Once upon a time there was a king. The kingdom was small, and the neighbours altogether too strong and too mighty. To discourage those who dreamt of conquering it, the king resolved to frighten them with his reputation instead.
“Whom might they all be afraid of?” he wondered—and worked it out: the gods. On his father’s side he came of Persian Zoroastrians; on his mother’s, of Ptolemaic Egypt. So he determined to amalgamate the whole of his parents’ Persian and Graeco-Roman divinities, throwing in the Egyptian notion of the king as divine ruler for good measure.
How was everyone to be persuaded of his godhead and his good-neighbourliness at one and the same time? The king deployed a series of public-relations manoeuvres, beginning with his own title. He gave orders that he was to be styled:
ΑΝΤΙΟΧΟΣ Ο ΘΕΟΣ ΔΙΚΑΙΟΣ ΕΠΙΦΑΝΗΣ ΦΙΛΟΡΩΜΑΙΟΣ ΦΙΛΕΛΛΗΝ
“Antiochus the Just, God Manifest, Friend of the Romans and Friend of the Greeks.”
Like many a mythomaniac in power, he came to believe his own inventions, and wished to ascend to the gods at the conclusion of his earthly reign. He ordered a pyramid-like complex built on the summit of Mount Nemrut, there to conduct the ceremonies and festivals of his new religion and to glorify him while he lived—and, after his death, to preserve his body for eternity.
To secure the faith and piety of his people, he made use of visual communications throughout the kingdom. The stelae bore dexiosis scenes—depictions of the king shaking hands with the gods, in the manner of “Doctor Livingstone, I presume?”—while the reverse carried the laws and the rules for venerating the gods and their burial places.
In the photographs, a pair of examples from Zeugma. These basalt stelae (69–36 BC) stood in the city’s agora. On the left, Antiochus with Apollo–Mithra–Helios (yes, he merged the lot of them into a single figure—why ever not?); on the right, with Heracles. The reverse of the second carries a rather remarkable text:
…And I believe that they will take the good as an example by granting the honour which belongs to the gods, and in the same way they will define me and cite fancy words in the wisdom of their blooming years. I pray for those who act in such way, to the patriarchal gods in Persia and Macedonia and also to the gods of motherland Kommagene, to grant forgiveness for their respectful behaviour. And whoever will possess the sovereignty for a long time will receive the mercy of gods and goddesses with my prayers, by maintaining our respectful behaviour and this law. Through divine commands, as an expression of my piety, I declare this inscription of the gods’ commands bearing supreme meaning with sacred letters in a low voice, to my citizens and to the strangers who read this inscription. This rock delivers with a low voice, the following, with the patronage of Zeus Oromasdes and desires of other gods, to the kings and rulers who suffer from human nature and who are solely separated by means of tribes or clan names, to the strangers and slaves: in the context of the law, if anyone with a blinding ignorance steps sacrilegiously to the sacred land, ignoring the sacred things, he should leave the common blessed house of the gods of his ancestors and run away to somewhere without religious value, and there he should get purified of the unconscious sin with the purifying fear. If he forces or sneaks his way into here due to his lack of religion, he will not reach a happy ending, because the great guardian who monitors here will not withhold his divine protection…
(The English as given on the museum’s own panel at Zeugma.)
