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THE JEWS AMONG THE
GREEKS AND ROMANS

ARCH OF TITUS, ROME

THE JEWS AMONG THE

GREEKS AND ROMANS

By

Max Radin

Philadelphia

The Jewish Publication Society of America

1915

Copyright, 1916, by

The Jewish Publication Society of America

MATRI MEÆ

PIETATIS ERGO

HOC OPUSCULUM

D. D. D.

PREFACE

It is a counsel of perfection that any historical study should be approached with complete detachment. To such detachment I can make all the less claim as I freely admit an abiding reverence for the history of my own people, and, for the life of ancient Greece and Rome, a passionate affection that is frankly unreasoning. At no place in the course of the following pages have I been consciously apologetic. It is true that where several explanations of an incident are possible, I have not always selected the one most discreditable to the Jews. Doubtless that will not be forgiven me by those who have accepted the anti-Semitic pamphlets of Willrich as serious contributions to historical research.

The literature on the subject is enormous. Very few references to what are known as “secondary” sources will, however, be found in this book. A short bibliography is appended, in which various books of reference are cited. From these all who are interested in the innumerable controversies that the subject has elicited may obtain full information.

There remains the grateful task of acknowledging my personal indebtedness to my friend, Dr. Ernst Riess, for many valuable suggestions. Above all I desire to express my indebtedness to President Solomon Schechter, of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, at whose instance the preparation of this book was undertaken. Those who share with me the privilege of his friendship will note in more than one turn of expression and thought the impress of that rich personality.

Max Radin

New York City,

October, 1915

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION

The civilization of Europe and America is composed of elements of many different kinds and of various origin. Most of the beginnings cannot be recovered within the limits of recorded history. We do not know where and when a great many of our fundamental institutions arose, and about them we are reduced to conjectures that are sometimes frankly improbable. But about a great many elements of our civilization, and precisely those upon which we base our claim to be called civilized—indeed, which give us the word and the concept of civic life—we know relatively a great deal, and we know that they originated on the eastern shores of the large landlocked sea known as the Mediterranean.

We are beginning to be aware that the process of developing these elements was much longer than we had been accustomed to believe. Many races and several millennia seem to have elaborated slowly the institutions that older historians were prepared to regard as the conscious contrivance of a single epoch. But even if increasing archeological research shall render us more familiar than we are with Pelasgians, Myceneans, Minoans, Aegeans, it is not likely that the claims of two historic peoples to have founded European civilization will be seriously impugned. These are the Romans and the Greeks. To these must be added another people, the Jews, whose contribution to civilization was no less real and lasting.

The Greeks and Romans have left descendants only in a qualified sense. There are no doubt thousands of individuals now living who are the actual descendants of the kinsmen and contemporaries of the great names in Greek and Roman history; but these individuals are widely scattered, and are united by national and racial bonds with thousands of individuals not so descended, from whom they have become wholly indistinguishable. We have documentary evidence of great masses of other races, Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Semitic, entering into the territory occupied by Greeks and Romans and mingling with them, and to this evidence is added the confirmation of anthropological researches. This fact has made it possible to consider Greek and Roman history objectively. Only rarely can investigators be found who feel more than a very diluted pride in the achievements of peoples so dubiously connected with themselves. It is therefore with increasing clarity of vision that we are ordering the large body of facts we already know about Greeks and Romans, and are gathering them in constantly broadening categories.

That unfortunately is not the case with the Jews. Here, too, racial admixture was present, but it never took place on a large scale at any one time, and may always have remained exceptional. However that may be, common belief both among Jews and non-Jews holds very strongly the view that the Jews of to-day are the lineal descendants of the community reorganized by Ezra, nor is it likely that this belief would be seriously modified by much stronger evidence to the contrary than has yet been adduced.[^[1]] The result has been that the place of the Jews in history has been determined upon the basis of institutions avowedly hostile to them. It may be said that historians have introduced the Jews as a point of departure for Christianity, and have not otherwise concerned themselves with them.

There was a time when Greek and Roman and Jew were in contact. What was the nature of that contact? What were its results? What were the mutual impressions made by all three of them on one another? The usual answer has been largely a transference of modern attitudes to ancient times. Is another answer possible? Do the materials at our disposal permit us to arrive at a firmer and better conclusion?

It is necessary first to know the conditions of our inquiry. The period that we must partially analyze extends from the end of the Babylonian Captivity to the establishment of Christianity—roughly from about 450 B.C.E. to 350 C.E., some seven or eight hundred years.

The time limits are of course arbitrary. The contact with Greeks may have begun before the earlier of the two limits, and the relations of the Jews with both Greeks and Romans certainly did not cease with either Constantine or Theodosius. However, it was during the years that followed the return from the Exile that much of the equipment was prepared with which the Jew actually met the Greek, and, on the other hand, the relations of Christian Rome to the Jews were determined by quite different considerations from those that governed Pagan Rome. It is at this point accordingly that a study of the Jews among the Greeks and Romans may properly end.

The Sources

Even for laymen it has become a matter of great interest to know upon what material the statements are based which scientists and scholars present to them. It is part perhaps of the general skepticism that has displaced the abundant faith of past generations in the printed word. For that reason what the sources are from which we must obtain the statements that we shall make here, will be briefly indicated below.

First we have a number of Greek and Latin writers who incidentally or specially referred to the Jews. However, as is the case with many other matters of prime importance, the writings of most of these authors have not come down to us completely, but in fragments. That is to say, we have only the brief citations made of them by much later writers, or contained in very late compilations, such as lexicons, commonplace books, or manuals for instruction. Modern scholars have found it imperatively necessary to collect these fragments, so that they may be compared and studied more readily. In this way the fragments of lost books on history, grammar, music, of lost poems and plays, have been collected at various times. Similarly the fragments concerning the Jews have been collected, and gathered into a single book by M. Théodore Reinach, under the title of Textes d’ auteurs grecs et latins relatifs au judaisme. Here the Greek and Latin texts and the French translation of them are arranged in parallel columns, and furnished with explanatory footnotes. M. Reinach’s great distinction as a classical scholar enables him to speak with authority upon many of the controverted questions that these texts contain. Often his judgment as to what certain passages mean may be unquestioningly accepted, and at all times one disagrees with him with diffidence.

Secondly, we have the Jewish literature of the period; but that literature was produced under such various conditions and with such diverse purposes that a further classification is necessary.

Most important for our purposes is that part of Jewish literature which was a direct outcome of the contact we are setting forth—the apologetic writings of the Jews, or those books written in Greek, only rarely in Latin, in which Jewish customs and history are explained or defended for non-Jewish readers. Most of these books likewise have been lost, and have left only inconsiderable fragments, but in the case of two writers we have very extensive remains. One of these men is the Alexandrian Jew Philo, a contemporary of the first Roman emperors. The other was the Palestinian Jew Joseph, who played an important, if ignoble, part in the rebellion of 68 C.E.

An estimate of the character of Philo and Josephus—to give the latter the name by which alone he is remembered—or of the value of their works, is out of place here. Philo’s extant writings are chiefly concerned with philosophic exposition, and are only indirectly of documentary value. However, he also wrote a “Defense” of his people, of which large portions have survived, notably the In Flaccum, a bitter invective against the prefect of Egypt under Tiberius, and the Legatio ad Gaium, a plea in behalf of the Alexandrian Jews made to the emperor Caligula by an embassy of which Philo was himself a member.[^[2]]

An apologetic purpose, for himself more than for his fellow-citizens, is discernible in practically all the extant writings of Josephus. One of them, however, the misnamed Contra Apionem, is avowedly a defense of the Jews against certain misrepresentations contained in Greek books. The importance of Josephus’ works is impossible to overrate. For many matters he is our sole authority. But the character exhibited in his own account of his conduct has impaired the credibility of much of what he says, and has provoked numerous controversies. It is impossible to disregard him, and unsafe to rely upon him. However, it is not unlikely that fuller knowledge, which the sands of Egypt and Palestine may at any time offer, will compel us to change our attitude toward him completely.[^[3]]

Besides the apologetic Jewish writings, directed to gentile readers, there was a flourishing literature in Greek (and perhaps in Latin too) intended for Greek-speaking Jews. It may be said that no branch of literary art was quite neglected. The great majority of these books are lost. Some, however, of a homiletic or parenetic tendency, attained partial sanctity in some of the Jewish congregations, and were, under such protection, transferred to the Christian communities that succeeded them. They may now be found in collections of Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, such as the German collection of Kautzsch and that recently completed in English by Charles. Examples are the Wisdom of Solomon, the Jewish Sibyl, the Letter of Aristeas, etc.

All these books were intended for Jewish readers, but for Jews whose sole mother tongue was Greek. In Palestine and Syria the Jews spoke Aramaic, and the educated among them used Hebrew for both literary and colloquial purposes. There was consequently an active literature in these languages. Some books so written were early translated into Greek, and from Greek into Latin and Ethiopic, and have survived as part of the Apocrypha. Judith, First Maccabees, Tobit, are instances. It was a rare and fortunate accident that gave us the Hebrew original of such a book, of Ben Sira, or Ecclesiasticus.

Again, the highly organized religious and legal institutions of the Jews found literary expression in the decisions and comments upon them that all such institutions involve. The exposition of the consecrated ancient literature was also begun in this period. It was not, however, till relatively late, 200 C.E. and after, that actual books were put together, so that it is dangerous to accept uncritically references to earlier dates.

The books referred to are primarily the Mishnah and the other extant collections of Baraitot. Besides these, such works as the Megillat Taanit and the Seder Olam must be grouped here. The earlier portions of both Talmuds may be included, perhaps all of the Jerusalem Talmud.

One source of somewhat problematic character remains to be considered. Biblical critics have been at some pains to assign as much as possible of the Bible to the earlier centuries of the period we have delimited. That more than a very slight portion can be so assigned is scarcely probable, but some of it may, especially those books or passages in which Greek influence is clearly noticeable. However, little profit can be gained for our purposes from material that demands such a deal of caution in its use.

Finally, besides literary evidences, which, as we have seen, have wretchedly failed to substantiate the poet’s vaunt of being more lasting than brass, we have the brass itself; that is, we have the stones, coins, utensils, potsherds, and papyri inscribed with Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Babylonian, and Egyptian words, which are the actual contemporaries, just as we have them, of the events they illustrate. It is the study of evidences like these that has principally differentiated modern historical research from the methods it displaced, and in the unceasing increase of these fragmentary and invaluable remains our hopes of better knowledge of ancient life are centered.[^[4]]

CHAPTER I
GREEK RELIGIOUS CONCEPTS

The Jew is presented to the modern world in the double aspect of a race and a religion. In a measure this has always been the case, but we shall not in the least understand what the statement of the fact means without a very close analysis of the concepts of race and religion formed by both Greeks and Romans.

The word religion has a very definite meaning to us. It is the term applied to the body of beliefs that any group of men maintain about supernatural entities upon whom they consider themselves wholly dependent. The salient fact of modern religions is that for most men the group is very large indeed, that it vastly transcends all national limits. Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, all profess the purpose of gaining the entire human race for their adherents, and have actively attempted to do so. The fact that the religions with which we are most familiar are “world-religions,” and the abstract character of the predicates of the Deity in them, would seem to make religion as such practically free from local limitation. However, that is not completely true even for our time. In the first place, the bulk of Christians, as of Muslims and Buddhists, are in all three cases bearers of a common culture, and have long believed themselves of common descent. They occupy further a continuous, even if very large, area. Religious maps of the world would show solid blocks of color, not spots scattered everywhere. Secondly, even within the limits of the religion itself national boundaries are not wholly expunged. The common Christianity of Spain and England presents such obvious differences that insistence upon them is unnecessary; nor does the fact that Southern Germany, Belgium, and Ireland are all Roman Catholic imply that all these sections have the same religious attitude.

These are modern illustrations, and they represent survivals of a state of things which in the Greek world was fundamental. As it seems to us axiomatic that an abstractly conceived God cannot be the resident of a limited area on the surface of the earth, just so axiomatic it seemed, at one stage of Greek religious growth, that a god was locally limited, that his activities did not extend—or extended only in a weakened form—beyond a certain sharply circumscribed geographical area. That is probably the most fundamental and thoroughgoing of the differences between Greek religious feeling and that of our day. Opinions may differ widely about the degree of anthropomorphism present at the contrasted periods; and then, as now, the statements made about the nature and power of the Deity were contradictory, vague, and confusing. But one thing it is hard to question: the devoutly religious man of to-day feels himself everywhere, always, in the presence of his God. The Greek did not feel that his god was everywhere with him, certainly did not feel that he was everywhere approachable.[^[5]]

At another point too we are in great danger of importing modern notions into ancient conditions. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all book-religions. The final source of their doctrines is a revelation that has been written down, and is extant as an actual and easily accessible book. Moreover, it is the narrative portion of this book that is the best-known part of it, and that is generally associated in the popular mind with it. In the same way, we are prone to think of Greek religion as a series of extraordinarily beautiful myths or narratives of gods and heroes, which have likewise been written down, and are extant in the poems and dramas of which they are the subject. This view has been greatly strengthened by the unfortunate currency of the epigram that Homer was the Greek Bible. No one would be inclined to force, except as a paradox, the analogy upon which the statement rests; yet the phrase is so terse and simple, and the elements of the comparison are so generally familiar, that consciously and unconsciously current conceptions are moulded by it.

Now if the epigram quoted is essentially true, we have at once a measure of Greek religious feeling, since the Homeric poems are as accessible to us as to the Greeks themselves. We should be compelled to reckon with variety in the interpretation of the text, but in the literal signification there would always be a point of departure. And we should at once realize that for divine beings depicted as they are by Homer a devotion of a very different sort is demanded from that which modern faiths give their Deity. Nor does later literature represent the gods on a loftier moral plane. When we read Aristophanes,[^[6]] it becomes still more difficult to understand how the gods could retain their divinity not only when deprived of their moral character, but even when stripped of their dignity. So far from raising the moral character of the divine beings who are the actors in these legends, the later versions of many quite unexceptionable myths deliberately debase them by subjecting most actions to a foully erotic interpretation.[^[7]] The less offensive narrative, to be sure, survives as well, but it is to be noted that the divinity of the personages in question seems to be as unquestioned in the corrupt as in the purer form of the story.

How might an emotionally sensitive or mentally trained man pour forth supplication before a guzzling braggart like the Aristophanic Heracles or an effeminate voluptuary like the Apollo of Alexandrian poetry? It seems hard to discover any other defense than the one Charles Lamb offered for the dramatists of the Restoration—that the world the gods moved in was a wholly different one from the human world; a world in which moral categories had no existence, a Land of Cockayne without vices, because it was without the sanctions which vice disregards. No doubt some Greeks felt in this way toward the myths. But it was not a satisfactory theory. It introduced a dualism into standards of conduct that soon became intolerable, when men reflected seriously upon other sides of the divine nature, and drew inferences from it.

As a matter of fact, the difficulty we find in addressing words of prayer and praise to such unworthy gods as sat upon the Homeric Olympus is modern, and was probably not felt at all by the vast majority of Greeks, either in Homer’s time or later. Not that the fraud, cruelty, faithlessness there exhibited seemed to the Greeks of any epoch commendable or imitable qualities. Even the Homeric Greek was far from being in a barbarous or semi-barbarous state. Civic virtues as between men were known and practised. But the personality of the individual gods in these stories could be disregarded in practice, because they were in no sense a part of the Greek religion. The chastest of men might with a clear conscience worship the lecherous Zeus, because worship did not at all concern itself with the catalogue of his amours. In Homer’s time and after, the Greek firmly believed that the Olympians were actually existing beings, but he scarcely stopped to ask himself whether it was literally true that Zeus had bidden Hera be silent under threats of personal violence. What did concern him in his relation with his gods was the disposition in which the god was likely to be toward him or his people. And his religious activity was directed to the end of making that disposition as good as possible.

The matter just set forth is far from being new doctrine; but for the general reader it must be constantly re-emphasized, because it is constantly forgotten. We continually find the Greek myths discussed in terms that would be true only of the Gospel narratives, and we see the Greek gods described as though they possessed the sharpness of personal outline which the Deity has in the minds of believing Christians. It is no doubt the extant literature—a florilegium at best—that is at fault in the matter. This literature, it must be remembered, was not preserved altogether by accident. To a large extent it represents a conscious selection, made for pedagogic purposes. The relative coherence which Greek myths have for us is due to the fact that the surviving poems and dramas which contain them were selected, partially at least, by Hellenistic and Byzantine schoolmasters in order to fit into a set cycle or scheme. Even in what we have there is abundant evidence that the myths about the gods could pretend to no sanctity for anybody, devout or scoffer, for the simple reason that they negated themselves, that widely differing and hopelessly contradictory stories were told of the same event or person.

