ABSTRACT
It is only due to later authors that we get a glimpse of the Sacred Inscription and Euhemerus’s theory of the origins of the gods and religion. Marek Winiarczyk has correctly pointed out that “we do not actually possess any fragments” of the text “in the strict sense of the word.”1 Such an assertion derives from the peculiar channels through which Euhemerus’s work managed to find its way to both ancient and modern readers. Virtually everything we know-and admittedly, it is very little-about Euhemerus’s work and theory is via the writings of two ‘pagan’ and two Christian authors: Diodorus Siculus, Ennius, Eusebius of Caesarea, and Lactantius. It is due to Winiarczyk’s valuable work, which includes a publication of all available testimonies along with his monograph on the Sacred Inscription, that we can now confidently claim that none of the authors who incor - porated (or translated) the original work into their own did so verbatim. This, of course, has various implications in how we, later readers, deal with the Sacred Inscription and the theory that Euhemerus promoted. In this chapter, however, I am not so interested in whether the available sources actually correspond to the original work, but why, how, and what those authors chose to utilize and incorporate from the lost original text according to their own agendas. In addition to this, I am interested in who those authors were and what we may learn from their choice to provide their readers with extensive summaries (and a translation) of the Sacred Inscription, fortuitously rescuing it from oblivion.
