Mene and Men: the ancient name of the Moon and the lunar god of Anatolia
Mene, the Greek poetic name of the Moon tied to the measuring of months, and Men, the moon god of Phrygia and Pisidia with a crescent at his shoulders.
The first line of the Homeric Hymn to the Moon does not say Selene but Mene: «Tell me, Muses, of the long-winged Moon». This second, less familiar name opens an interesting path. It leads to the word the Greeks used for the month, and from there to a male god worshipped for centuries in the interior of Asia Minor, Men, one of the clearest cases of a non-Greek lunar deity received into the Hellenistic and Roman world.
The Moon that measures time
Mene is linked to the Greek men, «month», and belongs to a family of Indo-European words that includes the Latin mensis and, according to linguists, also the English moon and month. The underlying idea is measurement: the Moon is the heavenly body that marks time with its regular phases, and the month begins as the interval between two new moons. It is no accident that many ancient languages have one word, or closely related words, for both moon and month.
In Greek poetry Mene remained above all an alternative name for Selene, used in solemn or archaising contexts. She had no separate cult of her own, but she preserved in the language the memory of a Moon understood more as a celestial calendar than as a mythological figure. The Orphic Hymns too, collected in the imperial age, address the Moon with epithets that dwell on the waxing and waning of her face.
Men, the god with the crescent at his shoulders
In Phrygia, Lydia and Pisidia, however, the Moon was a god. Men was depicted as a young man in a Phrygian cap, often on horseback or standing with a spear, and above all with a large lunar crescent rising behind his shoulders. His cult is documented by coins, reliefs and hundreds of inscriptions, mostly from the Hellenistic and Roman periods.
Strabo, the geographer of the age of Augustus, mentions some of his main sanctuaries. At Antioch in Pisidia there was a priesthood of Men Askaios with extensive estates, later abolished; between Laodicea and Carura stood the temple of Men Karou; at Cabeira, in Pontus, Men Pharnakou was worshipped, and by his name the kings of Pontus swore the royal oath. The sanctuary at Antioch, on a height near the city, has been partly brought to light by archaeologists.
Oaths and confessions
A remarkable aspect of the cult of Men emerges from the so-called confession inscriptions of Lydia and Phrygia, dating mainly to the second and third centuries AD. In them worshippers who believed they had suffered divine punishment for a fault, such as a theft or a broken oath, publicly declared their wrongdoing and their reconciliation with the god. Men thus appears as the guarantor of the given word and of the community's moral order.
Mene and Men, the name and the god, tell of the same bond from two different sides. The Moon, which returns unchanged after every month, became for the Greeks the measure of time and for the peoples of Anatolia a ruler who watches over agreements. In both cases the night's luminary is not only beauty, but rule and memory.