In reality the Greek myths were not coherent. It is hard to discover in many of them a folkloristic kernel that had to be kept intact. Almost everywhere we are dealing with the free fantasies of highly imaginative poets. So fully was this understood that the stories most familiar to us are generally alluded to in serious Greek literature with an apologetic, ὡς oἱ ποιηταί φασι, “as the poets say,” or some similar phrase. And as these stories were largely unrelated, so also were the gods of whom they were told, even though they bore the same name. If mythographers had taken the trouble to collect all the stories known of any one god—Hermes, for example—there would be nothing except the common name to indicate that they referred to the same chief actor, and much that, except for the common name, would be referred to different gods. Not even a single prominent trait, not a physical feature, would be found to run through all the myths so collected.

So far we have been dealing with extant literature. But if the more recondite notices of popular superstition are taken into account, as well as the archeological discoveries, we meet such figures as Demeter, Artemis, Apollo,[^[8]] in various and curious forms and associations, so that one might be tempted to suppose that these highly individualized figures of poetry were, in the shrines in which they were worshiped, hardly more than divine appellatives of rather vague content. And on the islands of the Aegean, in Crete and Cyprus, where the continuity between Aegean, Mycenean, and Hellenic civilization[^[9]] was perhaps less disturbed by convulsive upheavals, this seems especially to have been the case.

For cult purposes, then—the primary purpose of Greek religion—there was less difference between gods than we might suppose. Not even the strongly marked personages that poetry made of them were able to fix themselves in the popular mind. Sculptors had been busy in differentiating types, and yet even here the process was not completed. While in general we know of Poseidon-types, Zeus-types, etc., in art, the most thoroughly equipped critics find themselves embarrassed if they are required to name a statue that is wholly lacking in definite external symbols or attributes, such as the thunderbolt, trident, caduceus, and others.[^[10]] Even the unrivaled artistic abilities of Greek sculptors found it impossible to create unmistakable types of the Greek gods, for the reason that the character of the god as portrayed in myth and fable was fluid, and not fixed.

As among most peoples of the time, the essential religious act was that which brought the god and his worshiper into contact—the sacrifice. What the real nature of sacrifice was need not concern us here. The undoubted fact is that sacrifice and prayer formed a single act;[^[11]] that it was during the sacrifice that the worshiper ventured to address his prayer to the godhead he invoked. In doing so he must of necessity use the god’s name, and, as we have seen, the name was of more general and less specific connotation than is usually supposed. But the act of worship itself was specifically occasioned. Even the fixed and annually recurring festivals related to a specific, if recurring, occasion in the life of the people. This was eminently the case in the irregular acts of worship that arose out of some unforeseen contingency. Whatever the divine name was that was used, the specific occasion of its use made it necessary also to specify the function of the divinity of which the intervention was sought. That was regularly done by attaching to the name a qualifying epithet. When the rights of hospitality were threatened with invasion, it was Ζεὺς Ξένιος, Zeus the Protector of Strangers, that was addressed. In gratitude for a deliverance, Zeus or Apollo or Heracles or the Dioscuri or many another might be invoked as “the Savior.”[^[12]] And it might well be argued that the Greek who did so had scarcely anything more definite in mind than a Roman who worshiped Salus, the abstract principle of safety. In very many cases the particular function was especially potent in certain areas, so that a local adjective applied as a divine epithet would sum up the power desired to be set in motion.

In the actual moment of prayer or propitiation, it was often a matter of courtesy to ignore the existence of other gods. This makes perhaps a sufficiently definite phenomenon to justify the application to it of the special name “henotheism” long ago devised by Max Müller;[^[13]] and in henotheism we have very likely the germ of monotheism. But when not actually engaged in worship, the Greek was well aware that there were many gods, and that there were differences among them, and this quite apart from the myths, to which, as has been said, no very great importance can be attached in this connection. The differences in power and prominence of deities were perhaps not original, but they had arisen quickly and generally.

One difference particularly, that between gods and heroes, seems to have been real to the popular mind. A difference in the terminology that described the ritual act, and a difference in the act itself, point to a real distinction between the two divine conceptions.[^[14]]

Who and what the heroes actually were is an extremely doubtful matter. That some of them were originally men is a proposition with which legend has made us familiar.[^[15]] We shall recur later to the common heroization of the dead. That some of them were undoubted gods has been amply established.[^[16]] It may well be that they were deities of a narrowly limited territory, knowledge of whom, for one reason or another, remained sharply circumscribed for a long time, so that when they came later within the range of myth-making they could not be readily fitted into any divine scheme. Often the name that appears in some legends as a hero appears in others as an epithet or cult-title of a better-known god. This fact may be variously interpreted. At least one interpretation derives this fusion of names from the fact that the worshipers of the later deity invaded the cult-home of the earlier, and ultimately degraded the latter to accessory rank. Or it may be taken as a compromise of existing claims. At any rate, in some of the heroes we seem to reach an element somewhat closer to the religious consciousness of the Greek masses. And if the gods, or most of them, are heroes who owe their promotion to a fortunate accident rather than to any inherent superiority, we may discover the fundamental divine conceptions of the Greeks in the traits that especially mark the heroes: sharp local limitation, absence of personal lineaments, adoration based upon power for evil as well as for good.[^[17]]

It was because of this last fact that Greek poets could deal freely with gods and heroes in the narratives they created. The divine name possessed none of the ineffable sanctity it has for us by thousands of years of tradition. Except during the performance of the ritual act, the god’s presence and power were not vividly felt, and it would have been considered preposterous to suppose that he resented as compromising an idle tale from which he suffered no impairment of worship. That the gods really existed, and that honor was to be paid them after the ancestral manner, was more than the essence, it was the totality, of popular Greek theology. Speculation as to the real nature of gods and the world, the mass of citizens would have regarded as the most futile form of triviality.[^[18]]

But there were some who thought otherwise. Many thoughtful men must have felt the absurdities and immoralities of the myths as keenly as we do. Xenophanes[^[19]] protests, and no doubt not first of all men, against them. Further, with the earliest stirrings of cosmic speculation in Ionia, systems of theology are proposed that dispense with demiurges and administrators. Intellectually developed men cannot have been long in ridding themselves of popular conceptions that violated the most elementary reflection. To be sure, the philosopher did not always feel free to carry his conviction to the point of openly disregarding the established forms. To do so would bring him into conflict with other institutions that he valued, and with which religious forms had become inextricably bound up. But his own beliefs took broader and broader ground, and well before Alexander became monotheism, pantheism, or agnosticism.[^[20]]

All these standpoints must be kept in mind when we deal with the conflict between Greek and Jew: the popular one, no doubt rooted in a primitive animism, to which the gods were of indifferent and somewhat shifting personality, but to which the ritual act was vital; the attitude of poetry and folk-lore, in which divine persons appeared freely as actors, but in which each poem or legend was an end in itself unrelated to any other; and finally the philosophic analysis, which did not notably differ in result from similar processes of our own day.

We find the Hellenic world in possession of very many gods. Some of them are found practically wherever there were Greeks, although the degree of veneration they received in the different Greek communities varied greatly. However, such common gods did exist, and their existence involves the consideration of the spread of worships.

It is of course quite possible that the common gods grew out of the personification of natural phenomena, the solar-myth theory, on which nineteenth-century scholars sharpened their ingenuity.[^[21]] It may be, too, that one or more of them are the national gods of the conquering Hellenes, whensoever and howsoever such a conquest may have taken place. Some may have been of relatively late importation. The Greeks lived in territory open to streams of influence from every point of the compass. Of one such importation we know some details—the worship of Dionysus.[^[22]] Of others, such as Aphrodite, we suspect a Semitic origin by way of Cyprus.[^[23]] It will be noticed that the names of most of the common gods are difficult to trace to Greek roots, a fact in itself of some significance.

We must remember that the wandering of the god is often merely the wandering of a name. That is especially true in those cases in which an old divine name becomes the epithet or cult-title of the intruding deity. Here obviously there was no change in the nature of the god worshiped and no interruption of his worship. It is very likely, too, that very few deities ever completely disappeared, even when there was a real migration of a god. The new god took his place by the side of the old one, and relations of many kinds, superior or inferior, were speedily devised. So at Athens, in the contest between Poseidon and Athena, permanently recorded on the west pediment of the Parthenon, the triumph of Athena merely gave her a privilege. The defeated Poseidon remained in uninterrupted possession of shrine and votaries.

How did the worship of certain gods spread? One answer is obvious: by the migration of their votaries. Locally limited as the operation of the divinity was, in normal circumstances there never was a doubt that it could transcend those limits when the circumstances ceased to be normal. And that certainly took place when the community of which the god was a member changed its residence. The methods of propitiation, as crystallized into the inherited ritual, and the divine name, in which, for the rank and file, the individuality of the god existed, would be continued, though they were subject to new influences, and not infrequently suffered a sea-change.

But migration of all or some of the worshipers of a given deity was not the only way by which the god himself moved from place to place. Exotic rituals, as soon as men became acquainted with them, had attractions of their own, especially if they contained features that made a direct sensational appeal. The medium of transference may have been the constantly increasing commerce, which brought strangers into every city at various times. In all Greek communities there was a large number of “disinherited”—metics, emancipated slaves, suffrageless plebs—to whom the established gods seemed cold and aloof, or who had only a limited share in the performance of the established ritual. These men perhaps were the first to welcome newer rituals, which it was safer to introduce when they were directed to newer gods.[^[24]] They were assisted in doing this by the long-noted tolerance Greeks exhibited toward other religious observances, a tolerance which Christian Europe has taught us to consider strange and exceptional.

That tolerance was not altogether an inference from polytheism itself. Polytheism, to be sure, takes for granted the existence of other gods in other localities, but it does not follow that it permits the entrance of one god into the jurisdiction of another. And it was not universal. Among communities inhospitable in other respects it did not prevail. But it was the general rule, because the conception of ἀσέβεια, of “impiety,”[^[25]] was largely the same everywhere. Impiety was such conduct as prevented or corrupted the established forms of divine communication. The introduction of new deities was an indictable offense at Athens only so far as it displaced the old ones. Where no such danger was apprehended, no charge would lie. The traditions that describe the bitter opposition which the introduction of Dionysus encountered in many places, are too uniform to be discredited.[^[26]] But the opposition was directed to the grave social derangements that doubtless attended the adoption by many of an enthusiastic ritual. The opposition cannot have been general nor of long duration, since the worship of Dionysus spread with extraordinary rapidity, and covered the whole Greek world.

Religious movements curiously like the “revivals” of medieval and modern times visited Greece as they visit most organized communities. One of the most important of these, which gradually spread over Greece during the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E., must be reserved for later treatment. We may note here merely that there had been present from very early times the nuclei of a more intense religious life than any that could be experienced through the rather perfunctory solemnities of the state cults. These were the mysteries, of which the most famous were the Eleusinian in Attica. Some assign the latter to an Egyptian origin.[^[27]] Wherever they came from, they had assumed a large place in the imagination of Greeks as early as the eighth century;[^[28]] and they gained their adherents not so much by wrapping themselves in impenetrable secrecy as by promising their participants an otherwise unattainable degree of divine favor. Other mysteries existed elsewhere, possibly modeled upon the Eleusinian. All, however, made similar claims. It was in the form of mysteries that the emotional side of religion was deepened. Further, the organization of these mysteries exercised a profound influence upon all propagandizing movements, whether religious or not. It is not unlikely that the earliest organization of the Christian ecclesiae was, at least in part, influenced by the organization of the mysteries, whether of Eleusis or of some other sort.

It has been said that one commonly worshiped group of heroes were frankly and concededly dead men. It needs no demonstration to make clear that such worship of the dead must of necessity be very old; but at many places in the Greek world this ancient worship of the dead had become much weakened. The Homeric poems, for example, know it only in a very attenuated form.[^[29]] At many other places, on the other hand, it flourished vigorously and continuously from the earliest times. The application of the word ἥρως, “hero,” to the dead may have had very ancient sanction. In later times, the term appears very commonly,[^[30]] and undoubtedly claims for the persons so qualified the essential characteristics of other heroes—i.e. immortality, the primary divine quality in Homer, and greatly increased power. It involved no difficulty to the Greek mind to make this claim, for it was a very common, perhaps universal, belief that gods and men were akin, that they were the same in nature. Perhaps the very oldest of transcendental beliefs is that the all-overwhelming phenomenon of death is not an annihilation, and that something survives, even if only as a shadow in the House of Hades. When men began to speculate actively upon the real results of bodily death, it must have occurred to many that the vaguely enlarged scope of such life as did survive was a return to a former and essential divinity.[^[31]]

But from a hero, limited and obscure, to a god, seated in full effulgence at the table of Zeus, was a big step, and bigger yet was the deification of living men. It may even be that the latter conception was not Greek, but was borrowed from Egypt or Mesopotamia. There is no indication of its presence before Alexander. That a man in the flesh might be translated from mortality to immortality—entrückt—was a very ancient conviction. The son-in-law of Zeus, Menelaos, had been so privileged.[^[32]] A poetic hyperbole claimed as much for the tyrannicide Harmodius.[^[33]] There were others, of no special moment, who by popular legend had walked among men and were not found, as in later times happened to Arthur and Barbarossa. But they became as gods only by their translation. We do not meet in Greece for centuries men who ventured to claim for themselves in the visible body that measure of divinity. In Egypt, however, and Mesopotamia the conception was not new. Certainly Pharaoh did not wait to receive his divine character from the hand of the embalmer. He was at all times Very God. At both the Euphrates and the Nile, Alexander found ample precedent for the assumption of divine honors, to which he no doubt sincerely believed he had every claim. We know how he derived his descent, without contradiction from his mother Olympias. It was novel doctrine for Greeks, but the avidity with which it was accepted and imitated showed that it did not absolutely clash with Greek manner of thought.

After Alexander, every king or princelet who appeared with sufficient force to overawe a town could scarcely avoid the formal decree of divinity. The Ptolemies quietly stepped—though not at once—into the throne and prerogatives of Ra. Seleucus adopted Apollo as his ancestor, and his grandson took Θεός, “the God,” as his title. His line maintained a shadowy relation with Marduk and Nebo of Babylon. Demetrius the Besieger had only to show himself at Athens to be advanced into Olympus.

The religion briefly and imperfectly sketched in this chapter was not really a system at all. There is a deal of incoherency in it, of cross-purposes and contradiction. There was no priestly caste among the Greeks to gather into a system the confused threads of religious thinking. Its ethical bearings came largely through the idea of the state, in which religion was a highly important constituent. There was also a personal and emotional side to Greek religion, and in particular cases the adoration of the worshiper was doubtless the sacrifice of a broken and contrite heart, and not the blood of bullocks. But the crudities of animism cropped out in many places, and in the loftiest of Greek prayers there is no note like “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and all thy soul, and all thy might.” In its most developed form a Greek’s dependence on his god was resignation, not self-immolation.

CHAPTER II
ROMAN RELIGIOUS CONCEPTS

Roman religious ideas were in many respects like those of the Greeks, partly because they were borrowed from the Greeks and partly because they were common to all the nations of the Mediterranean world. It may even be that some of these common forms are categories which the human mind by its constitution imposes upon some classes of phenomena, Grundideen, as ethnologists call them.[^[34]] Among both Romans and Greeks we shall find deities sharply limited in their spheres, we shall find the religious act exhausted in the ritual communion, we shall find evanescent personalities among the gods. But all these things will be found in a far different degree, and at various periods many other matters will demand consideration which the Greeks did not know at all or knew to a slighter extent.

The differences in national development would of themselves require differences of treatment. Greek religion grew up in countless independent communities, which advanced in civilization at very different rates. Roman religion was developed within a single civic group, and was ultimately swamped by the institutions with which it came into contact. Again, it is much more necessary among the Romans than among the Greeks to distinguish clearly between periods. Roman political history passed through points of obvious crisis, and many institutions were plainly deflected at these points into quite new paths of development.

