Kybēbos on the Boundary between Persians and Greeks

Abstract

The cultic figure referred to as kybēbos has been identified by lexicographers as a mētragyrtēs, a begging priest of the Mother of the Gods identified as a eunuch. Calling this person a kybēbos associates him specifically with Kybebe, as the Mother of the Gods was known at Sardis and elsewhere in the Ionian/Aeolic sphere of Lydia and Phrygia, as a recently discovered shrine at Amisus in Pontos reveals (as Alexander Herda has shown, the goddess there bears the name Kybebo, in a dialect form where feminine names end in -o, as Leto, Sappho). Lexicographers attest that kybēbos was a figure known in the 5th century BCE, mentioned by Charon of Lampsacus, the playwright Cratinus, and Simonides. The last reference has commonly been assigned to Semonides of Amorgos in the 7th century rather than Simonides of Ceos in the 5th. Here arguments are presented to demonstrate the greater likelihood that it was Simonides of Ceos who mentioned the kybēbos in the context of remembrances of war and diplomacy between Greeks and Persians in the aftermath of the burning of Sardis and with it the shrine of Kybebe in the Ionian Revolt of 499–494 BCE.