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to quote three passages from this translation, to show how, by a refinement of criticism, they often found more meaning in their Scriptures than ever entered the minds of the writers. Thus when the Psalmist, speaking of the power of Jehovah, says, with a truly Eastern figure, He maketh the winds

4.

Ch. xi. 2.

his messengers, and the lightning his servants; these Psalm, civ. translators change the sentence into a philosophical description of the spiritual nature of angelic beings, and say, He maketh his angels into spirits, and his servants into a flame of fire. Again, when Isaiah describes the Spirit of the Lord, as a spirit of wisdom and understanding, a spirit of counsel and might, a spirit of knowledge and godly fear, the Greek Jews considered these six spirits as angelic beings, and added a spirit of piety, to complete the mystic number of seven, which with the Almighty afterwards made the Ogdoad of the Gnostics. Again, when the Hebrew text, in opposition to the polytheism with which the Jews were surrounded, says, Jehovah is our God, Jehovah alone, the translators turn it to contradict the Egyptian doctrine of a plurality of persons in the unity of the Godhead, by which the priests now said that their numerous divinities only made one God; and in the Alexandrian Greek this text, says, The Lord our God is one Lord.

Deuteron.

ch. vi. 4.

(60) By this translation the Bible became known for the first time to the Greek philosophers. We do not indeed hear that they immediately read it or noticed it, we do not find it quoted till after the spread of Christianity; but it had a silent effect on their opinions, which we trace in the new school of Platonists soon afterwards rising in Alexandria. From a few words in the poems of Callimachus, he indeed would seem to have read it as soon as it was published. More just views of the Creator, and of man's duties, were thence gained by many philosophers; and we must class among the great steps in the history of civilization, indeed, as a forerunner of Christianity, this spread of Jewish opinions among the Pagans. The story of the seventy translators may not have been true; but this number of elders proves the importance of the Jews who had settled in MaimoniEgypt. Hitherto Jerusalem had been the only des, De Syn. city in which the Jews held a Great Sanhedrim,

edr. 1

or council of seventy, while in other cities, whether in Judæa

or in the Dispersion, there were smaller Sanhedrims of twentyfive elders only. Thus in their Sanhedrim, in their Scriptures, and fifty years afterwards in their temple, the Jews of Egypt claimed an equal rank with their brethren of Judæa. But the use of a translation of the Law and the Prophets was far from pleasing to the Jews of Judæa; it Scaliger, Emendatio widened the breach between the Hebrews and the Temporum, Hellenists. The former declared that its publication was marked by a supernatural darkness, which overspread the whole earth for three days; and among the twenty-five fast days in the Jewish calendar, the eighth day of Thebeth was kept by one half of the nation as a day of mourning for the other half's crime of using a Greek translation of the Bible.

cap. vii.

(61) When Aratus of Sicyon first laid a plot to free his country from its tyrant, who reigned by the help of the king of Macedonia, he sent to Philadelphus to beg for money. He naturally looked to the king of Egypt for help when

Aratus.

entering upon a struggle against their er common Plutarch. rival; but the king seems to have theaught the plans of this young man too wild to be coun ctenanced. Aratus, however, soon raised Sicyon to a level with, 1 the first states of Greece, and made himself leader of thelo Achaian league, under which band and name the Greeks E were then struggling for freedom against Macedonia; and when, by his courage and success, he had shown himself worthdhy of the proud name which was afterwards given him, of tloihe Last of the Greeks, Philadelphus, like other patrons, gavgaie him the help which he less needed. Aratus, as we have seen, bought his friendship with pictures, the gifts of all otherolies the most welcome; and when he went to Egypt, Philading lphus gave him one hundred and fifty talents, or nine thouse and pounds, and joined the Achaian league, on the agreemplement that in carrying on the war by sea and land they shound ild obey the orders from Alexandria.

ame

(62) The friendship of Philadelphus, indeed, n fr was courted Inscript. by all the neighbouring states; the Avelittle island Letronne, of Delos set up its statue to him; a

Recherches.
Pausanias,

nd the cities of Greece vied with one another in, to doing him lib. 1. 6, 17. honour. The Athenians named one of ce th the tribes of their city, and also one of their public lecture-fill becoms, by his

name; and two hundred years afterwards, when Cicero and his friend Atticus were learning wisdom and eloquence from the lips of Antiochus in Athens, it was De fin. V. 1. in the Gymnasium of Ptolemy.

