THE APOLOGY OF PS.-MELITON

Ps.-Meliton's Apology is a short work, extant only in Syriac, in a sixth- or seventh-century manuscript. It is not at all well known. The work itself, which purports to be an example of early Christian apologetic, is a curiosity, as will emerge below. But the real curiosity is a chapter which is packed with information about pagan cults- cults to which the author applies a version of Euhemerism, although again a rather unusual one. Several of his cults are set in the Roman Near East, and it is scholars of this area who have paid the work the little attention that it has received. The author seems to have access to interesting and far-flung information, although it is mediated through a highly individual interpretative bias. The following study is an attempt to make the text more widely-known, and as a protreptic to further study, for there are certainly more things to be discovered about it, and it would benefit from the attention of scholars in more than one area. The first part of the paper considers the text as a whole and raises some general questions about the Euhemerist chapter. The second part, which is prefaced with an adapted version of William Cureton's translation for ease of reference, provides a provisional commentary on the Euhemerist chapter. Since the author's approach is anecdotal, I have used the term 'historiola ' for each entry. PART ONE I. WHAT IS IT? The main body of the text consists of a harangue purportedly delivered to an emperor called Antoninus. The heading in the manuscript calls it 'Melitonis philosophi oratio ad Antonimun Caesaretn. How well informed is it? To begin with, the attribution to Meliton, bishop of Sardis in Asia Minor (d. c. 190), cannot be right1. Eusebius quotes some fragments from the genuine Meliton's Apology, which was addressed to Marcus Aurelius some time between 169 and 176, and they do ' As first divined by J.L. Jacobi, the year after the editio princeps (Jacobi 1856, 107-8; cf. also e.g