric temple of Apollo. The approaches were lined with statues on stone bases, many of which were statues of Romans from the late Republican age. The altar was enormous, as were the colossal statues of Apollo, Artemis and Leto, up to twenty feet high, who made a family grouping in the shrine itself. On coins, we can see the particular type of Apollo, a huge half-naked divinity, seated at ease, whose right hand holds laurel and whose left rests on a lyre.
The god, we are told, was questioned by night, although not every night was fit for an inquiry. While visitors waited for a sacred night to fall, they were prepared for the process which lay ahead. At the beginning of the second century A.D., we know only of a “prophet” in the inscriptions which have so far been published. This single spokesman fits the picture of the oracle which was drawn by the historian Tacitus, himself a governor of Asia, and thus able, if he wished, to learn about the site.17 A priest, he said, was chosen from a fixed number of families and “generally summoned from Miletus.” This priest heard only the number and the names of the consultants; then he went down into a “cave” and drank the sacred water. Although he was “generally ignorant of letters and poetry,” he gave responses in verse on the “topics which each questioner had in mind.” We know nothing of the priest’s despatch from Miletus to Claros in the inscriptions which survive: Miletus, however, had its own vast oracular shrine where citizens served as prophets and played an important role, as we shall see, as poets of the god’s words. To date, the inscriptions confirm Tacitus’s picture of a single male attendant at his time of writing. Tacitus implies that the man’s method of answering was something of a miracle, and we must try to account for it. If the priest did not ask for his questioners’ questions, his verse responses can only have been general and rather stereotyped. Perhaps the god kept to certain familiar verses and “inspired” his priest to utter one or other set. One hostile visitor, Oenomaus the Cynic, called at the site, perhaps c. 120 A.D., and alleged that the same obscure verses were given out to different questioners.18 It may be wrong to trust him too closely, but his picture does fit neatly with the implication of Tacitus’s words.
By the mid-130s, however, the inscriptions reveal a change. The prophet is joined by a “thespode,” or “singer of oracles,” and unlike the prophet, this thespode serves for life.19 He brought a greater expertise, and by the time of the Oenoandans’ visit, the giving of oracles was split between a prophet, a thespode and a secretary. There was also a priest: how, then, are they likely to have shared out the work?
Iamblichus tells us that “many religious rites” were performed before the god was consulted. A sacrifice on the great altar was surely one of them, and the natural official for this rite was the priest. We know, too, from inscriptions that some of the visitors were initiated into a mystery rite, apparently as a preliminary to the consultation. As elsewhere, these rites would involve expense: one leader of a city’s delegation assisted the initiation of all the young choirboys whom he led, “out of love of honour and the god,” and presumably he paid the bill himself. These secret rites greatly enhanced the occasion.20 Meanwhile, the envoys were waiting for the appointed night, and while they waited, they talked. No doubt they talked to the priest and the secretary and probably to the thespode, too, telling them about their city and their problems, and starting the simple process by which a good counselling service works. They gave away enough to suggest an answer before they asked the question for which they had come. The temple staff listened innocently and so, therefore, did Apollo. There was no conscious fraud, no insincerity. Mortals could not bother gods without preparation, as a god would rebuke a questioner who asked too abruptly for too much. As the night approached, the prophet himself was absent. Iamblichus tells us that he fasted for a day and a night before the consultation began, and he also tells us of his withdrawal to “shrines untrodden by the crowds,” where he abstained from human business and prepared himself to receive the god “untarnished.”21 He seems to refer to something more than the prophet’s retirement at the moment of consultation. For twenty-four hours, then, the prophet had been out of sight, fasting, praying and freeing himself from the bother of the world. Iamblichus claims that he had already begun to be “enthused” by the god, but he may be elaborating the time of inspiration in order to suit his particular argument.
When the sacred night fell and the lamps had been lit in the sanctuary, the staff and the questioners met by torchlight before Apollo’s Doric temple. Above them loomed the colossal statues of the gods. The prophet reappeared, and together they prepared for the journey to Apollo’s inner shrine. Some of the visitors’ inscriptions mention that they had “entered”; Tacitus and Iamblichus knew