It is true that the title strictly signified no
more than "lord"; yet the legends which connect these Cyprian
princes with the goddess of love make it probable that they claimed
the divine nature as well as the human dignity of Adonis. The story
of Pygmalion points to a ceremony of a sacred marriage in which the
king wedded the image of Aphrodite, or rather of Astarte. If that
was so, the tale was in a sense true, not of a single man only, but
of a whole series of men, and it would be all the more likely to be
told of Pygmalion, if that was a common name of Semitic kings in
general, and of Cyprian kings in particular. Pygmalion, at all
events, is known as the name of the king of Tyre from whom his
sister Dido fled; and a king of Citium and Idalium in Cyprus, who
reigned in the time of Alexander the Great, was also called
Pygmalion, or rather Pumiyathon, the Phoenician name which the
Greeks corrupted into Pygmalion. Further, it deserves to be noted
that the names Pygmalion and Astarte occur together in a Punic
inscription on a gold medallion which was found in a grave at
Carthage; the characters of the inscription are of the earliest
type.
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