The Hellenistic World and Rome
North Africa, and is a parallel to Ulpian’s reference to the antiquity of Tyre.
A little later coins of Tyre show Dido supervising the foundation of Car-
thage.^48 Would it be pure speculation to see in this consciousness one source
of the rash of grants of the status ofcoloniamade to Syrian cities by Septimius
Severus from Lepcis, the husband of a lady from Emesa (which Herodian and
Heliodorus thought of as also being Phoenician)?
However, it is also relevant that the role of archaic Phoenicia in trade,
shipping, and colonisation was a well-established part of the Graeco-Roman
historical tradition.^49 For instance, Pliny the Elder (NH, ) contrasts the
modest commercial activity of the present—purple fishing—with Tyre’s
former glory as a colonising city; Strabo in theGeography(–) similarly
emphasises the colonial past of Tyre, as well as the ship-building and trade
of Sidon, and the Sidonian development of astronomy and arithmetic, as a
result of the needs of navigation; while Pompeius Trogus in book narrates
in detail the flight of Elissa (Dido) from Tyre and the foundation of Carthage.
But of course the most important contribution to Graeco-Roman cul-
ture made by Phoenicia had been the art of alphabetic writing. Everybody
(rightly) accepted that on the basis of Herodotus , , though Eupolemus, in
the second century.., asserted that writing had been invented by Moses,
who taught it to the Hebrews, after which it was transmitted by the Phoeni-
cians to the Greeks.^50 It was so much a part of the common stock of historical
knowledge that in the second century..the Sophist Hadrianos of Tyre
could open his first performance in Athens with the famous words ‘‘Again
letters [grammata] have come from Phoenicia’’ (Philostratus,VS, ). The
content of his proclamation was familiar, but the point could not have been
made with the same overtones by someone who was not from Phoenicia.
The transmission of the alphabet was of course only one element in the
legend of Kadmos, the son of Agenor, who came from Tyre or Sidon, and
after various adventures, including the search for his kinswoman, Europe,
founded Thebes and ruled there. The infinitely varied forms which the
legend took was studied by Ruth B. Edwards,Kadmos the Phoenician().
It is extremely significant that this legend was subsequently integrated and
internalised in Phoenicia itself. We may not wish to use Achilles Tatius’
novelLeucippe and Cleitophonas evidence, with its description of a painting
. E.g.,BMC Phoenicia, Tyre, no. ;Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum, Danish National
Museum: Phoenicia(), no. .
. For this tradition, see the exhaustive treatment by G. Bunnens,L’expansion phéni-
cienne en Méliterranée().
.FGrH, F. . See B. Z. Wacholder,Eupolemus().