Real comprehension of Roman religion is a matter of recent growth. During the vogue of comparative mythology, the Roman myths were principally discussed, and the patent fact that these were mere translations from the Greek seemed a complete summing up of Roman religion. It is only when the actual Roman calendar, as recorded on stone during the reign of Augustus, came to be studied that the real character of Roman religion began to be apprehended.[^[35]]

The results of this study have made it clear that during the highest development of the Roman state the official religious ritual was based upon pastoral and agricultural conditions that could scarcely be reached even in imagination. Propitiatory and dramatic rites carried out with painful precision, unintelligible formularies carefully repeated, ceremonial dances in which every posture was subject to exact regulation, all these things indicate an anxious solicitude for form that is ordinarily more characteristic of magic than of religion. Now, magic and religion have no very definite limits in anthropological discussions, but most of those who use the terms will probably agree that magic is coercive, and religion is not. We shall see at various points in Roman religion that a coercive idea was really present in the Romans’ relation with the gods, and that it followed in a measure from the way the gods were conceived.[^[36]]

The personality of the Greek gods was not so sharply individualized as the myths we happen to know would indicate, but the gods were persons. That is, during the act of prayer and sacrifice there was conjured up in the mind of the worshiper a definite anthropomorphic figure, who dealt with him somewhat as a flesh and blood man would do. But what was present in a Roman’s mind in very early times—those of the kingdom and the early republic—was probably not at all like this. The name of his deity was often an abstraction, and even when this was not verbally the case, the idea was an abstract one. And this abstraction had so little plastic form that he was scarcely certain of the being’s sex to which he addressed words of very real supplication, and wholly uncertain what, if any, concrete manifestation the god might make of his presence.[^[37]]

But it will be well to understand that this abstraction, which the Roman knew as Salus, or Fortuna, or Victoria, was not a philosophic achievement. It was not a Platonic “idea.” No one could doubt the fact that in times of danger safety was often attained. The means of attainment seemed frequently due to chance; that is, to the working of unintelligible forces. It was to evoke these forces and set them in operation that the Roman ritual was addressed, and whether these forces acted of their own mere motion, or whether the formularies contained potent spells, which compelled their activity, was not really of moment. That was the nature of the “abstraction” which such words as Fides, Concordia, and the rest signified to Roman minds.

In the early days a great deal of the religious practice was borrowed from the Etruscan neighbors, conquerors and subjects of Rome. The Etruscans, as far as anything can be said definitely about them, were especial adepts in all the arts by which the aid of deities, however conceived, could be secured. How much of actual religious teaching they gave the Romans, that is, how far they actually influenced and trained the emotions which the sense of being surrounded by powerful and unaccountable forces must excite, is not yet determinable. But they gave the Romans, or increased among them, the belief in the efficacy of formulas, whether of the spoken word or of action.

Although most of the Roman deities were abstractions in the sense just indicated, many others and very important ones bore personal names. These names could not help suggesting to intelligent men at all times that the god who bore one of them was himself a person, that his manifestations would be in human form, and that his mental make-up was like their own. Genetic relations between themselves and the gods so conceived were rapidly enough established. It is very likely, too, that some of these deities, perhaps Jupiter himself, were brought into Italy by kinsmen of those who brought Zeus into Greece, although the kinship must have been extremely remote. And when the gods are persons, stories about them are inevitable, arising partly as folk-lore and partly from individual poetic imagining. There are accordingly traces of an indigenous Roman or Italic mythology, but that mythology was literally overwhelmed, in relatively early times, by the artistically more developed one of the Greeks, so that its very existence has been questioned.[^[38]]

The openness of the Romans to foreign religious influences is an outcome of a conception, common enough, but more pronounced among the Romans than anywhere else. In most places the gods were believed to be locally limited in their sphere of action, and in most places this limitation was not due to unchangeable necessity but to the choice of residence on the part of the deity. Since it was a choice, it was subject to revocation. The actual land, once endeared to god or man, had a powerful hold upon his affections, vastly more powerful than the corresponding feeling of to-day, but for either god or man changes might and did occur.

Both Greeks and Romans held views somewhat of this kind, but the difference in political development compelled the Roman to face problems in the relations of the gods that were not presented to the Greeks. Greek wars were not wars of conquest. They resulted rather in the acknowledgment on the part of the vanquished of a general superiority. With barbarians, again, the struggles were connected with colonizing activity, and, when they were successful, they resulted in the establishment of a new community, which generally continued the ancient shrines in all but their names. Roman wars, however, soon became of a different sort. The newly conquered territory was often annexed—attached to the city, and ruled from it. To secure the lands so obtained it was frequently found necessary to destroy the city of which they were once a part, and that involved the cessation of rites, which the gods would not be likely to view with composure. The Romans drew the strictly logical inference that the only solution lay in bringing the gods of the conquered city to Rome. The Roman legend knew of the solemn words with which the dictator Camillus began the sack of Veii: “Thou, Queen Juno, who now dwellest in Veii, I beseech thee, follow our victorious troops into the city that is now ours, and will soon be thine, where a temple worthy of thy majesty will receive thee.”[^[39]] But besides this legendary incident, we have an actual formula quoted by Macrobius from the book of a certain Furius,[^[40]] probably the contemporary of the younger Africanus. The formula, indubitably ancient and general, is given as Africanus himself may have recited it before the destruction of Carthage in 146 B.C.E., and it is so significant that we shall give it in full:

Whoever thou art, whether god or goddess, in whose ward the people and city of Carthage are, and thou above all, who hast accepted the wardship of this city and this people, I beseech, I implore, I beg, that ye will desert the people and city of Carthage, that ye will abandon the site, the consecrated places and the city, that ye will depart from them, overwhelm that people and city with fear, dread, and consternation, and graciously come to Rome, to me and my people: that our site, our consecrated places, and our city be more acceptable and more pleasing in your sight, and that ye may become the lords of myself, the Roman people, and my soldiers. Deign to make known your will to us. If ye do so, I solemnly promise to erect temples in your honor and establish festal games.[^[41]]

What might happen as an incident of warfare could be otherwise effected as well. We have very old evidence of the entry of Greek deities into the city of Rome. The Dioscuri came betimes; also Heracles and Apollo, both perhaps by way of Etruria. And in historical times we have the well-known official importation of the Great Mother and of Asclepius.[^[42]]

These importations of Greek gods were at the time conscious receptions of foreign elements. The foreign god and his ritual were taken over intact. Greek modes of divine communion, notably the lectisternium, or sacrificial banquet,[^[43]] and the games, were adopted and eagerly performed by Romans. When Rome reached a position of real primacy in the Mediterranean, the process of saturation with foreign elements was accelerated, but with it an opposition movement became apparent, which saw in them (what they really were) a source of danger for the ancient Roman institutions. The end of the second Punic war, approximately 200 B.C.E., shortly after a most striking instance of official importation of cults, that of the Phrygian Cybele, particularly marks a period in this respect as in so many others. From that time on, the entry of foreign religions went on apace, but it was somewhat surreptitious, and was carried on in the train of economic, social, and political movements of far-reaching effect.

When the Jews came in contact with the Romans, this point had been long reached. As far, therefore, as the Jews were concerned, their religion shared whatever feeling of repulsion and distrust foreign religions excited among certain classes, and equally shared the very catholic veneration and dread that other classes brought to any system of worship.

The former classes correspond roughly to those of educated men generally. Their intellectual outlook was wholly Greek, and all their thinking took on a Greek dress. But they received Greek ideas, not only through Homer and Sophocles, but also through Plato and Aristotle. Not popular Greek religion, but sophisticated religious philosophy, was brought to the intellectual leaders of Rome. One of the very first works of Greek thought to be brought to Roman attention was the theory of Euhemerus, a destructive analysis of the existing myths, not merely in the details usually circulated, but in respect to the fundamental basis of myth-making.[^[44]] In these circumstances educated men adopted the various forms of theism, pantheism, or agnosticism developed by the Greek philosophical schools, and their interest in the ceremonial of their ancestral cult became a form of patriotism, in which, however, it was not always possible to conceal the consciousness of the chasm between theory and practice.

The other part of the Roman population, which knew Greek myths chiefly from the stage, could not draw such distinctions. What was left of the old Italian peasantry perhaps continued the sympathetic and propitiatory rites that were the substance of the ancient Roman cult. But there cannot have been a great number of these. The mass of the later plebs, a mixed multitude in origin, could get little religious excitement out of the state ritual. What they desired was to be found in the Oriental cults, which from this time on invaded the city they were destined to conquer.

CHAPTER III
GREEK AND ROMAN CONCEPTS OF RACE

During the nineteenth century a peculiar rigidity was given to the conception of race through the application of somewhat hastily formed biological theories. One or another of the current hypotheses on heredity was deemed an adequate or even necessary explanation, and by any of them racial characteristics became determined, fixed: race was an unescapable limiting condition. The Ethiopian could not change his skin. These ideas, when popularized, corresponded crudely to certain other ideas already present in men’s minds—ideas that often had a very different basis. Their lowest manifestation is that form of vicarious braggadocio which is known as jingoism, racial or national, and is expressed in the depreciation of everything that concerns other “races.”

Many historians have been influenced by this modern and unyielding concept of race, and have permitted themselves to make rather large promises about the destinies of existing groups of men on the basis of it.[^[45]] But as late as a hundred years ago it was not yet in existence. The term race then denoted a sum of national and social traits which it might be difficult to acquire in one generation, but which could readily be gained in two. Even such disparate ethnic groups as Austrian and Magyar knew of no impassable chasm that good-will on either side could not bridge.

It is the latter racial feeling and not the modern one that classical antiquity knew. Consequently, in the clash of races that took place during the period with which this book deals, “race” must be understood as the centuries before the nineteenth understood it. Racial prejudices, pride of blood, contempt for “slave-nations,” existed and found voice, but the terms are not coextensive with those of to-day.

It is well-known that a primary Greek distinction was that between Hellene and barbarian, and it is equally familiar that the distinction had not been fully formed in the time of Homer. There is no indication that the Trojans were felt to be fundamentally different from the Acheans, although it is likely enough that the allies who attacked the great city of the Troad were of different descent from those that defended it. The one instance found in Homer of the word βάρβαρος is in the compound βαρβαρόφωνος, “of barbarous speech” (Iliad ii. 867), which makes the original meaning of the word apparent. A Greek was one whose speech was intelligible. All others were barbarians, “jabberers.” And it is not only incidentally that Homer fails to make the racial division clear. When he of set purpose contrasts the two armies, as in Iliad iv. 422-437, it is the contrast between the silent discipline of the Greeks and the loose, noisy marshaling of the Trojans: “For all were not of one speech or of a single language. Mixed were their tongues, since the men came from far-off lands.”

It is probably in the course of just such expeditions as the Iliad tells of, a joint movement against a common foe, that a sense of national unity arose, and it is likely that it came to include many tribes of different race. We do not know what real basis there is for the traditional divisions of Ionians, Dorians, and Aeolians. These divisions have not proved very valuable means of classification to modern students of Greek dialects. The generic name of Greek to the East was Yavan, obviously the same as Ionian,[^[46]] and that name indicates where the first contact took place. The struggles of Greeks to establish themselves on the coast of Asia Minor probably created the three traditional groups, by forcing them to combine against threatened destruction. But there is nothing to show that any real feeling of common origin and common responsibility existed even here.

On the continent, again, there were large groups of men whom the Greeks found difficulty in classifying. There were some Epirotes and Macedonians whose claim to be Greeks was admitted. On the whole, however, Epirotes and Macedonians were classed as barbarians, though a different sort of barbarians from Scythian and Phrygian. The first realization of national unity came with the first great national danger, the catastrophe that impended from the Persians.

Even then actual invasion did not succeed in combining the Greeks even temporarily. That was due to the inherent difficulty in interesting Thessalians or Boeotians in the quarrels of Ionians.[^[47]] In spite of them, the danger was at that time averted, but it did not therefore become less real. The consciousness of this ever-present danger and the bitter experiences of subjection created groups that coalesced more solidly than ever before about certain leaders, Athenians or Spartans. In the fifth and fourth centuries, the concept of a Greek race received a real outline, and the feeling of a common race pride became highly developed.

This race pride showed itself principally in an over-weening confidence in the superiority of Greek arms. It is a false notion that represents the Greek as careless or contemptuously indifferent of the races about him. Never were men more eager for curious tales of out-of-the-way peoples. Their earliest historians won their chief success in this way. But Greeks had beaten back the conquerors of the world, and had maintained themselves aggressively as well. It was very natural that something of this attitude was apparent in dealing with barbarians even on terms of comity. The Greeks had at least colorable ground for believing that in military matters they were masters wherever they chose.

One phrase of which some Greek writers were fond need not be taken too seriously. Barbarians, we are told, are by nature slaves.[^[48]] It would be an error to attach much importance to the statement. Greeks did not really believe that Darius or Datames or Hamilcar was servile in character or in disposition. The expression was merely the facile chauvinism that military prestige readily stirs up in any nation. So at certain times some Englishmen were ready to call the French cowards, or Frenchmen to call Prussians so. Among the Greeks the principal basis for the statement was the fact that the activity of Greek merchants and pirates filled every city with slaves of all foreign nations. Indeed the phrase is no more than a generalized assertion of that state of things.

We shall have to qualify similarly the statement now and then encountered of a natural and permanent hostility between Greeks and barbarians. It is a commonplace of Athenian orators, but it practically always concerns the real hereditary enemy of Greeks, and particularly of Athens—the Persians. It is in calling the Greeks against their ancient foe that Isocrates uses the phrase,[^[49]] and in Demosthenes[^[50]] it is especially based upon the hostilities so long maintained between Athens and Persia and the ancient grudge Athenians bore for the sack of their city in 480 B.C.E.

The first achievement of united Hellas was the invasion of Persia, although it was under Macedonian leadership that this was done, but soldiers of Alexander appeared as Greeks to the East, and Alexander is מלך יון, melek Yavan, “king of Greece,” in the Book of Daniel.[^[51]]

Just at this culminating point in the development of Greek nationality, the process of blurring began. Greek and non-Greek were no sooner sharply contrasted than by the conscious assimilation policy of Alexander’s successors the lines tended to obliterate themselves. At first Greek culture was dominant, but beneath it Syrian, Egyptian, and Cappadocian obstinately survived, and ultimately, under Christian and Mohammedan influences, regained their place. It is with one phase of this specific problem—the threatened submergence of an Asiatic people by Greek culture—that we are particularly concerned.

The attitude of Romans toward other nations was, as might be expected, even more arrogantly that of masters and conquerors. But where we find among Greeks a certain theoretical importance attached to purity of Hellenic descent[^[52]] (which, by the by, was largely ignored in practice), the Romans scarcely understood what the term meant. A system in which emancipated slaves were citizens, who in the second generation were eligible to high civic honors,[^[53]] and not infrequently attained them—such a system did not tend to encourage claims to purity of blood. That does not mean that foreign origin, real or suspected, could not at any time become a handle for abuse. Cicero fastens on the Celtic strain in Piso’s lineage with savage delight, just as Demosthenes’ enemies rarely forgot to remind him of his Scythian grandfather.[^[54]] But these are not matters of real significance. The significant fact was that they who were Liby-Phoenicians in one generation were descendants of Romulus in the next.[^[55]]

Sumus Romani qui fuimus ante Rudini, “We are Romans, we who formerly were Rudinians,” says Ennius,[^[56]] and the metamorphosis was as complete and as easy if, instead of Italians, they were wholly barbarous elements that were absorbed. In religious matters the Romans more than the Greeks felt the efficacy of form. So in political matters the formula of emancipation and the decree of citizenship were deemed operative of a real change in the persons affected.

The Roman nobility, it is true, often made pretensions to a purity of descent that felt every foreign admixture as a stain.[^[57]] But such claims were absurdly groundless, and cannot really have deceived even those who maintained them. The great majority of Romans had no quarrel with any who desired and tried to be Roman. Even Juvenal’s venom is vented only on the avowed foreigners, who as Greeks, Egyptians, and Syrians lolled at their ease, while the ragged Cethegi and Cornucanii munched, standing, the bread of affliction and charity. The leveling tendencies of the autocracy removed a great many of the reasons of this friction, and in part succeeded in giving even the Greek-speaking East and the Latin-speaking West a common culture to maintain. But by that time new movements of population made such race-concepts as were based on blood-kinship too plainly out of accord with the facts to be seriously asserted. At the close of the period we are discussing, every man was either a Roman citizen, with a pressingly heavy share of the burden of maintaining the Roman system, or he was not. Who his ancestors were was wholly forgotten. It had even ceased to be of moment whether he spoke Greek or Latin or Syriac, Punic, or even Gallic,[^[58]] which had never completely died out in their ancient homes.