Cicero,

Scholiast in

(63) Philadelphus, when young, had married Arsinoë, the daughter of Lysimachus of Thrace, by whom he had three children, Ptolemy, who succeeded him, Theocrito, Lysimachus, and Berenice; but, having found that xvii. 128. his wife was intriguing with Amyntas, and with his physician Chrysippus of Rhodes, he put these two to death, and banished the Queen Arsinoë to Coptos in the Thebaid.

(64) He then took Arsinoë, his own sister, as the partner of his throne. She had married first the old Lysimachus, king of Thrace, and then Ceraunus, her half-brother, when he was king of Macedonia. As they were not children of the same mother, this second marriage was neither illegal nor improper in Macedonia; but her third marriage with Philadelphus could only be justified by the laws of Egypt, their adopted country. They were both past the middle age, and whether Philadelphus looked upon her as his wife or not, at any rate they had no children. Her own children by Lysimachus had been put to death by Ceraunus, and she readily adopted those of her brother with all the kindness of a mother. She was a woman of an enlarged mind; her husband Athenæus, and her step-children alike valued her; and Eratosthenes showed his opinion of her learning and strong sense by giving the name of Arsinoë to one of his works, which perhaps a modern writer would have named Tabletalk. This seeming marriage, however, between Lib. xiv. 4. brother and sister did not escape blame with the Greeks of Alexandria. The poet Sotades, whose verses were as licentious as his life, wrote some coarse lines against the queen, for which he was forced to fly from Egypt, and being overtaken at sea he was wrapped up in lead and thrown overboard.

lib. vii. 1.

(65) In the Egyptian inscriptions Ptolemy and Arsinoë are always called the brother gods; on the coins they are called Adelphi, the brothers; and afterwards the king took the name of Philadelphus, or sister-loving, by which he is now usually known. In the first half of his reign Philadelphus dated his coins from the year that his father came to the throne; and it was not till the nineteenth year of his

In

reign, soon after the death of his mother, that he made an era of his own, and dated his coins by the year of his own reign. The wealth of the country is well shown by the great size of those most in use, which were, in gold, the tetra-stater, or piece of eight drachms, and in silver, the tetra-drachma, or piece of four drachms, while Greece had hardly seen a piece of gold larger than the single stater. Exodus, Alexandrian accounts also the unit of money was ap. LXX. the silver didrachm, and thus double that in use among the merchants of Greece. Among the coins is one with the heads of Soter and Philadelphus on the one side, and the head of Berenice, the wife of the one and mother of the other, on the other side (see Fig. 231). This we may suppose to have been

XXX. 13.

Horapollo,

i. 11.

Visconti, Icon. Grec.

FAZIAEDA

Fig. 231.

struck during the first two years of his reign, in the lifetime of his father. Another bears on one side the heads of Ptolemy Soter and Berenice, with the title of "the gods," and on the other side the heads of Philadelphus and his wife Arsinoë, with the title of "the brothers" (see Fig. 232).

ÄÄEAPRN

Fig. 232.

This was struck after the death of his parents. A third was struck by the king, after his second marriage, in honour of his queen and sister. On the one side is the head of the queen, and on the other is the name of "Arsinoë the

brother-loving," with the cornucopia, or horn of Amalthea, an emblem borrowed by the queens of Egypt from Diod. Sic the goddess Amalthea, the wife of the Libyan Ammon lib. ill. 67, (see Fig. 233). This also was struck after his second marriage.

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14.

(66) On the death of Arsinoë, Philadelphus built a tomb for her in Alexandria, called the Arsinoëum, and Pliny, set up in front of it an obelisk eighty cubits high, lib. xxxvi. which had been made by King Nectanebo, but had been left plain, without carving. Satyrus, the architect, had the charge of moving it. He dug a canal to it as it lay upon the ground, and moved two heavily laden barges under it. The burdens were then taken out of the barges, and as they floated higher they raised the obelisk off the ground. He then found it a task as great or greater to set it up in its place; and this Greek engineer must surely have looked back with wonder on the labour and knowledge of mechanics which must have been used in setting up the obelisks, colcssal statues, and pyramids, which he saw scattered over the country. This obelisk now ornaments the cathedral of the Popes on the Vatican hill at Rome.

Lib. xxxvii.

(67) Satyrus, or Satyrius, wrote a treatise on precious stones, and he also carved on them with great skill; but his works are known only in the following lines, which were written by Diodorus on his portrait of Arsinoë cut in crystal:

VOL. I.

E'en Zeuxis had been proud to trace
The lines within this pebble seen;
Satyrius here hath carved the face

Of fair Arsinoë, Egypt's queen;
But such her beauty, sweetness, grace,
The copy falls far short, I ween.

Anthologia
Græca,
iv. 18.

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