Phrygia

“ The kingdom of Lydia appears to have become important about the end of the 8th century, and to have completely barred the path between Phrygia and Cyme or Smyrna. Ionian maritime enterprise opened a new way over Sinope. [11]
The downfall of the Phrygian monarchy can be dated with comparative accuracy. Between 680 and 670 the Cimmerians in their destructive progress over Asia Minor overran Phrygia; the king Midas in despair put an end to his own life; and from henceforth the history of Phrygia is a story of slavery, degradation and decay, which contrasts strangely with the earlier legends. ”

“ Of these cities, however, Laodicea was the greatest, for it was the metropolis of Phrygia, though Colosse is said to have been a great and wealthy place. The inhabitants of Phrygia, says Dr. Macknight, were famous for the worship of Bacchus, and of Cybele the mother of the gods; whence the latter was called Phrygia mater, by way of eminence. In her worship, as well as in that of Bacchus, both sexes practised every species of debauchery in speech and action, with a frantic rage which they pretended was occasioned by the inspiration of the deities whom they worshipped. ”

“ According to Greek tradition there existed in early time a Phrygian kingdom in the Sangarius valley, ruled by kings among whom the names Gordius and Midas were common. It was known to the ancient Greeks of Ionia and the Troad as something great and half-divine. When the goddess appeared to her favourite Anchises she represented herself as daughter of the king of Phrygia; the Phrygians were said to be the oldest people, and their language the original speech of mankind ”

“ While to Achæan ships great store of gold and Phrygian spoils are being conveyed, and they who came against this town, those sons of Hellas, only wait a favouring breeze to follow in their wake, that after ten long years they may with joy behold their wives and children. Vanquished by Hera, Argive goddess, and by Athena, who helped to ruin Phrygia, I am leaving Ilium, that famous town, and the altars that I love; for when drear desolation seizes on a town, the worship of the gods decays and tends to lose respect. ”

“ In Phrygia the corresponding song, sung by harvesters both at reaping and at threshing, was called Lityerses. According to one story, Lityerses was a bastard son of Midas, King of Phrygia. He used to reap the corn, and had an enormous appetite. When a stranger happened to enter the corn-field or to pass [pg 366] by it, Lityerses gave him plenty to eat and drink, then took him to the corn-fields on the banks of the Maeander and compelled him to reap along with him. Lastly, he used to wrap the stranger in a sheaf, cut off his head with a sickle, and carry away his body, wrapt in the corn stalks. ”

“ Of the two first springs of influence, our poet shows full consciousness, but none of the last; since his admiration for spiral patterns, derived, according to the best authorities, from the banks of the Sangarius, came to him at second-hand from Mycenæ. The metallurgical traditions of Phrygia find, moreover, no place in his verses. The dæmonic artificers of Asia Minor—the hammer-and-anvil goblins, sons or servants of Hephæstus, who of old intangibly colonised the shores and islands of the Levant, make no figure in the Iliad or Odyssey. ”

“ Almost the only fact which we know as to the history of Phrygia is that recorded by Strabo [67] , who tells of a Phrygian king Midas, who, when his kingdom was devastated about B.C. 680 by an invasion of the Cimmerians, committed suicide by drinking bull’s blood. After the Cimmerians had retired, the kingdom of the Lydians arose to a great height of power and splendour, but that of the Phrygians did not fully recover, remaining a dependency of Lydia.
The Midas of the Midas Tomb can scarcely be the monarch who fell in the darkest hour of his country’s history. ”

“ All writers suppose them to have been magicians, attendants upon the mother of the gods, and to have lived in Phrygia about Mount Ida. They call the Troad Phrygia, because, after the devastation of Troy, the neighbouring Phrygians became masters of the country. It is also supposed that the Curetes and the Corybantes were descendants of the Idæan Dactyli, and that they gave the name of Idæan Dactyli to the first hundred persons who were born in Crete ”

“ In these and other cases the Phrygian character was more or less Hellenized; but wave after wave of religious influence from Asia Minor introduced into Greece the unmodified “barbarian” ritual of Phrygia. The rites spread first among the common people and those engaged in foreign trade. The comic poets satirized them, and Plato and Demostienes inveighed against them; but they continued to spread, with all their fervid enthusiasm, their superstition and their obscene practices, wide among the people, whose religious cravings were not satisfied with the purely external religions of Hellenism. ”

