# Ancient Historians and Comparative Religion

> Ancient historians and comparative religion concerns a practical question: what kind of evidence is an ancient author giving you when he reports a god, a prodigy or a miracle? The answer differs by…

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Section: Religion and practice, Ancient History, Ancestry & Genetics
Last updated: 2026-10-20
Publisher: Library of Ashurbanipal (Van Kush Family Research Institute), https://wiki.soapbox.community

**Ancient historians and comparative religion** concerns a practical question: **what kind of evidence is an ancient author giving you when he reports a god, a prodigy or a miracle?** The answer differs by author, and knowing which author you are reading is most of the work.

## Three historians, three stances

The Institute's paper *Three Types of Ancient Historian* sorts them by **epistemological posture** rather than by reliability:

- **Polybius** (c. 200–118 BCE) — the **materialist**. He reports Roman religious practice in detail and explains it functionally, as an instrument of social cohesion. The Institute's phrase for this: he *"worships the machinery while denying the operator."* Read him for what was *done* and discount his account of why.
- **Livy** (59 BCE–17 CE) — the **practitioner**. His prodigy lists — rains of stones, speaking oxen, statues that sweat — are annual, formulaic, and tied to specific expiations. Whatever one thinks they record, they are **systematic reporting in a fixed format**, which makes them usable as data in a way that anecdote is not.
- **Josephus** (37–c. 100 CE) — the **civilisational self-historian**. He does for Judaism what **Berossus** did for Babylon and **Manetho** for Egypt: presents his own people's records to a Greek-reading audience, with the apologetic pressures that implies. Read him knowing who he was writing for and what he needed from them.

## Two mythographers, who are not historians

- **Ovid**, *Metamorphoses* (c. 8 CE) — a poem, not a handbook. It is the source of the standard form of many myths in Western tradition, which means **the version everyone knows is often Ovid's literary version** rather than the cult tradition. Enormously influential, and the wrong thing to cite for what anyone believed.
- **Pseudo-Apollodorus**, *Bibliotheca* (1st–2nd c. CE) — the opposite: a dry, systematic handbook of Greek myth and genealogy with no literary ambition. **For genealogies it is the single most useful ancient source**, because genealogy is what it is organised around. The "Pseudo-" is because the attribution to Apollodorus of Athens is impossible on dating grounds.

For any argument reading **myth as genealogy** — see Solar Theory and Euhemerism — the *Bibliotheca* is the primary text and Ovid is the trap.

## Apollonius of Tyana, and the comparison with Jesus

**Apollonius of Tyana** (c. 3 BCE–c. 97 CE) was a Neopythagorean sage and ascetic. Almost everything known of him comes from the *Life of Apollonius* by **Philostratus**, written in the 220s CE — over a century after his death — and **commissioned by the empress Julia Domna**. It reports miracles, healings, a raising from the dead, an appearance after his own disappearance, and travels to India.

**The comparison with Jesus is not a modern provocation. It is an ancient argument with a documented record:**

- **Sossianus Hierocles**, a Roman governor under Diocletian, wrote the *Philalethes* (*Lover of Truth*, c. 303 CE), **explicitly arguing that Apollonius did what Jesus did and was not therefore called a god** — a polemic aimed at Christian claims during the persecution.
- **Eusebius of Caesarea** answered him directly in *Against Hierocles*, which survives — and which is therefore our main witness to what Hierocles said.

That exchange is the useful object. It shows that **the criteria for distinguishing a divine from a merely remarkable figure were contested in antiquity**, by both sides, in writing. Anyone raising the comparison today is re-entering an argument, not starting one — and Philostratus's dependence on Julia Domna's patronage and his distance from events are the standard scholarly cautions on his side of it.

## What kind of book this library is

Worth stating plainly, because it sets the standard this wiki should be judged by: **the Library of Ashurbanipal is a *bibliotheca*** — a handbook in the line of Pseudo-Apollodorus, not a monograph and not an epic.

The distinction is real and it cuts both ways. A *Bibliotheca* is judged on **coverage, accuracy of attribution, and organisation** — does it have the entry, does it say who says so, can you find it. It is **not** judged on originality, and it does not get credit for elegance. Homer and Ovid are judged on entirely different criteria and are far worse sources for the thing a handbook is for.

Where this library departs from the ancient model is deliberate: Pseudo-Apollodorus reports variants without adjudicating them, and this one **marks its own hypotheses as hypotheses** and states what would falsify them. That is the modern obligation added to the ancient form.

## The general rule this library uses

**Match the claim to the genre.** A prodigy list is administrative record; an epic is literature; a handbook is reference; an encomium is advocacy. Most bad comparative religion — including the popular kind that flattens all traditions into one — comes from reading a poem as a report, or an apologetic as a chronicle.

See also: Solar Theory and Euhemerism · Western Magical Systems · Mysticism and Eastern Philosophy in Science · Khepri · Pashupata Shaivism