At no time did a feeling of racial kinship make a strong sentimental appeal. That the whole human race was an extended family was taken as axiomatic. Striking physical differences did not prevent similarity of names from proving kinship between Egyptian and Greek and Persian and Ethiopian. All through Greek history factions in Greek cities called upon outsiders against their countrymen. The Phoenicians of Utica preferred the foreign Romans to their Carthaginian kinsmen. Similarly the Campanians of Capua chose to fraternize with the Libyans and Phoenicians of Hannibal’s army rather than the closely related Latins.[^[59]] In these circumstances nothing will lend itself more easily to distorting our view of the times than the importation into them of the modern view of race—of that view, at least, in which the historians of the nineteenth century found so easy and adequate an explanation of everything they desired to debase or extol.

CHAPTER IV
SKETCH OF JEWISH HISTORY BETWEEN NEBUCHADNEZZAR AND CONSTANTINE

We have briefly sketched in the foregoing chapters the concepts of race and religion that Greek and Roman applied to the world about them. These concepts were not starkly rigid. They changed considerably and often rapidly in the six centuries our subject covers. They are further to be qualified by the social environment within which they operated. But it was not only the Greeks or Romans who in blood and thought passed through many and profound changes. The Jews, too, developed in many directions, and this development can no more be lost sight of than the corresponding one among their neighbors.

In 586 B.C.E. the kingdom of Judah, which had for some years been a Babylonian dependency, was ended as a political institution, and the majority of its people, at any rate of the nobles and wealthy men of them, were forcibly deported to Babylon. The deportation though extensive was not complete. Some, principally peasants and artisans, were left, but in districts so long wasted by war their condition can only have been extremely wretched. Since the whole region was part of the same huge empire, the old boundary lines were probably obliterated, and those who lived there subjected to the control of imperial governors residing in one or another of the walled cities of Syria or Philistia.

Within the next two generations momentous political changes occurred. The Babylonian empire gave way to a Persian, which, however, can at first have changed nothing except the personnel of the actual administrators. According to a very probable tradition, one of the first acts of Cyrus was to permit, at any rate not to oppose, the remigration of some of the Judean families or clans to their former homes. Within the next hundred years a larger and larger number of the families deported by Nebuchadnezzar likewise returned, though never all of them and perhaps not even a majority of them. Much of the old territory must have been found unoccupied, since otherwise conflicts must have arisen with interests vested within the fifty years and more that had elapsed, and of these we do not hear. But we do hear of immediate conflicts between the returned exiles and those who professed to be the descendants of the Israelites (and Judaites) left by Assyrians (and Babylonians) on the soil. These latter were beginning to gather about Shechem, where they must already have been a dominant element, and where they had created a cult center on Mount Gerizim. The conflict tended to become compromised in time, until the activities of the reformer Ezra, backed by the civil governor Nehemiah, again and permanently separated them.

The returned exiles had from the beginning made the ancient capital their center, and had succeeded in obtaining permission to rebuild their ancient shrine. But they were at an obvious disadvantage compared with their rivals at Shechem, until the city of David could receive the characteristic of a city—the walls which alone distinguished village or somewhat more densely populated section of the open country from the polis or city proper. These, too, were obtained through Nehemiah, and the prohibition of connubium between the so-called Samaritans of Shechem and the Jews of Jerusalem was the first aggressive act of the now self-reliant community.

The system of government of the Persian empire was not oppressive. The distant king of kings was mainly insistent upon recognition of his sovereignty and regularity of tribute, less as a means of support than as an acknowledgment of submission. Within the provinces the satrap was practically king, and might make his domination light or burdensome as he chose. We have excellent contemporary evidence that he took his responsibilities lightly for the most part. In the mountains of Asia Minor many tribes seem scarcely to have known that they were born vassals of the Persian king.[^[60]] The local satrap rarely attempted to control in detail the administrative affairs of the communities in his charge, particularly when such an attempt would precipitate a rebellion.

In Judea the open plains and low hills rendered it easier for the governor to emphasize the king’s authority than it was among the mountains of Cappadocia or the fiords of Cilicia, whose native syennesis, or king, retained both title and authority. We have, however, a confused and particularly fragmentary record of what actually happened in the two hundred years that elapsed between Zerubbabel and Alexander. Changes of great moment in the political, social, and religious life of the Jews were undoubtedly taking place, since we find those changes completed a few years later, but we can only conjecture the stages of the process. On the whole our sources, till considerably later, are very imperfect. The Persian period forms the largest gap in the history of the Jews.

A great many Biblical scholars, particularly in Germany, assign to this period an influence nothing short of fundamental. A large part of the texts now gathered in the Bible are placed in this time. The extreme view practically refers the beginning of Jewish history to this date, and assumes that only a very small part of the older literature and institutions survived the Babylonian exile. The new community began its life, it is asserted, with elements almost wholly dependent upon the civilization of Babylon and Persia.

It is extremely unlikely that this theory is correct. Every individual assertion of course must be judged in the light of the evidence presented for it. And on this point it may be sufficient to mention that the evidence for almost every position is of the feeblest. It consists largely in apparent inconsistencies of statements or allusions, for which the theory advanced suggests a hypothetical reconciliation. If these hypotheses are to be considered scientifically, they at best present a possible solution and always only one of many possible solutions. But the general theory suffers from an inconsistency much graver than those it attempts to remove.

The inconsistency lies in this: The soil of Palestine, never of high fertility, had greatly deteriorated by the frequent wars of the seventh century and the neglect and desolation of the following centuries. Commerce, because of the absence of ports, was practically non-existent. Those who returned can scarcely have found time for anything else than the bare problem of living. In these circumstances it is obviously improbable that a literary activity rich and powerful enough to have created the masterpieces often assigned to this period can have existed. The conditions of pioneers do not readily lend themselves to such activities. City life, an essential prerequisite of high achievements in art, was being reconstructed very slowly and was confined almost wholly to Jerusalem. The difficulty is a serious one, and is quite disregarded by many scholars to whom the bleakness of our records of this time affords a constant temptation.

Jewish soldiers fought in the armies of their Persian master wherever these armies went. Some must have been among the Syrian contingent at Marathon and Plataea.[^[61]] The garrisons of the frontiers contained many of them. Recently a fortunate accident has disclosed, at the upper cataract of the Nile, a garrison community of Jews, of which the records, known as the Assuan and Elephantine papyri,[^[62]] have opened up quite new vistas in Jewish history. Perhaps the most important point established is the beginning of the Diaspora. The existence of communities of Jews outside of Palestine, developing their own traditions and assimilating their appearance and social customs to those of their neighbors, is a matter of capital importance for the history of later Jewry. When such communities multiplied, Jerusalem came more and more to have a merely religious presidency over them, and the constitution of Judea itself became determined by that fact, while the foundations were being laid for the career of religious propaganda later so successfully undertaken.

The virtual autonomy of the Persian period allowed the development of a well-organized ruling caste of priests, in which were perhaps included the Soferim, or Scribes, men learned in the Law, who had no definite priestly functions. The scope of the high priest’s jurisdiction, the extent of his powers, may not have been sharply defined as yet. In itself the presence of a high priest as head of the state was not at all unusual in that region. As has been said, the interference of the representative of the Persian sovereign was a variable quantity. In the second half of the fifth century a Jew, Nehemiah, held the office of tirshatha, or viceroy, an accident that was of inestimable value to the growing community, and may have finally secured the threatened political existence of Jerusalem.

One other political event, of which we have dim and confused accounts, was a rebellion—whether in or of Judea—under Artaxerxes Ochus (359-338 B.C.E.). The account of Josephus speaks of feuds in the high-priestly family, the murder of a claimant in the temple precincts, and the intervention of the all-powerful eunuch Bagoas.[^[63]] That some such thing happened there can be no reasonable doubt, although we cannot recover the details. It is, however, unwarranted to make the incident in any way typical of the fortunes of Judea during Persian rule. There was no tradition in later times of Persian oppression, nor can even this rebellion, if rebellion it was, have involved serious repressive measures, since the Greek invasion a few years later found the Jews loyal to their overlord.

When the Macedonian Alexander changed the face of the East, the Jews were swept along with the rest of the loose-jointed empire built by Cyrus and Darius. Upon Alexander’s death, after uncertainties which the whole Levant shared, Palestine fell to Egypt, of which it was a natural geographical appanage as it had been for millennia before. Under the suzerainty of the Ptolemies the Jewish communities in Egypt received very considerable reinforcements, and the home-country became a real national expression, and rapidly attained a relatively high degree of material well-being, since the practical autonomy of Persian days was continued. Seized by Antiochus of Asia in the decrepitude of Egypt, Judea entered with full national consciousness into the heterogeneous kingdom ruled by a singularly fantastic royal house. A blunder in policy of the peculiarly fantastic Epiphanes provoked a revolt that was immediately successful in causing the prompt abandonment of the policy, and was helped by dynastic chaos to a still larger measure of success.

RUINS OF THE AMPHITHEATER AT GERASA (JERASH) GILEAD, PALESTINE
(© Underwood and Underwood)

The leaders of that revolt, the Hasmonai family, produced a succession of able soldiers. Besides the old Mattathiah and his heroic son Judah, Jonathan, Simon, and John, by selling their service dearly to this one or that one of the Syrian pretenders, by understandings with the ubiquitous Roman emissaries, above all by military skill of the first order, changed the virtual autonomy of Persian and Ptolemaic times into a real one, in which Syrian suzerainty was a tradition, active enough under the vigorous Sidetes, non-existent under the imbecile Cyzicenus.[^[64]]

During all this time Jews, from personal choice and royal policy, had extended their dispersion throughout the new cities founded by their Seleucid masters. Until the battle of Magnesia, 190 B.C.E., Asia Minor was the real center of the Seleucid monarchy; and in the innumerable cities established there, Jews in large numbers settled. When Judea became independent there were probably as many Jews outside of it as within it.

With the Hasmonean princes—“high priest” is the title which the Hebrew legend on their coins gives them[^[65]]—the country entered upon a career of conquest. Galilee, Idumaea, the coast cities of Philistia, portions of Gilead were seized by John, or Aristobulus, or Alexander, so that Judea rapidly became one of the important kingdoms of the East, with which no one could fail to reckon who became active in the affairs of that region. Rome had backed the Hasmoneans against Syria so long as Syria presented the possibility of becoming dangerous. But that soon ceased. By a strange paradox of history the Hellenized East found its last champion against the Romans in the Persian kings of Pontus, and when Mithradates was crushed, it could only be a question of the order in which every fragment of Alexander’s empire would slip into the maw of the eagles. The Roman liquidator, Pompey, appeared in Asia, and Antioch became a suburb of Rome.

The pretext for clearing their way to Egypt by taking Judea presented itself in a disputed succession. The sons of Alexander Jannai were compelled to accept the arbitrament of the Romans, with the usual result. The loser in the award, Aristobulus, attempted to make good by arms what he had lost in the decision. A Roman army promptly invested Jerusalem, moved by the patent injustice of allowing a capable and vigorous prince to usurp the place of a submissive weakling. The Roman general walked into the inner court of the temple, and peered into the Holy of Holies. He found nothing for his pains, but his act symbolized the presence of the master, and left a fine harvest of hate and distrust for the next generations to reap.

From that time on, the history of Judea is the not uncommon one of a Roman dependency. The political changes are interesting and dramatic but not of particular importance: vassal kings, docile tetrarchs, finally superseded by the Roman procurator with all the machinery of his office. Judea was different only in that her rebellions were more formidable and obstinate. But Rome had developed a habit of crushing rebellions. Simeon bar Kosiba, known chiefly as Bar-Kochba, was the last Jew to offer armed resistance. With his death the political history of Judea comes to an end.

The religious and social history of the Jews had for many centuries ceased to be identical with that of their country. It was a minority of Jews then living that participated in the rebellion of 68, and perhaps a still smaller fraction that took part in the rising under Trajan and Hadrian. The interest of all Jews in the fortunes of Judea must at all times have been lively and deep, but the feeling was different in the case of non-Palestinian Jews from that of men toward their fatherland.

Meeting for the study of their ancient lore in their “guild-house,” the proseucha, or schola, the Jewish citizens of the various cities of the Roman empire or the Parthian kingdom did not present to their neighbors a spectacle so unique as to arrest the latter’s attention at once. They were simply a group of allied cult-communities, sometimes possessing annoying exemptions or privileges, but not otherwise exceptional. An exceptional position begins for them when their privileges are abolished, and their civil rights curtailed, by the legislation of the early Christian emperors.

CHAPTER V
INTERNAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE JEWS DURING THE PERSIAN PERIOD

The Jews took to Babylon a highly complicated body of civil law and religious doctrine. The essence of the latter was an exclusive monotheism, and that belief was not the possession of a cultured few, but the accepted credo of the entire nation. No doubt, among the common people, practices still existed that implied the recognition of polytheism. No doubt, too, words and phrases occurred in common speech, in poetry, and in ritual, which had arisen in polytheistic times, and are fully intelligible only with a polytheistic background. But these phrases and practices do not imply the survival of polytheism, either as a whole or in rudimentary form, any more than using the names of the Teutonic gods for the days of the week commits us to the worship of those gods, or the various funeral superstitions still in vogue allow the inference that our present-day religion is a worship of the Di Manes.

Just as the Jewish religion was in a highly developed form at the time of the Exile, so the Law was very fully developed. That the entire Law, as embodied in the Pentateuch, was promulgated by Moses is not altogether likely, but that any considerable fraction of it is later than 586 B.C.E. is equally unlikely. Interpolations doubtless occurred often. To insert into an authoritative text an inference from the words which the interpolator honestly believed to be true, was not a generally reprehended practice. Perhaps some of the emphasis upon sacerdotal organization which parts of the Pentateuch show, may have so been imported into the constituent codes of the Torah. But on how slight a scale this was can be readily seen by comparing the Pentateuch with any of the apocryphal books consciously designed to magnify the priesthood.[^[66]] The actual civil law bears every mark of high antiquity. The religious law is at least not inconsistent with such antiquity.

Now neither in civil law nor in religious thought did the community that slowly formed itself about the acropolis of Zion remain stationary. We must suppose that the energies of the returning exiles were pretty well concentrated upon the economic problems before them. But an actual community they were from the start, and although the communal life was far from attaining at once to the richness of former days, it contained all the elements necessary. Without a common law, i.e. a regulation of conflicting claims to property, and without a common cult, i.e. a regulation of the communication between the divine and the human members of a state, no state was conceivable to the ancient world. Changed conditions will infallibly modify both, and some of these modifications it will be necessary to understand.

We possess in the book known as Ben Sira, or Ecclesiasticus,[^[67]] an invaluable and easily dated record of life as it appeared to a cultured and wealthy inhabitant of Jerusalem about the year 200 B.C.E. The incidental references to past time and, above all, the inferences which may legitimately be drawn about the origins of a society so completely organized as that of Judea at that time, render recourse to the book a necessity at many points of our investigation. While accordingly we find it a convenient terminus in both directions, we must make large individual qualifications. Ben Sira does not fully represent his time or his people. He belonged to a definite social stratum. His own studies and reflections had no doubt developed conclusions that were far from being generally shared. But he is an eloquent and unimpeachable witness that the Biblical books had already reached a high measure of sanctity, and the division later perpetuated in the tripartite canon of Law, Prophets, and Writings, already existed; and, if nothing else, the single reference to Isaiah as the prophet of consolation renders it probable that even so heterogeneous a corpus as the canonical Isaiah was already extant much as we have it now.[^[68]]

Opinions may differ as to the length of time necessary to permit this development. But that a very few generations could have sufficed for it is scarcely credible. Since even the Secondary Canon, that of the prophets, had already become a rigid one, in which historical differences in parts of the same book were ignored, the Law must have been fixed for an even longer time, and the process of interpretation which every living code requires must have gone on apace for very many years indeed.

