The Greeks in Bactria and India c19.10

c19.10

Before going further, the actual circumstances must be considered, which means answering the question ‘What was this temple of Nanaia-Artemis?’ It has been known since 1931 (earlier writers on the subject could not know) that the Elamite nature-goddess Nanaia was the great goddess of Greek Susa, and that her temple was at Susa and was, for some purposes at any rate (e.g. manumissions), used by the Greeks of Susa as their city-temple (see p. 29). It is also clear from Strabo and Pliny that there was no other temple of Nanaia (i.e. no other of importance) in Elymais at all;³ this temple at Susa is the one Strabo calls τὰ ’Ἀζάρα,⁴ and this is the temple of the Antiochus story. It may be that Polybius knew this, though he has contrived to give the false impression of a temple in Elymais; the one writer who certainly knew that the temple stood in a great city is the author of I Maccabees (Josephus merely copies him). I do not know whether Nanaia’s temple stood within or without the wall of Susa;⁵ but as regarded the city it was a little temple-state with its own treasury, a state within a state, as the temple of Artemis at Ephesus had been prior to the reign of Lysimachus, and as many other Asiatic temples were, e.g. at Babylon and Uruk; and exactly as the Ephesians (before Lysimachus) nevertheless treated the Artemision as their own temple, so the Greeks at Susa regarded the temple of Nanaia. They sometimes called Nanaia Artemis, and it seems that by the latter part of the second century she, like Ishtar-Artemis of Uruk, had appropriated from Ephesus Artemis’ bee (p. 6); and the importance of this temple of Nanaia is shown by the fact that the Parthian king Phraates II, whose father Mithridates I had conquered Elymais, occasionally put her bee on the royal coinage.⁶ Now Susa was Antiochus’ city—the inscriptions show that it was Seleucid throughout the reigns of Seleucus IV and Antiochus IV;⁷ consequently the temple of Nanaia was Antiochus’ own temple. And Hellenistic kings did not sack their own temples;¹ that is first principles. But though Nanaia’s temple was a state, it was not a large territorial state like some temple-states in Asia Minor, but a city-temple like the Artemision at Ephesus; and had Antiochus really desired to sack it, the ‘barbarians of the place’, that is, the Elymean priesthood and personnel of the temple, would have had no chance of resisting his army, as very late writers make them do.