Arsinoe's Adonis and the Poetics of Ptolemaic Imperialism

The Adonia sponsored by Queen Arsinoe in Theocritus' fifteenth Idyll, our fullest account of an Adonis festival anywhere, is a hybrid ceremony, woven together out of different religious and cultural practices. The present article seeks to understand the festival within its poem and that poem within the Alexandrian courtly milieu that produced it. Our fragmentary evidence for the cult and myth of Adonis in general comes from throughout the Mediterranean world, from a wide spectrum of literary genres, and from all strata of ancient chronology. The variegated, inconsistent picture it presents is no trick played by its lacunosity, but a function of its diverse origins and uses; thus in a text like Idyll 15, it is not simply a question for us to unravel syncretistic matter from some essential Adonia. We will find a series of mutually interwoven texts (in the broadest sense): the Adonia of Classical Greece, the ritual codes of Egypt, the public image of the Ptolemies, the other Greek poetry of Theocritus' time and place, and the life of early Ptolemaic Alexandria, all read and misread by the poet who frames our view of them.

Arsinoe's Adonia

Idyll 15, a hexameter dialogue titled "Syracusan Women, or Worshippers of Adonis" in our manuscripts, is set around the later 270s B.C.E.¹ Gorgo and Praxinoa, Alexandrians of Syracusan origin (line 90), set out one morning for an Adonis festival sponsored by Queen Arsinoe at the palace. The women admire tapestry depictions of the god (78-86) and hear a forty-five-line hymn that represents Arsinoe as celebrating Adonis in gratitude for Aphrodite's deification of the late Queen Mother, Berenice (106-11). The singer's impressionistic description of the display includes a representation of Adonis on an ornate bed with his goddess-lover under a leafy canopy (119-31); near him lie fruit, mini-gardens kept in silver baskets, golden bottles of scented oils, breads, and meats (112-18).² At dawn "we women" will carry Adonis to the seashore in mourning and begin a song, presumably the competitive dirge at which the singer herself won last year (132-35; cf. 98). The hymn ends with a prayer, echoed by Gorgo, that Adonis be favorable next year too.

The poem is a royal encomium,³ exalting the queen as heir and champion of Hellenic culture. By the time of the Ptolemies the Adonia, originally a transformation of the yearly ritual mourning for the Mesopotamian god Tammuz, had long had a special place in Greek society; in Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E., whence the bulk of our evidence comes, it was observed by women at home with a combination of lamentation and merriment.⁴ Arsinoe's celebration, "at home" as in Athens, is a clear statement of her own Hellenism.⁵ It also includes the poetic competitions that linked Ptolemaic Egypt to Greek literary history, and in particular continues a tradition of Adoniac cult hymns like those of Sappho and Praxilla of Sicyon; at line 129 the Sapphic associations of the term gambros, "bridegroom," unite Sappho's marriage songs and Adonis-songs in a single literary pedigree.⁶ The singer herself is introduced as "the Argive woman's daughter" (97): the Homeric meter and language of the poem, themselves harnessed to the ideological program, lend the mother's ethnic the Homeric sense of "Greek" (versus non-Greek).⁷ References to the ruling dynasty here are not vague: the Lagids, like all noble Macedonian families, traced their ancestry and legitimate Hellenism back to Argos (specifically to Heracles, as in Idyll 17.20-27). The singer's identity thus parallels that of the festival's sponsor: in terms of Ptolemaic ideology, Arsinoe too is "the Argive woman's daughter." In this gynecocentric poem song and monarchy follow the same path, from mother to daughter.⁸

Yet a searching comparison of Theocritus' picture with the Greek Adonia reveals a more complex encomiastic impulse. Arsinoe's Adonia can be read as a composite whose slippage from its Greek referent—particularly in the cult objects, food offerings, emphasis...