founded her cult in the city, where her temples soon proliferated. New imagery and
attributes were developed for her interaction with her new Greek consumers,
amongst whom women may have predominated. Sarapis too, despite the elaborate
myths of his origin, was a native Egyptian god, Osiris-Apis, and his existence
is attested prior to Alexander’s arrival. But he was appropriated from Memphis
by Ptolemy Soter and radically redesigned for a role in the new city: a religious
innovation of enormous success, given its artificiality. He was brought to serve as
Alexandria’s protector-god (all Greek cities had to have one), but he was identified,
appropriately, with Hades and, a little less appropriately, with Asclepius. Ptolemy III
built him the magnificent Sarapieion, the dramatic destruction of which, in AD 392,
came to symbolize the end of paganism in Egypt, and indeed further afield. As a pair
Sarapis and Isis came to serve as a divine projection of the royal couple, with whom
they were often associated. Alexandria was distinguished from the other cities con-
sidered here not least by its dynastic cult, which grew by increments out of a cult for
Alexander, whose body Ptolemy I had secured for the city, and into which dead
Ptolemies were soon incorporated. In the midst of all this Alexandria’s important
Jewish population seems to have been left to practice its religion in freedom, and
possibly even with a degree of moral support from the throne. It was the Ptolemies,
after all, who commissioned the Septuagint and who, in Alexandria, presided over the
rapprochement between Jewish and Greek culture that permitted the emergence of
Christianity.
Finally in our review of different religious systems,Madeleine Jost(Chapter 17)
analyzes the initially less heavily centralized, wild, and pastoral, but reputedly pious,
land of Arcadia. There are, she contends, two ways in which one can speak meaningfully
of an ‘‘Arcadian religious system.’’ First, we can look to the existence of distinctively
Arcadian deities worshiped throughout the region. In fact there were three ‘‘pan-
Arcadian’’ deities that structured the religion of the region as a whole. Two were the
goat-god Pan and Zeus Lykaios, who were adopted as federal symbols when the
Arcadians formed themselves into a league, the latter despite his associations with
human sacrifice. A third was Despoina, whose worshipers celebrated her orgiastic
rites in animal costumes, and whose sanctuary at Lykosoura enjoyed an importance
that far outstripped that of its local city, receiving honor from all over Arcadia. These
deities were distinctively characterized by wildness and animalian aspects. We can also
look to the distinctive structuring of the local pantheons of the Arcadian cities, and in
particular to the valuable information that can be gleaned from the epithets applied to
the gods in these pantheons. These epithets, whilst often familiar from elsewhere in
Greece, could sometimes be interpreted in a distinctively Arcadian fashion. Some
epithets intriguingly preserve the memories of lost local deities. Others celebrated the
preoccupations that chiefly concerned this rustic society, and related to agricultural and
pastoral activities. Secondly, we can look to Arcadian mythology for distinctive tales
rooted in the land of Arcadia itself. An Arcadian religious identity is proclaimed in
particular by the myths of animal transformation, such as that of Lykaon into a wolf,
and those of Demeter and Poseidon into horses (myths which should not be taken
to document an ‘‘animal phase’’ in the history of Arcadian religion). For gods, such
transformations represented their intimate connections with the animal world;
for men, they represented the regression to the animal state that ensues when the
institutions of civilization are flouted.
Introduction 11