evidence from Hierapolis outside the text? This is of course a much-debated ques-
tion. Since DDSwas, first and foremost, rigorously structured around a Herodotean
model, the provision of accuracy with regard to the actual cultic realities at the
temple of the Syrian goddess cannot have been at the forefront of the author’s mind.
Some fantastic exaggerations in DDS, for example a reference to columns at the
temple’s entrance of 600 feet in height (28), indeed hint at an attitude which was
rather tongue-in-cheek. However, to make the joke (describing a temple in Roman
Syria in the same manner in which Herodotus would have done it) work, the author
would have needed to portray at least a realisticrepresentation of religious life in
the region. And to be able to do so he must have been familiar with many aspects
of Near Eastern worship, which is of course what he claims in the opening lines: “I
myself that write am an Assyrian” (1). Without giving an accurate or “true” picture
of what went on in this specific temple at Hierapolis, DDScan therefore still be
considered as emblematic of religious life in Rome’s orient as a whole.
Viewed from a non-oriental perspective, the text is relevant also on a different level
for what it reveals – though in deliberately confusing terms – about common Greco-
Roman perceptionsof what counted as “Near Eastern” (Elsner 2001). Exploring
religious and other cultural identities was a very common feature, indeed the main
characteristic, in the writings of most authors in this period, which was known as
the “Second Sophistic.” This label, which originated in antiquity itself, was given to
a Greek cultural “movement,” or rather the blossoming of a Greek literary culture,
which harked back deliberately to the classical age, when Athens had been the cen-
ter of the world (Bowie 1974; Swain 1996). The mythological interest in the past
which is present in DDS, for example the listing of five different and contradictory
traditions about the foundation of the temple at Hierapolis (12–27), has strong par-
allels in writings from the same period that cover the Greco-Roman world. Its most
obvious exponent was the Description of Greece, written by Pausanias, who traveled
as a tourist or pilgrim (depending on our definitions) through mainland Greece, where
he visited temples and other antiquities from the classical period which were still
there by the time he wrote in the second half of the second centuryad. Pausanias
was above all interested in the various stories which linked certain sanctuaries to specific
gods and their various mythologies, and attempted to show a critical attitude toward
what he was taught at the different places. In a certain way the Greek religious
identity which his work thus helped to (re-)create provided a counterbalance to the
domination of the Greek world by Rome (Elsner 1992).
Among other figures of this period that are relevant to a discussion of religion
in the Roman east, mention ought to be made briefly of the voluminous writer Plutarch,
who, as a local politician and highly educated philosopher, also held a priesthood at
the temple of Apollo at Delphi for the last thirty years or so of his life. From his
writings, datable to the last decennia of the first and the first decennia of the second
centuryad, we can distil an image of a man for whom religion was a very serious
matter, combining a philosophical approach with professional participation in cultic
life (Swain 1996). Simultaneously he investigated religious issues with historical ques-
tions in mind, producing works such as On the Pythian Oracles, On the Decline of
Oracles, and On Isis and Osiris. One of the key figures of the Second Sophistic, he
Religion in the Roman East 453