A net for Astarte

6.24 (on YouTube)

<ANONYMOUS>

This woven net worn out, but worn in vain,

Does Heliodorus hang as offering

Here in the temple porch for Syria’s Queen.

Guiltless of blood it was in fishery;

Instead it gathered countless strands of wrack,

Piling it high upon the friendly shore.

Like my last post, this is a new translation that won't be in the book.

Plenty of dedicatory epigrams concern fishermen and their gear. In addition to the many variants on the ‘three brothers’ who hunt with nets by land, sea, and air (6.11-16 and 179-87), there is a substantial run of fishing poems at 6.23-30. In epigrams on trades and crafts generally, the typical occasion for dedicating tools is retirement after a a successful career, but that expectation can also be subverted.

In an essay titled On the Syrian Goddess, the second-century sophist Lucian, himself a Syrian, says of Astarte’s cult at Hierapolis: ‘In the great court oxen of great size browsed; horses, too, are there, and eagles and bears and lions, who never hurt mankind but are all sacred and all tame’ (41). (Various modern sources attest as well that fish were sacred to Astarte, but that's a rabbit-hole down which I don't want to go.) Under Astarte’s miraculous protection humans and animals live alongside one another, doing and suffering no harm. I suppose this makes her a fit dedicatee for a fishing-net that was never any good for catching fish.

Heliodorus may have scraped a living from his net all the same: seaweed was gathered and fermented to produce the purplish-red dye orchil, used for rouge, and called phukos just like the wrack from which it was made. When Lucillius at AP 11.310 critiques a woman’s purchase of expensive cosmetics — ‘For that amount you might have bought a face’ — orchil is on his list (that one's in the book).

The poem’s authorship and date are unknown. I do not imagine a connection with the Syrian Heliodorus who wrote the Aethiopica in the fourth century AD.

You can read Lucian’s essay on Astarte in an old translation by Herbert Strong and John Garstang, available online.