Note 134 — Chapter X · SYRIA AND THE LAND OF THE NABATAEANS.

The little treatise, ascribed to Lucian, as to the Syrian goddess at Hierapolis adored by all the East, furnishes a specimen of the wild and voluptuous fable-telling which was characteristic of the Syrian cultus. In this narrative—the source of Wieland’s Kombabus—self-mutilation is at once celebrated and satirised in turn as an act of high morality and of pious faith.