“ This identification, while it helps us to conjecture the local attributes of the deities, enables us also to recognise at once the national character of the leaders in the procession, for the cult of the Nature goddess was world-wide. Her association with the lioness is familiar in her many guises, as for instance in Phrygia, where she rides in a lion-drawn car. ”

“ Bithynia, Phrygia, and Colchis, must however be excepted from sharing in this general propriety of the female character; for, as these nations are chiefly connected with Cancer and the Moon, their male population is, generally speaking, slavish in its habits, timid and superstitious, while the greater part of the women, owing to the matutine and masculine position of the Moon, are of masculine manners, ambitious of command, and warlike. ”

“ Thus, with the strigil, the toga would serve to suggest Lydia or Lycia as the source of the Etruscans, if Herodotus had not recorded the tradition, or the Etruscans themselves had not claimed this ancestry. This tomb enables me to say that the manners of ancient Phrygia (I use as a general name that of the chief of the states of Asia Minor) are, at the distance of three thousand years, preserved with a fidelity of imitation, or an identity of character, in modern Barbary, such as at the interval of thirty years can scarcely be reckoned on in Europe. ”

“ The gathering of foreign merchants and slaves in the Anatolian cities, and the constant shifting of their 31inhabitants by their successive masters, had forced on the votaries of these Phrygian deities a theocrasia of the most complete kind, and the Phrygian god and goddess were in turn identified with the deities of Eleusis, of whom indeed they may have been the prototypes, with the Syrian Aphrodite and Adonis, with the Egypto-Greek Serapis and Isis, and probably with many Oriental deities as well [105] . At the same time, their fame and their worship had spread far beyond Phrygia. ”

“ An engagement at the fords of the Granicus, only a few days after the crossing of the Hellespont, placed Asia Minor at the mercy of the invader (334) . Mysia, Lydia, Caria, and Lycia tendered their submission, Miletus and Halicarnassus being the only towns to offer any resistance. In the spring of 333, Phrygia followed the general movement, in company with Cappadocia and Cilicia; these represented the Hittite and Asianic world, the last representatives of which thus escaped from the influences of the East and passed under the Hellenic supremacy. ”

“ Beyond the Epictetus to the south is the Greater Phrygia, leaving on the left Pessinus, and the parts about Orcaorci, and Lycaonia, and on the right Mæones, Lydians, and Carians. In the Epictetus are Phrygia Paroreia, and the country towards Pisidia, and the parts about Amorium,1279 Eumeneia,1280 and Synnada.1281 Next are Apameia Cibotus,1282 and Laodiceia,1283 the largest cities in Phrygia. Around them lie the towns [and places] , Aphrodisias,1284 Colossæ,1285 Themisonium,1286 Sanaus, Metropolis,1287 Apollonias, and farther off than these, Peltæ, Tabeæ, Eucarpia, and Lysias. ”

“ The national instrument of the Phrygians was the flute, and it is worthy of remark that up 186to a very late period flute-players at Athens were usually distinguished by Phrygian names. Olympos the greatest musician known to the Greeks, was probably himself a native of Phrygia, since he is said to have been a pupil of Marsyas. In fact the barbarians of antiquity appear, though in a somewhat different way, to have made as much use of music as the Greeks themselves. ”

“ About the same period, Macedonius, Theodulus, and Tatian, who were Phrygians by birth, courageously endured martyrdom. [1]
A temple of Misos, a city of Phrygia, having been reopened by the governor of the province, after it had been closed many years, these martyrs entered therein by night, and destroyed the images. As other individuals were arrested, and were on the point of being punished for the deed, they avowed themselves the actors in the transaction. They might have escaped all further punishment by offering sacrifices to idols ”

“ It appears that the name Phrygians, like that of Thracians, was a generic designation, and comprehended tribes or separate communities who had also specific names of their own. We trace Phrygians at wide distances: on the western bank of the river Halys,—at Kelænæ, in the interior of Asia Minor, towards the rise of the river Mæander,—and on the coast of the Propontis near Kios;—in both of these latter localities there is a salt lake called Askanius, which is the name both of the leader of the Phrygian allies of Troy, and of the country from whence they are said to come, in the Iliad. ”