We know very little of the actual agencies by which this process was effected. The second great code of the Jews was not finally fixed till 200 C.E. We are, however, measurably familiar with the organization of the judiciary for some two centuries before, but even here there are distressing gaps, and for the time before Hillel the tradition is neither clear nor full. All, therefore, that concerns the organization of the judicial bodies that framed and applied the Law must be conjectured, and the earliest conjectures embodied in Talmudic tradition are perhaps as good as any. The development of “houses of prayer” was a necessity where so many Jewish communities were incapacitated from sharing in the great cult ceremonies at Jerusalem, and these houses became a convenience within Palestine and Jerusalem itself. But the creation of houses of prayer demanded local organization, and with that local organization gradations of members and the establishment of local magistrates. There can be little doubt that the organization of the Greek city-state, familiar to the East for many years, became a model for these corporately organized communities. Now the judicial function inherent in the character of ancient magistrates of all descriptions might easily have been the means of originating that long series of responsa from which the later Mishnah was finally winnowed. With every increase of population, power, and governmental machinery, the judicial system increased in complexity, and the intimate relation which the civil code bore to the ancient sacred code, as well as the close penetration of life by religion, tended to render the complexity still more intricate.

But if the origin of the oral law, in its application at least, can be made clear to ourselves only by means of such imaginative reconstruction, we are helped on the side of Jewish religious development by the possession of at least one fact of prime importance. The religious system of the Bible knows of a life after death, in Sheol, but does not know of a survival of personality. Warlock and witch, by such incantations as were used by Odysseus at the mouth of the dread cave, or by the wise woman at En-Dor, could give the shadowy ghost enough outline to be recognizable under his former name, but for the most part all these flitting spirits were equal and indistinguishable. But about 100 B.C.E. there was current generally, although not universally, a very different belief, to wit, that in Sheol, or the grave, personality was not extinguished, but at most suspended; and that under certain conditions it might, or certainly would, be permanently continued. In other words, between the deportation to Babylon and the culmination of the Hasmonean rule, the belief about life after death had very considerably changed for most people. And the change was of a nature that must inevitably have affected conduct, since the acceptability of man’s life could no longer be proved by the naïvely simple method of Eliphaz the Temanite,[^[69]] nor yet by the austere consciousness of rectitude that was the ideal of the prophets. Transferred to a world beyond perception, reward and penalty gave the Torah a superhuman sanction, which must have been far more powerful than we can now readily imagine.

It is idle to look for the origin of this belief in any one series of influences. For many generations poets and philosophers had swung themselves in bolder and bolder imagery up to the Deity, which they, as Jews, conceived in so intense and personal a fashion. Very many passages in the Bible have seemed to imply a belief in personal immortality and resurrection, and perhaps do imply such a belief. Nor is it necessary to assume that these passages are of late origin. Some of them may be, but one would have to be very certain of the limitations of poetic exaltation to say just what definite background of belief metaphor and hyperbole demand. We shall not go far wrong if we assume that even before the Exile, individual thinkers had conceived, perhaps even preached, the dogma of personal immortality. Its general acceptance among the people occurred in the period previously mentioned. Its official authorization took place much later in the final triumph of Pharisaism.

Personal immortality and resurrection of the body are kindred, but not identical, conceptions. Of the two, resurrection is probably the older, and resurrection, we may note, implies a real suspension of personality, when the body is dissolved in death. But the body may be recombined, and, when that occurs, the personal life is renewed. The exact time must have been very differently conceived by different men. A great many, however, had already very definite fancies—one can hardly say beliefs—as to the great day that would deliver the souls from Sheol. That such a great day would come, on which the whole cosmos would be permanently readjusted, is the essence of all eschatology. It was only natural that all other hopes of the people should tend to be combined with it; and of these hopes the principal one was the Messianic hope.

It is obvious that no adequate discussion of the development of this hope can be given here, even if our fragmentary sources permitted such discussion. The most that can be done is to state the situation briefly. It is all the more important, as the Messianic idea was the source of the most powerful political movements among the people, and the direct occasion of at least one of the desperate insurrections of the Jews.

Many nations look back to a golden age of power and prosperity, and forward to a future restoration of it. The Jews likewise never forgot the kingdom of David and Solomon, and saw no reason to despair of its return. As a matter of fact, the Hasmonean rule at its greatest extent was practically such a restoration. But conditions and people had radically changed between David and Alexander Jannai. In 1000 B.C.E. it was a mighty achievement for the small tribal confederation to have dominated its corner of the Levant, to have held in check the powerful coast cities of Philistia, to have been sought in alliance by Tyre and Egypt. In 100 B.C.E., men’s minds had long been accustomed to the rise and fall of great empires. Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, Macedon, Egypt, Syria, Athens, and Sparta, and in the distant west Carthage and Rome, had at different times been lords of many lands. The Judean kingdom itself had arisen from the wreckage of such an empire. It was accordingly a different political ideal that filled the imagination of every nation at this time. To secure and maintain the independence of a few square miles of semi-arid soil between the Jordan and the Sea was no deed to puff men with inordinate pride, however difficult of actual accomplishment it was. As a step toward larger deeds, however, it was notable enough.

What was the larger deed, and how was it to be accomplished? However disproportionate it may seem to us, it was nothing else than the dominion over the whole world, to be accomplished by sudden and miraculous conversion of men’s souls for the most part, or by force of arms, if it should prove necessary. And, as was natural enough, it was in the ancient royal line, the stock of David, that the leader, the Anointed of God, was to be found.

The family of David, which was still important and powerful when Zechariah xii. was written (perhaps the fourth century B.C.E.), had evidently since fallen on evil days. It cannot, of course, have entirely disappeared, but no member of undoubted Davidic lineage arises to make political pretensions. It is even likely that, in the absence of adequate records, and with the loss of importance which the family suffered during the fourth and third centuries B.C.E., it had become impossible for anyone to prove descent from David.

None the less, perhaps because of the decline of the family, popular imagination clung to the royal house. In the bitter days of exile, the writer of Psalm lxxxix. loses no faith in the destiny of David’s line:

I have made a covenant with My chosen,

I have sworn unto David, My servant,

Thy seed will I establish forever,

And build up thy throne to all generations.

So the author of First Maccabees, a loyal supporter of a non-Davidic dynasty, puts in the mouth of the dying Mattathiah the acknowledgment of the ultimate sovereignty of the ancient house: “David for being merciful possessed the throne of an everlasting kingdom” (I Macc. ii. 57).

The certainty of this high destiny grew inversely with the political fortunes of the people. But when even the Hasmoneans fell, and Judea, so far from increasing the possessions of Solomon, found herself a hopelessly insignificant fraction of a huge empire, it was not merely the political side of the Messianic idea that fed upon its non-realization. Obscure economic and religious factors had long been operative, and all these raised popular temper to a point of high and, as it proved, destructive tension. It must always be remembered that those who undertook to lead the people against the Romans did not aim at the restoration of the Hasmonean or even Solomonic kingdom. The establishment of a throne in Jerusalem was the first step of that triumphant march through the world which would inaugurate the reign of the God-anointed son of David. The Judean zealots fought for no mean prize.

The Jews who came into contact with Greeks and Romans were a people whose development had been continuous from the earliest times. The cataclysms of their history had produced disturbances, but no break in their institutional growth. To the civil codes of the ancient polity they were in the process of adding a new body of law based upon judicial decisions. To the ethical monotheism of their former development the popular mind was adding a belief in personal immortality and bodily resurrection. Folk-lore and superstitions on one side, and speculative philosophy on the other, were busy here, as they were busy everywhere, in modifying the attitude of the people toward the established religion.

Finally the Messianic idea was gaining strength and form. In essence a hope for future prosperity, it had united in itself all the dreams and fancies of the people, which had arisen in many ways. It became in the end the dream of a world-monarchy, in which a scion of David’s line would be king of kings and give law to the world from Jerusalem. The ushering in of that era soon became a great day of judgment affecting the whole universe and ardently desired to correct the oppressive evils of actual life.

CHAPTER VI
THE FIRST CONTACT BETWEEN GREEK AND JEW

Jews came into the occidental horizon as part of a larger whole. That whole was known as Syria. Unfortunately Syria itself is a very vague term, and is without real ethnographic or geographic unity. It might include Mesopotamia and all the intervening region between the Taurus and Egypt. One might suppose that with such a people as the Phoenicians Greek dealings had been so extensive and frequent that it was impossible to call them out of their name, but Tyrians too are considered and spoken of as branches of the Syrians. The name soon became practically a descriptive epithet, more or less derogatory in its implication.[^[70]]

The lower part of the region between the Taurus and Sinai was known to Greeks as Syria Palaestina, a name almost certainly derived from the Philistine cities whose position on the coast and whose origin made them familiar to traders. The Greeks knew, of course, that variously denominated tribes occupied the hinterland, but what little they knew about them did not until somewhat later get into the literary fragments that have come down to us. Perhaps they would not even have been surprised to learn that here, as in Asia Minor, a very large number of peoples had settled and fought and jumbled one another into what seemed to superficial outsiders a common group of Syrians.

The particular section later occupied by the Jews had itself been the scene of a racial babel. The Israelites were, by their tradition, expressly commanded to dispossess Hittite, Girgashite, Canaanite, Amorite, Perizzite, Hivite, and Jebusite.[^[71]] The recurrence of this enumeration indicates an historical basis for the tradition. It is very likely that nations so named were actually subdued by the invading Hebrews. The fact that the tribes dispossessed are seven in number makes caution necessary in accepting the statement. Perhaps some of these “nations” are different names for the same group. Some of them, e.g. Hittite or Amorite, may be vague descriptive terms, like Syrian or even Hebrew.

Then there were the Phoenicians, representing perhaps the first Semitic invasion of this territory. Below them, the Philistines, “from Caphthor,” who are very plausibly identified with Cretans or “Minoans,” the Keftiu of the Egyptians.[^[72]] During Mesopotamian and Egyptian sovereignty, Mesopotamian and Egyptian infiltration may be safely assumed. The desert never ceased to contribute its share of tribes. Permanent results of such nomad invasions were the settlement of the various Hebrew tribes—Moab and Edom in the southeast and Israel on both sides of the Jordan.

If the analogy of other times and places is to be followed, no one of these groups was ever completely and literally exterminated. Jewish tradition knows of an attempted extermination—that of the Amalekites—only as a very exceptional thing. The resultant nationalities, which in Greek times occupied Palestine, were likely enough to have been of somewhat mixed origin. When the Greeks came to know them well, however, the Jews had long been a well-defined group, frowning upon intermarriage, although it is not likely that the prohibition of connubium had its source in any importance attached to racial purity, or that all Jews everywhere were equally strict in enforcing it.[^[73]]

As has been suggested, the first contact was probably military. Since Jews served in the Persian armies as far south as Elephantine, they probably were equally present in the battalions of Datis and of Mardonius.[^[74]] Another early contact was in the slave-mart, no doubt both as buyers and the bought. Enterprising Tyrian traders had made themselves comfortable in Jerusalem before Nehemiah (Neh. xiii. 6), and human commodities formed the chief merchandise of most commerce. Before him, perhaps before the Exile, Joel reproaches the Phoenicians with the words, “The children also of Judah and the children of Jerusalem have ye sold unto the Grecians.”[^[75]] “Syrus” had become a common slave-name in Greece in the fifth century, and Syrus might include anything.[^[76]]

All these scattered and uncertain hints do not tend to present a very clear picture. However, the time was rapidly coming when Greek contact with “Syria” was to be vastly more intimate.

In the spring of 334 B.C.E., Alexander crossed the Hellespont to carry out the cherished vision of Isocrates, a united Hellas drastically stamping out the Persian peril. From the complete success of his efforts we are wont to date the so-called Hellenistic epoch, the period in which Greek influences in art, government, and society were dominant. But Hellenization had in actual fact begun long ago in the domain of art. It had penetrated central Asia Minor far back in the seventh century B.C.E.,[^[77]] and the magnificent “satrap-sarcophagus” at Sidon shows how thoroughly it was appreciated at the very borders of Judea well in the middle of the fifth century B.C.E.[^[78]] A generation before Alexander the king of Sidon bore a Greek name.[^[79]]

So the “king of Yavan,” who received the submission of Jerusalem, passed, on his way to Egypt, among a people to whom the name of Greek was quite familiar—who had long known of Greek skill in craftsmanship, Greek prowess on the field of battle, and Greek shrewdness in bargaining. The new empire, on the dizzy throne of which Alexander placed himself, seemed to all the East commensurate with the whole world, and to the kinsmen of the new king of kings and lord of lords all men were ready enough to grant the deference formerly owed to Persians.

At Alexander’s untimely death it could scarcely have seemed to men that great changes were impending. On the contrary, the prestige of his literally miraculous successes, the impress of his powerful and fascinating personality, continued for a long time. It might be doubtful—in fact, it must have immediately become uncertain—whether the persons to whom the actual administration of affairs would fall, would be of Alexander’s blood. The satraps of the old régime had to some extent been displaced by the great king’s generals. Every one of these was convinced that the coveted prize would fall to the strongest or cleverest or quickest; but for a while a short and troubled truce was maintained under the shadow of regal authority embodied in the poor fool Arrhidaeus and the unborn child of Roxane. When the young Alexander was born, the conditions at Babylon challenged the intriguing of every court-parasite. Ptolemy, son of Lagos, satrap of Egypt, was the first to disregard the confused and divided authority of the zany king and his baby colleague. A general débâcle followed. Palestine suffered more than others, because it was unfortunately situated on the road to Egypt. But by about 300 B.C.E. the country was definitely settled as a province of Egypt, and it entered upon a century of extraordinary and varied growth.

It is just about this time that unmistakable knowledge of the Jews themselves, as a separate nationality of Syrians, is evidenced in extant Greek writers. Histories of the nearer and of the remote East, impressions of travel and concatenation of irresponsible gossip of all sorts had long been written by Greeks. Some of these may well have contained reference to the Jews. In the fifth century, Herodotus speaks of the “Syrians of Palestine” in connection with the rite of circumcision, which, he claims to know from the testimony of the Syrians themselves, was derived from Egypt.[^[80]] However, he obviously writes at second hand, so that we have no means of knowing whether or not he refers to Jews. That he knew the name Ἰουδαῖοι is not likely, but the fact that his source was probably a literary one makes it possible to date the acquaintance of Greeks with the practice of circumcision in this region, and therefore perhaps with Jews, at least to the beginning of the fifth century B.C.E.

The peculiar natural phenomena of the Dead Sea attracted the attention of travelers from very early times. Aristotle discusses it, and after him—no doubt before him, as well—the collectors of wonder-tales, of which we have so many later specimens. Interest in the Dead Sea, however, by no means implied interest in those who dwelt on its borders, and the story of the bituminous formation on the water and the curious manner in which it was collected could be and was told without so much as a mention of the name of Jews.[^[81]]

But they are mentioned, and for the first time in extant Greek writers, by the famous pupil and successor of Aristotle, Theophrastus of Lesbos. The passage does not occur in any one of the works of Theophrastus which we have in bulk, such as the Characters or the Natural History. It is a quotation made by the Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyrius, who wrote somewhere about 275 C. E. The quotation may, in accordance with ancient custom, be of substance rather than verbatim. Faulty memory may have further diminished its value for our purposes. When we add to these facts possible uncertainties in the transmission of the text of Porphyrius, we are in a fair way of realizing from what dubious material we must piece our knowledge together.

The passage is in itself, except perhaps for one casual phrase, strangely unimportant, but as the earliest plain reference to Jews in a Greek writer it deserves citation in full:

As a matter of fact, if the Jews, those Syrians who still maintain the ancient form of animal sacrifice, were to urge us to adopt their method, we should probably find the practice repellent. Their system is the following: they do not eat of the sacrificial flesh, but burn all of it at night, after they have poured a great deal of honey and wine upon it. The sacrifice they seek to complete rather rapidly, so that the All-Seer may not become a witness of pollution. Throughout the entire time, inasmuch as they are philosophers by race, they discuss the nature of the Deity among themselves, and spend the night in observing the stars, looking up at them and invoking them as divine in their prayers.

As Reinach points out,[^[82]] there is scarcely a correct word in this description considered as an account of actual Jewish sacrificial rites. If we have a correct, or even approximately correct, version of Theophrastus’ report, he or his informant was curiously misinformed. This informant obviously could not have been a Jew. No Jew could have been so ignorant of the customs of his people. Nor did his statement come directly from any one who had actually witnessed, from the Court of the Gentiles, even a small part of a Jewish sacrifice. It may well be that we have before us an inextricable confusion between Jewish and other Syrian rites. We are left to wholly uncontrolled speculation, if we are bent on knowing whence Theophrastus derived the assertions he makes here.

