CHAPTER VI

THE FIRST CONTACT BETWEEN GREEK AND JEW

Footnote 70:

Σύριος means scarcely more than “Oriental” in Aeschylus (Persae, 81, Σύριον ἅρμα; and Ag. 1312, Σύριον ἀγλάϊσμα).

Footnote 71:

Except Hittite and Amorite, these names have no non-Biblical occurrence.

Footnote 72:

Caphthor is rendered Cappadocia in the LXX (Amos ix. 7), for no better reason, it may be, than the similarity between the first syllables. The Keftiu ships of the Egyptian monuments are scarcely other than Mycenean, and if they came from Crete, Minoan (Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, ii. 492). That the Philistines are of Cretan origin is, in the absence of monumental sources, a pure theory. It fits in well, however, with what we do know of them.

Footnote 73:

The Jews were commanded by Ezra to put away their “strange wives” (Ezra x. 10) for the specific reason that the latter incited them to idolatry. Instances of intermarriage occur in the papyri from Elephantine (see ch. IV., n. 3).

Footnote 74:

Datis and Artaphernes commanded the Persian troops defeated at Marathon, 490 B.C.E. Mardonius was defeated at Plataea in 479.

Footnote 75:

Joel iii. 6. There is nothing in the extant Book of Joel inconsistent with a pre-Exilic date. Such slave raids as the Phoenicians are here accused of making, the Greeks made freely in Homeric times, and Greek merchants were already in every mart. In the famous picture of a golden age in Isaiah, Jewish captives are to be assembled “from Assyria, Egypt—and from the islands of the sea” (Isaiah xi. 11), a passage indubitably pre-Exilic. The “islands of the sea,” however, are obviously Greek.

Footnote 76:

In the lexicon of Stephen of Byzantium (s. v.) we read Σύροι κοινὸν ὄ νομα πολλῶν ἐθνῶν. Strabo, writing in the time of Augustus, includes most of the nations of Asia Minor, such as the Cappadocians, etc., under that term (xvi. 2).

Footnote 77:

The famous Harpy-tomb from Xanthus in Lycia, now in the British Museum, dates from the sixth century. It is, however, so highly developed a work that it presupposes a long history of mutual artistic influence between Greece, Ionia, and Lycia.

Footnote 78:

One of the magnificent sarcophagi found in 1887 at Sidon by Hamdi Bey. They are all published in sumptuous form by Hamdi Bey and Reinach, Une nécropole royale á Sidon, Paris, 1892. An excellent and convenient description may be found in Hans Wachtler, Die Blütezeit der griechischen Kunst im Spiegel der Reliefsarcophage, Teubner, 1910 (Aus Natur u. Geisteswelt, no. 272).

Footnote 79:

Strato, king of Sidon in 360 B.C.E. Athen. xii. 531. Cf. Gerostratos of Arados at about the same time.

Footnote 80:

Herodotus, ii. 104 (cf. ii. 37).

Footnote 81:

Aristotle states the fact in the Meteorologica, II. iii. 39, but does not mention the Jews.

Footnote 82:

Textes, p. 8. n. 3.

Footnote 83:

In the royal tombs at Sidon excavated by Hamdi Bey (see above, n. 9.), one of the monuments bears a long Phoenician inscription of a king of Sidon. It begins: “I, Tabnit, priest of Astarte and king of Sidonians, son of Eshmunazar, priest of Astarte, and king of the Sidonians.”

Footnote 84:

Plato, Euthyphro, 3 C., and _passim_.

Footnote 85:

Aristotle, Rhetoric, III. vii. 6.

Footnote 86:

Reinach, Textes, pp. 10-12. Müller, Frag. hist. graec. ii. 323, quoted in Josephus, In Ap. i. 22.

Footnote 87:

The untutored philosophers of Voltaire’s stories were quite in the mode of the eighteenth century, which had discovered the “noble savage,” and were quite convinced that civilization was a retrogression from a state of rude and primitive virtue. It was, further, a convenient cloak behind which one might criticise an autocratic régime. Hence the flood of “Turkish,” “Chinese,” “Japanese,” etc. “Letters,” of which Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes are the most famous. Modern instances are “The Traveller from Altruria” of Mr. Howells, and Mr. Dickinson’s “Letters of a Chinese Official.”

Footnote 88:

Cited by Diogenes Laertius, i. 9 (Müller, Frag. hist. graec. ii. 328).

Footnote 89:

Reinach, Textes, p. 13; Müller, Frag. ii. 437; Clemens Alex, i. 15. Megasthenes had previously resided at the court of Sibyrtius, satrap of Arachosia (southern Afghanistan). Arrian, Anab. V. vi. 1.

Footnote 90:

Clemens Alex. Str. v. (Sylberg), pp. 607 seq. Justin Coh. ad Graecos, 25.

Footnote 91:

Cf. Ecclesiasticus l. 26; Zech. ix. 2.

Footnote 92:

At Elephantine we learn from the papyri recently from there (Pap. 1, Sachau) that the Jews had a shrine consecrated to יהו and that in 410 B.C.E. it was destroyed by the priests of a rival Egyptian temple.

Footnote 93:

Reinach, Textes, p. 39. Müller, Frag. iii. 35.