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Updated: June 9, 2025
I sell them at a high price, when they are beautiful, without inquiring who they are. In commodities of this kind rank makes no difference, and a queen that is ugly will never find a merchant. Perhaps I may have sold Queen Astarte; perhaps she is dead; but, be it as it will, it is of little consequence to me, and I should imagine of as little to thee."
Make him first reverse it all; make him take the curse off us. Bring him along; take him to Astarte, Hercules, or old Saturn. We’ll broil him on a gridiron till he turns all these canes into vines, and makes olive berries of the pebbles, and turns the dust of the earth into fine flour for our eating.
Half his teaching is a protest, in variously eloquent phrase, against all forms of Materialism and Hedonism, which he brands as "worships of Moloch and Astarte," forgetting that progress in physical welfare may lead not only to material, but to mental, if not spiritual, gain. Similarly he denounces Atheism, never more vehemently than in his Journals of 1868-1869:
Then striking a grand attitude, he looked towards the Moon and burst out in accents of thrilling indignation: "Pardon, O beautiful Diana of the Ephesians! Pardon, O Phoebe, thou pearl-faced goddess of night beloved of Greece! O Isis, thou sympathetic queen of Nile-washed cities! O Astarte, thou favorite deity of the Syrian hills!
She was on her way from Damascus to Aleppo, to be united to her cousin, when she was brought hither, where she will, I trust, not long remain your prisoner. The countenance of Astarte changed; but, though it lost its painful and vindictive expression, it did not assume one of less distress. After a moment's pause, she murmured, 'Can this be true? 'Who could have told you otherwise?
It was repeated again and again, and was answered by shouts from the opposite side and from the mouth of the ravine. "By Astarte!" Malchus exclaimed, "they have found out that we have escaped already." It was so. One of the natives had crept forward along the path, hoping to find the sentry asleep, or to steal up noiselessly and stab him.
"That is how the Anglo-Saxons of the 19th century treat the beautiful Diana, the blonde Phoebe, the amiable Isis, the charming Astarte, the Queen of Night, the daughter of Latona and Jupiter, the younger sister of the radiant Apollo!" It has already been pointed out that the direction followed by the projectile was taking us towards the northern hemisphere of the moon.
It was Astarte herself; it was the Queen of Babylon; it was she whom Zadig adored, and whom he had reproached himself for adoring; it was she whose misfortunes he had so deeply lamented, and for whose fate he had been so anxiously concerned.
Nothing here helped anything else, since the stamped greyness didn't even in itself make it impossible his eyes should follow such sentences as: "The loveliness of the face, which was that of the glorious period in which Pheidias reigned supreme, and which owed its most exquisite note to that shell-like curl of the upper lip which always somehow recalls for us the smile with which windblown Astarte must have risen from the salt sea to which she owed her birth and her terrible moods; or it was too much for all the passionate woman in her, and she let herself go, over the flowering land that had been, but was no longer their love, with an effect of blighting desolation that might have proceeded from one of the more physical, though not more awful, convulsions of nature."
The Queen had said that, besides Mount Sinai and Mount Calvary, there was also Mount Olympus. It was true; even Tancred had not challenged her assertion. And the legends of Olympus were as old as, nay, older than, those of the convent or the mosques. This was no mythic fantasy of the beautiful Astarte; the fond tradition of a family, a race, even a nation.
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