The important words of the passage are found in the casual phrase ἅτε φιλόσοφοι τὸ γένος ὄντες, “inasmuch as they are philosophers by race.” The phrasing indicates that this aspect of the Jews is not wholly new. Word had come to Theophrastus, and to others before him, of a Syrian people not far from the coast, whose ritual in some respects—though the transmission is confused as to what respects—differed from that of their neighbors, but whose customs were strikingly different in one particular, that part of their divine observance was some form of theologic discussion. That, as we know, was a fact, since “houses of prayer”—we may call them synagogues—already existed. This reference to them is the one kernel of observed fact in this whole description, however indirectly obtained.

Now the Greeks of the fourth century knew of esoteric religious communities, and they knew of nations that professed to be especially attached to religious practices. But groups of mystae engaged in rapt spiritual converse were never coextensive with entire nations. And “religious” nations might be simply those among whom an elaborate state cult was punctiliously performed. Even theocracies were no unheard-of thing. Sidon was such a theocracy; i.e. theoretically ruled by the god and administered by his priest.[^[83]] But that too was largely formal, not strikingly different from the patronage of Athena over Athens. The Jewish theocracy was a more intensely real matter than this, but that fact could not have been apparent to either merchant or traveler, from whom in the last analysis the information about Jews before 300 B.C.E. must have come. If, therefore, Greeks found something in the religious customs of the Jews that aroused immediate attention, it was the very general interest and participation of the masses in the theological discussion as it was carried on in the synagogues.

This fact alone would justify the use of the term φιλόσοφοι, “philosophers.” Theology, the knowledge of the high gods, was an accredited branch of wisdom which the Platonic Socrates strove with a little too palpable irony to elicit from Euthyphro.[^[84]] Those who busied themselves with it were properly termed philosophers, whatever may have been the conclusions they reached. If we venture to assume that the conclusions which the Jews had long reached were actually known, Theophrastus’ phrase could only have been confirmed. An exclusive monotheism was in every sense a philosophic and not a popular concept.

A contemporary of Theophrastus was Clearchus of Soli in Cyprus. Of his writings none whatever has survived, except quotations in other books. Among other works he wrote dialogues more or less after the Platonic manner, in which his master Aristotle is interlocutor in place of Socrates. One of these dialogues was marked, no doubt as a subtitle, περὶ ὕπνου, “On Sleep,” and in this dialogue an encounter of Aristotle with a Hellenized Jew is described.

We need not seriously consider the question whether such an encounter actually occurred. It is not in the least likely that it did. The only inferences that may be drawn from this passage are those that concern Clearchus.

Aristotle is the narrator, and tells his story, as he takes pains to say, according to the rules formulated in Rhetoric.[^[85]] He had met a man in Asia, a Jew of Coele-Syria by birth, but Grecized in speech and in soul. This Greek or Jew voluntarily sought out Aristotle and his associates, πειρώμενος αὐτῶν τῆς σοφίας, “to find out whether they were really as wise as their reputation.” On the whole, however, he had given rather than received edification.[^[86]]

What it was in this man’s conversation that so strongly aroused the approval of Clearchus we are not told. Josephus, in whose Contra Apionem we find the passage, ends here, to tell us briefly that the rest of Aristotle’s story described the man’s great strength of character and the admirable self-control of his habits of life. It may be suspected that Clearchus’ Jew is little more than a mouthpiece for his own ethical doctrines, a sort of fourth century Ingénu, or Candide.[^[87]] But what he does actually say is of great interest.

We have here the first mention of the capital in the form Jerusalēmē, introduced, it may be noted, for its outlandish sound. And we have the statement, curious enough to our ears, that the Jews are descendants of Hindu philosophers, who bear the name of Jews in Syria and Calani in India. Elsewhere Clearchus asserts an exactly similar connection between the Persian magi and the Hindu gymnosophists.[^[88]] It is obvious that Clearchus has the caste organization of the magi in mind, and that his knowledge of Jews is as mediate and remote as that of Theophrastus.

The connection of the Jews with India was evidently a hasty conclusion, arrived at when knowledge came to the Greeks of the existence of castes whose function was principally religious. The statement is repeated by a man who should have known better—Megasthenes, Seleucus’ ambassador to India. “All that has been written on natural science by the old Greek philosophers,” he tells us, “may also be found in philosophers outside of Greece, such as the Hindu Brahmans and the so-called Jews of Syria.”[^[89]] He is of course quite wrong as to the facts. But his statement is evidence of the wide currency of the opinion that the Jews possessed a very special and very profound lore. Megasthenes, it may be noted, does not state or imply that the Greeks were borrowers. If he had done so, the writer in whose book we find the citation, Clemens of Alexandria (about 180 C.E.), would have pounced upon it. Clemens was eagerly searching for demonstration of the thesis set up by many Jews and most early Christians, that all Greek science and philosophy were derived from an imagined early communication between Moses and the first Asiatic philosophers.[^[90]]

Theophrastus, Clearchus, and Megasthenes, all of them belonging to the generation of or immediately after Alexander, hold largely the same views. Influence of one of them upon the others is practically excluded. We may find in them accordingly such knowledge of the Jews as at about 300 B.C.E. had reached educated Greeks.

If we try to imagine how this information reached them, we are reduced to pure speculation. It does not seem to have been a common literary source, although it is likely enough that in the numerous histories of the East, now lost, casual and inaccurate references were made to the Jews. And again it is not likely that the vastly increased communication that followed Alexander’s campaign, at once brought the Jews much more prominently within the circle of Greek interest. In those days, the land-passage hugged the sea as closely as the sea-passage hugged the land. Judea was a little inland country, somewhat out of the line of direct communication between the Euphrates and the Nile. If then the current views, expressed as they are by Theophrastus and his contemporaries, had neither a literary source nor one of direct report, it can only have spread as an indirect, filtered rumor, perhaps by way of Phoenicians, Syrians, and Egyptians.

As far as Phoenicians and Syrians are concerned, immediate contact with the Jews must have existed. Tyrians and Sidonians and Philistines are frequently mentioned in the post-Exilic books of the Bible.[^[91]] This contact was not wholly hostile, though it was often so; but if these nations were the sources of Greek information about the Jews, the hostility is not apparent. Perhaps in the generations between Zechariah and Alexander it had disappeared. At all events, it would appear that the Canaanite neighbors of the Jews really knew very little about them, except that the Jews were the residents of the hills about Jerusalem, and that they had highly characteristic religious rites—characteristic principally in the earnestness with which they were performed.

In Egypt, a country that had never ceased to be in communication with Greece from very early times, and particularly since the founding of a Greek city at Naucratis, in Egypt itself, about the middle of the sixth century B.C.E., there had been communities of Jews from times that antedated the Persian conquest. Into the situation here, newly discovered papyri at Assuan and Elephantine allow us a glimpse, but only a glimpse. Even the little we know includes one case of bitter conflict between Jews and Egyptians.[^[92]] No doubt it was not the only case of its kind. Egyptians, we may be sure, knew of the Jews in the communities in which Jews lived, and one might suppose that Greek visitors to Egypt would at some time stumble across Jews there. However, our extant sources, which speak of Egyptians often enough, do not seem to have recognized the presence of foreign elements in the Egyptian population. It was reserved for the papyri to show us Persians, Syrians, Babylonians, and Jews established in the land as individuals and in groups.

The view of the Jews that represented them as a mystical sect did not cease when Judea became an important political factor in the East. One Greek thinker particularly had professed so strange and esoteric a doctrine that his biographers and critics inevitably looked for the source of it in non-Greek tribes and especially in those who had otherwise obtained a reputation for wisdom of various kinds. This was Pythagoras. Some seventy-five years after Theophrastus, Hermippus of Smyrna, in his Life of Pythagoras, ascribed certain definite doctrines of the latter to the Jews and Thracians.[^[93]] Pythagoras as a matter of fact had traveled extensively, and had brought to his Italian home little fragments of exotic lore variously derived. That his philosophy was influenced by them, there is no sufficient proof, much less based upon them, and the general belief that he was so influenced had probably no sounder foundation than the indubitable strangeness of the rites he instituted and his personal mannerisms. But in later times Pythagoras was a name to conjure with for those who were bent on establishing a connection between the Jews and the Greeks. Hermippus had numerous imitators among later Jewish and Christian writers.

We shall of course never be able to discover the particular moment that marked the first meeting of Jew and Greek. The contact that is indicated in the words of Theophrastus or Megasthenes is already of some duration. The term Ἰουδαῖος has a definite meaning for educated Greeks. It denoted a Syrian sect, living together about their rock-citadel and akin in doctrine and probably in blood to the Persian Magi and Hindu gymnosophists. More exact information was scarcely available. The two non-Judean sections where Jews were to be found, Babylon and Egypt, were themselves strange and only partially understood regions to Greeks in spite of their long acquaintance with both of them.

CHAPTER VII
EGYPT

In the relations that subsisted between Jews and Greeks after Alexander, Egypt plays an important part, so that particular attention must be directed to that country.

The influence of Egypt upon Palestine is no new thing in its history. For century after century the mighty empire across Sinai had been the huge and determining fact in the political destiny of all Palestinian nations. Indeed Palestine is much more properly within the Egyptian sphere of culture than the Babylonian. The glamor lasted even when the Pharaoh had become a broken reed. Men’s minds instinctively turned in that direction, and the vigor of the relatively youthful Assyria could not hold imaginations with half the force of the remembered glories of Thutmose and Ramses.

Egypt had been in Persian times a turbulent province, subdued with difficulty and demanding constantly renewed subjugation. Shortly before Alexander’s conquest, Artaxerxes Ochus had reconquered it with brutal severity. It offered no resistance to the victorious Macedonians. Upon Alexander himself it exercised an undoubted attraction. The ancient gods of this most ancient of countries were those best fitted to confirm his rather raw divinity. From none else than Amon himself, in his isolated shrine in the desert, he claimed to have received revelation of his divine lineage. And at the mouth of the Nile he laid the foundation of the greatest monument he was destined to have, the city of Alexandria.

When Alexander’s satraps proceeded to carve out portions for themselves, Egypt was seized by Ptolemy, whose quick brain had grasped at once the advantages accruing from the possession of an inexhaustible granary and from the relative remoteness of his position. The first contests would have to be fought in Asia. To attack Egypt meant a costly and carefully planned expedition, with the hazards of a rear attack. It was attempted, and it failed. Egypt might, as far as the country itself was concerned, breathe freely for a while, and give itself the opportunity of developing its extraordinary resources.

One of Ptolemy’s first aggressive campaigns was the seizure of Palestine, the natural geographical extension. Judea and Jerusalem fell into his hands. It is probable, as will be later discussed, that the story of the capture of the city on the Sabbath is apocryphal. But there can be no doubt that one of the immediate consequences of the annexation of Palestine was a greatly increased emigration of Jews, and doubtless of Palestinians generally, to Egypt. There is the tradition of a deportation, but it is feebly supported. However, the emigration was unquestionably vigorously encouraged and stimulated by the king. The new city needed inhabitants, and Egyptians were as yet looked at askance by their Macedonian rulers.

From the beginning, a great number of Greeks, Jews, Persians, Syrians, and Egyptians dwelt side by side in Alexandria. Greeks who now spoke of Jews could do so at first hand, and they could also obtain at first hand accounts of Jews from other nations, especially from the Egyptians. When, therefore, at about this time, Hecataeus of Abdera, a Greek living in Egypt, wrote a history of that country, he had more to say of the Jews than that they were a Syrian caste of strange ritual. Indeed his account of them is so important that it will be briefly summarized.

A pestilence broke out in Egypt, which was popularly attributed to the neglect of the national cult owing to the presence of foreign elements in the population. To propitiate the gods, the strangers (ἀλλόφυλλοι) were expelled. The most distinguished and energetic, as some say, arrived in Greece led by famous chieftains, of whom Danaus and Cadmus are the best known. The mass of the population settled in the neighboring Palestine, which was then a desert.

This colony (ἀποικία) was led by a certain Moses, famous for his wisdom and valor. He founded several cities, of which Ierosolyma is now the best-known. Having organized cult and government, he divided the people into twelve tribes, because he considered that number the absolutely perfect one, and because it corresponded to the number of months in the year.

He made no statues of gods, because he regarded as God and Ruler of all things the heavens that encircled the earth, and accordingly did not believe that the Deity resembled man in form. The sacrifices he instituted, the manner of life he prescribed, were different from those of surrounding nations. This was due to the expulsion they had suffered, which induced Moses to ordain an inhospitable (μισόξενον) and inhuman (ἀπάνθρωπον) form of living.

Since the nation was to be directed by priests, he chose for that purpose men of the highest character and ability. These he instructed, not merely for their sacerdotal functions, but also for their judicial and governmental duties. They were to be the guardians of law and morality.

It is for this reason that the Jews have never had a king, but appoint as ruler the wisest and ablest of their priests. They call him high priest (ἀρχιερεύς), and regard him as bearer of the divine commands, which he announces at the public assemblies and other meetings. In this matter the Jews are so credulous that they fall to the ground and adore (προσκυνεῖν) the high priest when he interprets the divine message. At the end of their laws is written, “These words, which Moses heard from God, he states to the Jews.”

Moses showed much foresight in military matters, since he compelled the young men to train themselves by exercises that involved courage and daring and endurance of privations. In his campaigns he conquered most of the surrounding territory, which was divided equally among all citizens, except that the priests received larger shares, so that they might enjoy greater leisure for their public duties. These allotments the possessors were forbidden to sell, in order to prevent depopulation by the creation of great estates. As an additional means to that end he compelled every one to rear his children, an arrangement that involved little expense and made the Jews at all times a very populous nation. Marriage and funeral rites were likewise quite different from those of their neighbors.

However, many of these ancient customs were modified under Persian, and more recently under Macedonian, supremacy.[^[94]]

So far Hecataeus of Abdera. The fragment is interesting, not merely as the first connected account of Jews by a Greek, but also from a number of facts that are contained implicitly in his narrative.

We have seen, in the previous chapter, what general knowledge of the Jews educated Greeks had in the latter half of the fourth century. Hecataeus could scarcely avoid being familiar with that version before he came to Egypt. That he ever was in Judea there is no evidence. If he followed his master Ptolemy, he might easily have been there. But the information he gives was almost certainly obtained in Egypt, and the sources of that information will be more closely examined.

It is evident at once that some of his facts must have come from contemporary Jewish sources. His statement of conditions among the Jews is markedly accurate for the time in which he wrote, although to be sure these conditions do not date to Moses. The absence of a king, the presence of a priestly nobility, the judicial functions of the priests, the compulsory military service, the supremacy of the high priest, and the veneration accorded to him, are all matters of which only a resident of Judea can have been cognizant.

Was the source a literary one? Did Hecataeus, writing at about 300 B.C.E., have before him a translation of the Bible or of the Pentateuch or a part of it? In the first place there is very little reason to believe that such a translation was current or was needed at this time. Secondly, the matters mentioned are just those that do not stand out at all in such a rapid reading of the Bible as a curious Greek might have given it. To obtain even approximate parallels, single verses of the Bible must be cited. But the statements of Hecataeus do correspond to actual conditions in the Judea of his time. We may therefore plausibly suppose that Hecataeus’ informant was a Greek-speaking Jew, perhaps a soldier. Certain inaccuracies in the account would not militate against such a supposition. Whoever it was from whom the information came, cannot himself have been especially conversant with his national history. The glorious period of Jewish history was that of the kings, of David and Solomon. For any Jew to have asserted that no king ever reigned over them is scarcely conceivable. But that may be an inference of the Greek and not a statement of the Jew, and that in Egypt there were Jews crassly ignorant of everything but the facts of their own time, we can readily enough imagine.[^[95]]

Was there any other source of information? Obviously no Jew told Hecataeus that his people were descendants of Egyptian outcasts, at least in the way in which they are here described; no Jew qualified the institutions of his people as “inhospitable and inhuman”; no Jew represented his kinsmen as credulous dupes. Plainly these stories are told from the Egyptian point of view. The first almost surely is. It constitutes in outline what has often been called the “Egyptian version of the Exodus.”

As to that version this question at once arises: What are its sources? Is it a malicious distortion of the Biblical story, or has it an independent origin in Egyptian traditions?