“ But there are others who themselves are even more heretical in nature (than the foregoing) , and are Phrygians [1] by birth. These have been rendered victims of error from being previously captivated by (two) wretched women, called a certain Priscilla and Maximilla, whom they supposed (to be) prophetesses. And they assert that into these the Paraclete Spirit had departed; and antecedently to them, they in like manner consider Montanus as a prophet. And being in possession of an infinite number of their books, (the Phrygians) are overrun with delusion ”

“ Now, that music can heal diseases, Theophrastus asserts in his treatise on Enthusiasm, where he says that men with diseases in the loins become free from pain if any one plays a Phrygian air opposite to the part affected. And the Phrygians are the first people who invented and employed the harmony which goes by their name; owing to which circumstance it is that the flute-players among the Greeks have usually Phrygian and servile-sounding names, such as Sambas in Alcman, and Adon, and Telus. ”

“ In this way, he says, the Phrygians call him “Amygdalus,” from which proceeded and was born the Invisible (One) , “by whom all things were made, and nothing was made without Him.” [1] And the Phrygians say that what has been thence produced is “Syrictas” (piper) , because the Spirit that is born is harmonious. “For God,” he says, “is Spirit; wherefore,” he affirms, “neither in this mountain do the true worshippers worship, nor in Jerusalem, but in spirit. For the adoration of the perfect ones,” he says, “is spiritual, not carnal.” ”

“ It was in this phase that she was worshipped in the Metroön at Athens. In reality, the Mother Goddess appears under three aspects: Rhea, the Homeric and Hesiodic goddess of Cretan origin; the Phrygian Mother, with Attis; and the Greek Great Mother, a modified form of the Phrygian Mother, to be explained as the original goddess of the Phrygians of Europe, communicated to the Greek stock before the Phrygian invasion of Asia Minor and consequent mingling with Asiatic stocks (cf. Showerman, p. 252) . ”

“ He, bewildered with passion, fixes his eyes upon her: the 10
sight makes him burn the more for battle, and thus he
addresses Amata in brief: “Let me not have tears nor
aught so ominous, dear mother, as my escort to the iron
battle; Turnus is not free to postpone the call of death.
Go, Idmon, and bear the Phrygian despot a message that 15
will like him not: Soon as the goddess of to-morrow’s
dawn shall fire the sky with the glow of her chariot, let
him not spur the Teucrians against the Rutulians ”

“ The same, he says, is the Pleroma, whereby all things that are [137] begotten by the unbegotten have come into being and are filled.
But the same one is called by the Phrygians “unfruitful.” For he is unfruitful when he is fleshly and performs the desire of the flesh. This, he says, is the saying: “Every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is cut down and cast into the fire.” [124] For these fruits, he says, are only the rational, the living man who enter by the third gate. [125] They say, indeed: “Ye who eat dead things and make living ones, what will ye make if ye eat living things?” ”

“ The Illyrians were in these ancient times also bounded on the east by the Phrygians and Thracians, as well as by the Pelasgians. The Phrygians were at this time the immediate neighbours of the Macedonians in Lebæa, by whom they were called Brygians (Βρύγες, Βρύγοι, Βρίγες) ;30 they dwelt at the foot of the snowy Bermius, where the fabulous rose-gardens of king Midas were situated, while walking in which the wise Silenus was said to have been taken prisoner. They also fought from this place (as the Telegonia of Eugammon related) 31 with the Thesprotians of Epirus. ”

“ In a note to this Mr Mead quotes from The Life of Isidorus: "I fell asleep and in a vision Attis seemed to appear to me, and on behalf of the Mother of gods to initiate me into the feast called Hilario, a mystery which discloses the way of our salvation from Hades." Throughout the document reference is continually made to the Phrygians and their doctrine of Man. The Eleusinian Mysteries are then treated of as subsequent to the Phrygian, "after the Phrygians, the Athenians," but the teaching is represented as being essentially identical. ”