The former supposition is the one generally accepted. We have seen that there is little likelihood that a Greek translation of the Pentateuch existed as early as 300 B.C.E. If then the Egyptian version is consciously based upon the Jewish story, that story must have been known to the Egyptians by oral transmission only. Until recently, imagined difficulties in the way of assuming such a transmission seemed weighty objections, but all these difficulties have disappeared in the light of the Assuan and Elephantine papyri. The existence of Jewish communities in Egypt from pre-Persian times is established by them, and particular interest centers upon one of them, which alludes to the Passover celebration and represents the Egyptian Jewries as referring certain questions to the Palestinian community.[^[96]]

It must be clear that if Passover had been celebrated in Egyptian surroundings for two centuries, the Egyptian neighbors of the Jews knew of the feast’s existence and of the occasion it was intended to celebrate. In those two centuries the elements that make this version an Egyptian one may easily have arisen. Indeed, it would have been strange if stories representing the Exodus as anything but the Jewish triumph it is depicted in the Pentateuch had not circulated widely among Egyptians.

The mere celebration of Passover was apt to make permanent a certain hostility between the two nations. When we compare Deut. xxiii. 7, “Thou shalt not abhor an Egyptian,” with Ezra ix. 1, where the customs of the Egyptians are classed as abominations, and where Egyptian, Moabite, and Edomite are added to the list of peoples (Deut. vii. 1) to be shunned and avoided, it is plain that the attitude toward Egyptians had undergone considerable change in the intervening centuries. It requires a long period of antagonism to explain the later Alexandrian anti-Semitism.

At the same time the papyri show other phases of life as well. They offer instances of amicable relations, even of intermarriage, as well as instances of hostility, such as that which resulted in the destruction of the shrine of Yahu at Elephantine. The latter incident is too obscure to permit us to draw inferences from it. But it is clear that it can no more be considered typical than the other examples, which show perfectly free and friendly intercourse.

The story as it appears in Hecataeus, however, does not imply, even in its unflattering aspects, hostility on the part of the Egyptians. It may be remembered that the founders of several Greek nations as well as the Jews were expelled from Egypt on the occasion mentioned. It is easy to see how Egyptians, learning of Greek and Jewish legends that ascribed the origin of those nations to themselves, would accept the ascription, and make it a part of their own stories in a way to flatter the national vanity.

While therefore the supposition that Egyptians based their version on the Jewish story of the Exodus as it became known to them is much the more probable view, the possibility of an independent Egyptian tradition on the subject is not to be dismissed cavalierly.

The Egyptian records that have come down to us do not often mention Jews. Careful study has made it plain that the Pharaoh of the oppression or the Exodus cannot be identified so readily as was formerly done, but they have shown that the popular traditions about the Hyksos had at least so much foundation in fact, that about 1580 B.C.E. Ahmose I did actually drive out the Semitic or half-Semitic conquerors of the country, and these conquerors are quite plausibly identified with the Hyksos. Now during the Hyksos period we hear of a ruler named Jacob-Her, or Jacob-El, and a few centuries after the inscriptions of Mer-ne-ptah show Israel already established in Palestine. If, in the casual selection of inscriptions that has been made by the lapse of thirty-five centuries, these facts appear, it is surely not impossible that in 300 B.C.E. a great many more facts were known. It is not likely that every Egyptian priest could read the hieroglyphics, but some could, and the knowledge of a few could easily become common possession.

When Greeks came to Egypt in the train of Alexander and Ptolemy, they not only brought Jews there, but they found them, as well as the story just discussed, whether two hundred or twelve hundred years old.

When we meet the Egyptian version again, it is in a form unmistakably malevolent. A very few years after Hecataeus, an Egyptian priest named Manetho wrote the history of his people in Greek. His sources were popular traditions much more than the monuments, but they were at least partly documentary. Manetho’s book has been lost, and its “fragments,” as usual, appear in the form of quotations in much later books, where we must estimate the probabilities of wilful and careless error.

The fragments of especial interest to us are contained in Josephus’ apologetic work known as Contra Apionem (§1, 26-27), where unfortunately one cannot always distinguish between the statements of Josephus and those of Manetho.

The essential part of Manetho’s story, as far as we can piece it together, is that the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt was nothing more nor less than the defeat and expulsion of certain rebellious Egyptians. These latter had been isolated from their fellow-men as lepers and criminals, and had treasonably summoned to their aid the Bedouin Hyksos from Jerusalem. The Egyptian outcasts were led by a Heliopolitan priest named Osarsiph, who afterwards changed his name to Moses. After a short domination over Egypt, they were defeated and expelled, and pursued to the frontiers of Syria.

If the very indefinite words of Josephus are to be trusted (Contra Apionem, i. 26), Manetho expressly asserts that this account is based upon what is popularly told of the Jews (τὰ μυθευόμενα καὶ λεγόμενα περὶ τῶν Ἰουδαίων). Whether Manetho really said so or not, it is extremely unlikely that it was the case. The account seems too finished and detailed to have such an origin. It is much more likely that it is a deliberate invention of Manetho himself, following the Jewish story with a certain amount of care. As has been suggested, the name Osarsiph is simply an Egyptian version of Joseph, the name of Osiris (which often appears as Osar- or Osor- in names)[^[97]] being substituted for the assumed theophoric element Jo-, a syllable that would be familiar to all Egyptians in such very common Jewish names as Johanan and Jonathan.

The “Egyptian version” as we found it in Hecataeus is far from malevolent. In Manetho it is plainly inspired by hatred. The Jews are represented as the mongrel offspring of Egyptian outcasts and half-civilized Bedouins. The vice of unsociability is reasserted, coupled with a charge of “atheism,” a term we shall have to deal with later in detail. Moses, or Osarsiph, forbade the Jews “to have any dealings with anyone whatsoever except their confederates” (συνωμοσμένοι). That is, of course, more precise than the words “inhospitable and inhuman manner of life” of Hecataeus, and formed in ancient times a more serious indictment than in our own.

Now Josephus, of course, is roused to considerable heat by the “silly lies” of Manetho, although as testimony to the antiquity of his people the story is grist to his mill. He points out very clearly and correctly that many of the incidents are admissions that the corresponding incidents of the Jewish story are essentially true. These admissions do not prove that Manetho read these matters from the hieroglyphic records, but merely that he knew the Jewish story, and, except for the confusion of Moses and Joseph, that he knew it well.

Nearly all Manetho’s details are suggested in some way by the Biblical story. The leprosy of Osarsiph is probably derived from the story of Moses (Exodus iv. 7); the convicts in the quarries (οἱ ἐν ταῖς λᾳοτομίαις), from the bondage which the Jews acknowledged of themselves (Exodus i. 12-14). Manetho cannot accept Joseph’s rule nor Pharaoh’s discomfiture at the Red Sea, but, as many other ancient and modern writers did, he will not absolutely deny what he wishes to avoid, but prefers to present it in a form less galling to his pride. Osarsiph did rule over Egypt, but his rule was a chastisement of the Egyptians for the impiety of King Amenophis, and was effected only by the aid of foreign mercenaries. Pharaoh did advance to “the river” with a picked army and then withdraw before the enemy, but it was a voluntary withdrawal, impelled by his fear of the offended gods.[^[98]]

It is by no means impossible that all the facts implied may have been learned by Manetho through oral acquaintance with the Jewish story of the Exodus. But if Manetho acquired his information so, we should expect confusion in the sequence of events. We should find anachronisms of various sorts. It is therefore more likely that he had an actual book before him. Tradition of strong intrinsic probability assigns the translation of the Pentateuch into Greek to the reign of Philadelphus. Writing at about 270 B.C.E., Manetho may well have read the Pentateuch, at least cursorily. Indeed it would be easy to suppose that it was the circulation in Greek of stories so offensive to Egyptians that specially moved him to publish his own interpretation of those stories. He was hardly likely to have made so much of them, if they were merely legends, scarcely known except to the Jews themselves and their closest neighbors.

The “Egyptian version” may be said to have been the more successful. The leprosy of Moses, the founder of the nation, was constantly girded at by later writers. Tacitus repeats Manetho faithfully in the matter,[^[99]] and one of the latest pagan writers of whom we have fragments concerning the Jews, Helladius, makes allusion to the same thing.[^[100]] The point does not seem to us of capital importance, but among peoples that regarded bodily defects as obvious signs of divine displeasure in the person afflicted, it was likely to have weight.

It may, however, be well to remember that both versions were in equal circulation. To many the Jewish story seemed the more probable. But it is significant that at the very beginning of the period when the Jews took a larger share in the life of the Mediterranean world we find Jews and Egyptians distinctly in conflict. That conflict was destined to become embittered, but it must not be taken as an epitome of Jewish relations generally with other nations.

CHAPTER VIII
JEWS IN PTOLEMAIC EGYPT

Greek civilization was essentially urban. The city-state, or polis, was its highest governmental achievement. When, therefore, under Alexander and Ptolemy, Egypt was to be transferred wholly within the sphere of Greek culture, it was by means of a polis that this was to be effected.

The same was still more largely true for the other parts of Alexander’s empire. In Asia and Syria the “Successors” were busy founding, wherever convenient, cities diversely named. However, in these regions they were merely continuing, in a somewhat accelerated fashion, a practice begun long before. In Egypt, on the contrary, it was plain that a modification of that policy was necessary. There was, to be sure, an ancient Greek city at one of the western mouths of the Nile, the city of Naucratis. But that had been founded as an emporium, and due care was taken that it should be essentially nothing more, that it should acquire no supporting territory in Egypt. And however important and wealthy Naucratis became, it remained confined to its foreign trade for its subsistence.[^[101]] Besides, it had considerably dwindled in 330 B.C.E., so that its claims could never have been seriously considered by Alexander, in comparison with his desire to found a new city and in comparison with the much superior location of Alexandria.

It is not likely that Alexander himself completed the plans for the organization of the city. That was left to Ptolemy, and it was accomplished with a modification of the Greek system that illustrates both the wariness and the foresight of this most astute of Alexander’s officers.

The essential part of the polis was its organization as a commonwealth, i.e. as a group of citizens, each of whom had a necessary function to perform in the state. From time immemorial the administration of affairs was assigned to a boulē, or senate, the actual executives being little more than committees of the boulē; but at all times an essential element of the constitution was the confirmation, real or constructive, of all acts of the boulē by the dēmos, or mass of citizens. The manner in which the boulē was selected, as well as the extent to which the check exercised by the dēmos was real, determined the measure of democracy each polis obtained. However, even in cities which, like Sparta, were in theory permanent camps, the same view was held of the necessity of these parts and of their respective functions, so that everywhere, in legal contemplation, sovereignty resided in the dēmos.[^[102]]

It must not be supposed that all men who lived within the walls of the city were members of the dēmos. That is a conception of democracy wholly alien to ancient ideas. The participation of the individual in the state was a privilege, acquired in the first instance by birth. Side by side with the citizens was the slave, who was wholly devoid of legal rights, and the metic, or resident foreigner, who had, as a result of a direct compact with the state, acquired the right of residence and personal protection upon the payment of certain specified taxes.

The privilege of citizenship was a complex of rights, to which were attached certain very definite and sharply emphasized obligations. What those rights were depended upon the constitution of the given polis. Where they were fullest, as at Athens, they included voting in the public assembly, the holding of public office, service on the jury, and a claim for certain personal privileges, such as admission to the dramatic performances at the Dionysiac festivals. In other states they were not quite so extensive, but the obligations were everywhere the same, i.e. payment of taxes and military service. The state was in the habit of remitting from time to time certain or all of these taxes and other compulsory services, so that we may say that various grades of citizens and metics generally existed.

Now Naucratis was just such a polis as this. So were the various Apameas, Antiochias, Seleucias, Laodiceas, established in Asia and Syria. It is true that the boulē and dēmos of these cities were the merest shadows; and actually the despotism of the monarch was as undoubted as it had been in Persian times. But the shadows were at least a concession to the Hellenic spirit, and as such were immensely treasured; nor can it be denied that as long as they remained the remembrance of free institutions remained as well. At Pergamon, which the Attalids created, no public act was done except as the deliberate choice of senate and people.[^[103]]

But when Ptolemy constituted Alexandria, he deliberately departed from this plan. As has been said, Naucratis had boulē and dēmos and all the other appurtenances of a well-regulated polis. So had Ptolemais somewhat later; and many years later, when the emperor Hadrian founded an Antinois in memory of his dead minion, he likewise made it a full and complete Greek city. In Alexandria, on the other hand, there is no trace, till late in Roman times, of a boulē; and of a dēmos as little. In the great mass of Greek papyri that have come from Egypt there is nowhere any indication that a senate ever met, or a people ever assembled, to parody the deliberations of the Athenian ecclesia. In other words Alexandria was much less a polis than it was a royal residence, i.e. the site of the king’s palace amidst a more densely gathered group of his subjects.[^[104]]

In externals Alexandria was every inch a city. It had the high walls, which, as Alcaeus tells us, do not constitute a state. It had the tribe and deme, or district division, and it had its various grades of citizens, determined by the duties and imposts to which they were subjected.

Of its tribe and district division we know some details. There were probably five tribes, each of which consisted of twelve demes, or districts, which in turn had twelve phratries, or wards. The tribes were known by the first five letters of the Greek alphabet. In the absence of even formal political rights, this division can have been made simply in the interests of the census and the police. The obligations to pay taxes and perform military service were very real ones, and their proper enforcement necessitated some such organization of the city.[^[105]]

Different classes of citizenship were at once created by the establishment of special taxes and special exemptions. The peculiar Greek fiscal arrangement known as the liturgy, which made the performance of certain services to the state a means of compounding for taxes, was also in vogue. We have records of certain of these classes of citizens, or inhabitants, and it is at least probable that there were other classes of which we know nothing.

First of all, there were the Macedones, or Macedonians. These form a specially privileged group, whose residence was probably by no means confined to Alexandria. Just what their privileges were we do not know, but that they lay chiefly in fiscal exemptions of one sort or another, is almost certain.

Then there were the Alexandreis, or Alexandrians. We know that there were at least two groups—those that were enrolled in a given tribe, or deme, and those not so enrolled. We can only conjecture the purpose of this division, and one conjecture will be mentioned later.

Besides these, there were other men whose legal right to residence was unquestioned. They were variously designated. We find Persians, Jews, and other nationalities, qualified with the phrase τῆς ἐπιγονῆς, which means literally “of the descent,” but the exact force of which is unknown. This classification procured for those so termed certain very much valued exemptions. Native Egyptians also were present, paying a special poll-tax, and no doubt a very large number of metics and transient foreigners. Greek publicists regarded the presence of a large number of metics and foreign merchants as a sign of great prosperity.[^[106]] We may be sure that no burdensome restrictions made the settling of these classes difficult at Alexandria.

Were the Jews in Alexandria citizens? A great many heated controversies have been fought on this subject, some of which would surely not have been entered into if a clearer analysis had been available of what constituted Alexandrian “citizenship.” As we have seen, the question can only be framed thus: Did the Jews of that city appear on the census books as “Alexandreis,” with or without the deme and tribe adjective after them, or were they classified as Jews, and did they form a distinct fiscal class by themselves?

The denial of their citizenship is principally based upon distrust of Josephus, who asserts it. But distrust of Josephus may be carried to an extravagant degree. Modern writers with pronounced bias may, of course, be disregarded, but saner investigators have equally allowed themselves to be guided by disinclination to credit Josephus, and have come to the conclusion that the Jews were not citizens of Alexandria.

There were of course very many Jews in Alexandria who were not legally Alexandrians. Josephus’ assertion did not and could not mean that every Jew in the city was, by the very fact of his residence, an Alexandrian. Nowhere in the ancient world could citizenship be acquired except by birth or by special decree. Jews who emigrated from Palestine to Alexandria, and were permitted to remain there, were metics, and became Alexandrians only if they were specially awarded that designation. But that was just as true for a foreign Greek or a foreign Macedonian, since at Alexandria “Macedonian” was a class of citizenship, not an ethnic term. Those who assisted in the founding of the city were undoubtedly classified either as “Macedones” or “Alexandreis,” and the tradition that Jews were among them is based upon other authority than Josephus. It is not enough, therefore, if one desires to refute Josephus, to show that there were Jews in Egypt who were not “Alexandreis.” Undoubtedly there were thousands of them. But if, in the papyri, we do find Jews among the “Macedones” and others among the “Alexandreis,” the statements of Josephus on the subject are strikingly confirmed, for he says no more than that there were Jews in both these categories.[^[107]]

Of the two classes of Alexandrians, those enrolled in demes and those not so enrolled, it is likely that the Jewish “Alexandreis” belonged to the latter class. The former either paid a special district tax, or, more likely, were charged with the performance of certain district duties, either religious in their nature, such as the burying of the pauper dead, or of police character. When Alexandrians were constituted, not registered in demes, the purpose can only have been to secure exemption from these local duties, and the example quoted would of itself indicate why the Jews may have been so exempted.

It was not, however, merely in Alexandria that the Jews settled, precisely as it was not merely in Greek cities that Greeks were to be found. That part of Egypt which lay outside the definite civic communities as they were founded from time to time, was organized in nomes, in large agricultural districts containing many villages or even cities. In every instance, however, the administrative unit was the nome.

These nomes had themselves a history of immemorial antiquity. Some of them were surely in boundary coincident with the petty nationalities that antedated the first dynasties. The mass of the population in them had practically always been peasant-serfs, and continued to be so. Beside them, in the villages and towns, there lived in Greek times motley groups of men, whose legal status was determined in a number of ways. Some were citizens of Alexandria, Ptolemais, etc., and merely resident in the nome. Others enjoyed certain military and fiscal privileges, which involved the right of residence. But in all circumstances, in the elaborate financial organization of Egypt every resident had certain precise dues to pay, and was marked by a certain designation.

The military and other settlers whom the Greeks found in Egypt, whether they were Persians, Jews, Syrians, or Babylonians, retained their status, i.e. they paid taxes and performed services differing from those of the native Egyptians in part, although no doubt certain taxes were levied upon all. The foreigners whom Ptolemy invited or brought into Egypt must have been settled either in the cities or the nomes, and were given a definite fiscal status. And besides all these various grades, there were metics—a term which may have included emancipated slaves, and of course slaves as well—in huge numbers. There can be little doubt that Jews were to be found in all classes, from the highly privileged nobility of “Macedones” to the slaves.[^[108]]

In most large Greek cities metics of foreign birth or ancestry existed. There were Phoenicians and Egyptians in Athens in very early times. But they were all, together with non-Athenian Greeks, gathered into the general group of metics, and no one group ever became numerically so preponderant that a special class had to be legally constituted of them. In Egypt, however, the general term metic was rarely used. For the nome organization of the country it seemed scarcely applicable. Instead, those foreigners who had acquired legal residence and other rights were known by their national name. So there was a group of Egyptian residents known as Ἰουδαῖοι, as “Jews,” which was in their case a legal designation, whereas, when the “Macedones,” “Alexandreis,” etc., of the same nationality were referred to as Ἰουδαῖοι, the term was merely descriptive.

We do not know whether the Ἰουδαîοι that had no other classification were more numerous or less numerous than those who had. But it was shortly found advisable to organize the Jewish metics to the extent of superadding upon their own cult-organizations certain royal officers responsible to the king. Of these the chief was the ethnarch, and it is evident that the ethnarch would assume an importance in proportion to the number under his jurisdiction. The right to have an ethnarch seems to have been a prized privilege and was not confined to the Jews. What the relation of the later alabarch[^[109]] was to the ethnarch is not clear. The two terms may perhaps designate the same office.

But a complete understanding of the condition of the Jews in Egypt and Alexandria necessitates some account of the synagogue organization.

There is no reason to question the Jewish tradition that the synagogue was Exilic or pre-Exilic in origin. In fact, it is not easily conceivable that it could have been otherwise. Worship was a social act in the ancient world, and properly to be performed in concert. It was inevitable therefore that just as soon as the Jews were removed from those places where the ancestral and traditional ritual was performed without any conscious organization for that purpose, they would combine themselves in groups in order to satisfy the strongly marked religious emotion that characterized them.

Corporate organization, based upon the performance in common of some religious act, characterized the whole ancient world. The state was itself a large corporation of this kind, and the local divisions rapidly assumed, or always possessed, the same form. Obviously members of the same nationality residing in a foreign city would be specially prone to organize themselves into such corporations, and as a rule make the religious bond, which seems to have been a formal requisite, the common worship of one of their own gods. The merchants of Citium at Athens formed a guild for the worship of the Cyprian Aphrodite. It was in this way that Egyptian merchants and artisans made Isis known to the Roman world.[^[110]]

It has been said that the state itself was such a corporation, of which the formal basis was the common performance of a certain ritual act. When new states were founded or new men admitted into old states, a great deal was made of the act. It follows therefore that when Jews were admitted into the newly founded civic communities of Asia, as we know they were, some relation would have to be entered upon between themselves and the religious basis of the state. In most cases, special exemption from participation in these religious acts seems to have been sought and obtained.

In Egypt the conflict between the exclusive worship of Jehovah and the less intolerant worship of the Nile-gods had been in existence for centuries before the Greeks. The pre-Greek Jewish immigrants were perhaps not of the sort that sought to accentuate the conflict, though friction was unavoidable. At the Greek conquest, it must be remembered, no great disposition was shown by the first Ptolemies to accept the native institutions or the native gods. The new god of Alexandria, the mighty Sarapis, was not, as has been generally supposed, a composite of Osiris and Apis, but an out and out Greek god, imported from his obscure shrine in direct opposition to the indigenous gods.[^[111]] Membership in the civic communities, or residence in the country districts, can have involved no obligation to share the ritual localized there. Every group of foreigners might freely disregard it, and maintain unimpaired their own ancestral forms.

We accordingly find Jewish synagogues—in the sense of cult-organizations, each having its own meeting-house, schola, or proseucha, and organized with magistrates and council, like miniature states—not only in Alexandria but in insignificant little towns of Upper and Lower Egypt.[^[112]] Nor was the legal basis of such organization wanting, i.e. the corporate personality, since we find these synagogues enjoying the rights of property and subject to the imposts levied upon it.[^[113]] The extent of each synagogue was limited by the physical capacity of the schola. There must have been in Alexandria very many of them.

Who were members of them? The various classes of Jews in the city and country were divided by social and legal lines. In the synagogue social distinctions cannot have disappeared, but there can be no doubt that in many, if not in all, there would be found Jews representing every class of the community. In other parts of the Greek world it was no strange thing to see citizens, metics, foreigners, slaves, claiming membership in the same cult-organization, and jointly worshiping a native or foreign god. The synagogue likewise contained among its members nobles and slaves. The tendency for the wealthier classes to become completely Hellenized, and so completely to abandon the synagogue, did not show itself prominently for some time.

We may readily suppose that the native Egyptians regarded all the foreign invaders with scarcely discriminating hatred. In most cases, when Greeks and Jews dwelt in the nomes, they were both exempt from local dues, and both paid the same special tax. What the attitude of the Egyptians was to their Greek and Macedonian masters, we have no need to conjecture.[^[114]] As under Persian rule, they rose in bloody riots; and after a century of Greek domination, they were so far successful that a complete change in the policy of the Ptolemies was effected. The house had very rapidly degenerated—a process perhaps hastened by the Egyptian custom of brother and sister marriage, which they adopted. From the weaker kings of the close of the third century B.C.E., the Egyptian priests received a complete surrender. Continuity with the Pharaohs was consciously sought. The ancient titles in a modified form were adopted in Greek as well as Egyptian for the rulers. The hieroglyphics represented Ptolemy as the living god, sprung from Ra, just as they had done for Amen-hem-et thousands of years before.[^[115]]

But a Hellenizing process had gone on as well as an Egyptizing process. The irresistible attractions of Greek culture had converted even the fiercest nationalists into Greeks outwardly, and in the horde of Greek names that the papyri exhibit we have sometimes far to seek, if we wish to discover unmistakably Greek stock. Intermarriage and concubinage must have given Egypt a large mixed-blood population, which no doubt called itself Greek. Evidences of Greek aloofness on the subject of marriage have been sought in the denial of connubium by the city of Ptolemais to foreigners.[^[116]] But that applied to foreign Greeks as well, and was a common regulation in most Greek cities.

The Hellenizing process affected the Jews even more. In Alexandria the Jewish community had begun to show signs of the most active intellectual growth, and the results of that growth, naturally enough, wore a Greek dress. But that process had been active in Palestine as well, where the consequences were somewhat more important. It is there that we shall turn for a study of the first conflicts between Judaism and Hellenism.

CHAPTER IX
THE STRUGGLE AGAINST GREEK CULTURE IN PALESTINE

While Palestine was a Greco-Egyptian province, the influences at work over the whole Levant had been as effectually operative there.

In the matter of government no change had been made that was at all noticeable. The internal autonomy of Persian times had been maintained; the claims of the tax-collector and recruiting sergeant were dealt with by the whole community, not by the individual.

Socially and economically, relative peace had permitted considerable progress. At the close of this period the work of Ben Sira is the best of all possible evidence, both of the literary productivity out of which the book arose and of the society which it implies. We are given glimpses of settled and comfortable life, which could scarcely have been attained unless the preceding century had been one of constantly increasing well-being. It is a well-equipped table at which Ben Sira bids us sit. The graces and little luxuries of life are present, and equally the vices that went with these luxuries.[^[117]]

Nor had the character of the whole spiritual culture essentially changed. The language of daily intercourse was Aramaic, the lingua franca of the whole region. But the literary language was still Hebrew. It must have been constantly spoken among educated men, for the changes it continued to exhibit are not such as would occur if it had been quite divorced from life. And the literary activity, which took its forms from the established and already canonical literature, took its substance from the life about it. That this life had been impregnated with Greek elements, there can of course be no manner of doubt.

Not only the old Philistian and Phoenician cities of the coast had acquired a Greek varnish, but Judea was being surrounded by a closer and closer network of new Greek foundations. Ptolemais, Anthedon, Apollonia, Arethusa, and the cities of the Decapolis across the Jordan, brought the external forms of Greek culture so near that even the peasant who went no great distance from his furrow must have encountered them.

What made up the fascination of Greece for the nations she dominated? In the first place it must be insisted upon that there was a national resistance, whether or not it took the form of insurrection. Indeed, insurrection was a thing quite apart from resistance to Hellenism. As we have seen in the case of Egypt, national resistance to the political domination of Greeks did not by any means imply national resistance to the spread of Greek culture. The latter resistance generally took the form of a dull and obstinate clinging to ancestral ritual and language. At Antioch in the fourth century C.E., some men and women still spoke Aramaic, and knew no Greek.[^[118]] It is only within the rather narrow limits set by wealth and education that the Hellenization was really effective. Unfortunately most of our available evidence is concerned with this class.

Among these men, who were naturally open to cultural impressions, the attraction of Hellenism was undoubted, and had been growing slowly for years before Alexander, and it had meant for them all the charm of an intellectual discovery. The mere fact that what the Greeks had was new and different could have been of no real influence. There must have been an actual and evident superiority in Greek life or culture to have drawn to itself so quickly the desires and longings of alien peoples.

In one field that superiority was evident, in the field of art. Whatever may have been the origins of Greek art, from the seventh century on no one seriously questioned that Greek workmen could produce, in any material, more beautiful objects than any other people. Artistic appreciation is no doubt a plant of slow growth, but the pleasure in gorgeous coloring, in lifelike modeling, in fine balances of light and shade, in grouping of masses, is derived immediately from the visual sensation. No peasant of Asia could fail to be impressed by his first glimpse of such a city as the Ephesus and Miletus of even the sixth or fifth century. After the extraordinary artistic progress of the fifth century had vastly increased the beauty of Greek cities, every foreigner who visited them must have found greater and greater delight, as his knowledge grew broader and deeper.

In other branches of art, in music, poetry, dancing, the wealthier Asiatic had a training of his own. But it is likely that even a slight acquaintance with Greek taught him to depreciate the achievements of his own people. Doubtless, in poetic capacity and imagination, Phrygian, Lydian, or Lycian was the equal of Greek. Yet we have no choice but to believe that in sheer sensuous beauty of sound, which made a direct appeal to any partly cultivated ear, no one of the languages could compare with Greek. Nor is it likely that any written literature existed in Asia that could be ranked with Greek.

With the appeal to eye and ear there went an appeal to the intellect. Greek mental capacity was not demonstrably greater than that of the Asiatic peoples to whom the Greeks were perhaps akin, but both imagination and reflection had framed their results in systematic form. The rich narrative material found in every race was available in Greek in dramatic and finished pieces. The philosophic meditation in which others had long anticipated the Greeks was among the latter set forth in clearer and simpler phrasing.

The allurement of all these things was intensified by a franker and fuller exploitation of all physical instincts, and the absence of many tabus and forms of asceticism that existed among non-Greek peoples. A vastly increased freedom over one’s body seemed a characteristic of Greek life, and a vastly greater freedom of political action was characteristic of the Greek polis.

It is small wonder therefore that the upper classes of Asia and Syria had for two or three centuries before the conquest succumbed to a culture that possessed so visible a sorcery. Then, with the conquest, came a new factor. To be a Greek was to be a Herrenmensch, a member of the ruling caste, a blood-kinsman of the monarch. Syrians, Asiatics, and Egyptians found themselves under the direct sway of a Greek dynasty, supported by a Greek court and army. All the tendencies that had made Greek cultural elements attractive for certain classes were intensified by the eager desire of the Greeks to identify themselves with the dominant race, and this identification seemed by no means impossible of achievement.

What had to be given up? As far as language was concerned, a smattering of Greek was the common possession of many men. Every trading-post had for generations swarmed with Greek merchants. Greek mercenaries were to be found in most armies. It was no especially difficult matter for those classes which knew a little Greek to increase their familiarity with it, to multiply the occasions for its use, to sink more and more the soon despised vernacular. The latter, we must repeat, was not and could not be suppressed, but it became the language of peasants. In the cities men spoke Greek.

But there were other things—the ancestral god and the ancestral ritual. These were not so readily discarded. However, the attitude of the Greeks in this matter made it unnecessary to do so. The gods of Greece were often transplanted, but rarely more than the name. In Syria and Asia particularly it was only in wholly new foundations that Greek gods and Greek forms were really established. Generally the sense of local divine jurisdiction was keenly felt. Greeks had a wholesome awe of the deity long in possession of a certain section, and in many cases erected shrines to him, invoking him by the name of some roughly corresponding Hellenic god. Frequently the old name was retained as an epithet. Thus Greek and Syrian might approach the ancient lord of the soil in the ancient manner and so perpetuate a bond which it was ἀσέβεια, “impiety,” to break.

Since the essentials were maintained, the only step necessary to turn a Syrian into a Greek was to purchase a himation, change his name of Matanbal to Apollodorus, and the transformation was complete. He might be known for several years as “ὁ καὶ Matanbal”—“alias Matanbal”; he might suffer a little from the occasional snobbishness of real Greeks, but, especially if he was wealthy, such matters would be of short duration. The next generation would probably escape them altogether, and their children, the young Nicanors, Alexanders, Demetriuses, would talk glibly of the exploits of their ancestors at Marathon or under the walls of Troy.

But there was also no inconsiderable group that combined adoption of the new with loyalty or attempted loyalty to the old. Many Syrians, Egyptians, Phoenicians, and others, conscious of a history not without glory, desired to acquire the undeniably attractive Hellenic culture, while maintaining their racial ties, of which they felt no real reason to be ashamed. That was particularly true of the Seleucid dominions where Alexander’s assimilative policy was consistently pursued. Persian or Lydian or Phoenician descent was a thing many men boasted of. It was with a sense of adding something to the culture of the world that natives with Greek training prepared to transmit in Greek forms the history of their people to Greeks and to interpret their institutions to them. And they found a ready enough audience. On many points, especially in religion and philosophy, the Greeks were willing enough to concede a more profound acquaintance to barbarians than they themselves possessed; and often the weariness of civilization made Greeks search among fresher peoples for a sound social life, since that life was tainted, in Greek communities, by many grave diseases.

But people of this class found themselves in a delicate situation, an unstable equilibrium constantly disturbed. It was hard to remain a Grecized Syrian. Generally the temptation to suppress the Syrian was well-nigh irresistible. Now and then, the rise of national political movements would claim some of the younger men, so that the fall was on the native side. In general, the older conservative attitude expressed itself naturally in avoidance of Greeks as far as possible, and precisely in proportion to the value set upon the national and indigenous culture.