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grasped alike at the protection of this new Imperial power granted alternately to each. In a higher point of view, His place the romance of the story is not unworthy of the importance in religious history. of this first meeting of the Greek and the Hebrew on the stage of history. Henceforth, Alexander the Great became the symbol of their union. His name came into common Jewish use as a translation of Solomon. The philosophy of Aristotle was believed to have sprung from Alexander's gift of the works of Solomon. The friend of Jaddua becomes a Jewish proselyte. The son of Ammon, with the twisted horns appearing beneath his clustering locks, was transformed in the Mussulman legends into the Saintly Possessor 2 of the Two Horns and reckoned among the Apostles of God. These legends or fancies were not without their corresponding realities. The Orientals were not so far wrong when they treated Alexander not only as a conqueror but a prophet. That capacious mind, which, first of the Greeks, and with a wider grasp than even his mighty master Aristotle, conceived the idea of the universal Fatherhood of God, and the universal communion of all good men, was • not

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'far' from the realm of those with whom the Jew and Mussulman have placed him. God,' he said,3 is the common Father of all men, especially of the best men.' Nor were these mere words. They bore fruit in two immense consequences. One was the union of the European and Asiatic races under one Empire, leading to the spread of the Greek language as the common vehicle of communication in the Eastern, ultimately of the whole civilised, world; of Greek ideas, partly for evil and partly for good,

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Founda

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into the very recesses of the Semitic mind. Of this we shall trace the course as we proceed. The other fact was the foundation of Alexandria. It became at once the capital of the East, the centre of the three continents of the ancient earth, and the point in which Greek philosophy and Hebrew religion were to meet in an indissoluble union.

In the little fishing-town of Rhacotis, the discerning eye of Alexander, on his rapid journey to the Oasis of Ammon, saw the possibility of creating that which hitherto the Eastern shores of the Mediterranean had entirely lackeda magnificent harbour. The low level reef of the isle of Pharos 2 furnished the opportunity-when connected with the mainland by a mole-of such a shelter for ships as neither Tyre nor Sidon nor Joppa had ever been able to afford.

The first Ptolemy did well to name the city not after himself, but after Alexander. Not Constantine was more identified with the city on the shores of the Bosphorus than was Alexander with that at the mouth of the Nile. His friend Hephæstion became its guardian hero. The military cloak of Alexander supplied its outline. It was his own plan for Babylon resuscitated; even the rectangular streets of the Asiatic capital were reproduced. In the later Jewish phraseology it even bore the name of Babylon.3 No funeral was ever seen more splendid than that which conveyed the remains of the dead King from Chaldæa in the golden car drawn by sixty-four mules, each with its golden cover and golden bells, across desert and mountain, through the hills and vales of Palestine, till they were deposited in the tomb which gave to the whole quarter of Alexandria where it stood the name of the Body.' That tomb has gradually dwindled away to a wretched Mussulman chapel, kept by an aged crone, who

4

1 Sharpe's Egypt, i. 220, 226, 241. 2 Here, again, as at Tyre and Jerusalem, he was guided by a dream. Homer, he said, had appeared to him,

repeating the lines which describe the island of Pharos (Plutarch, Alex. 26). Surenhusius' Mishna, v. 240. Diod. Sic., xviii. 21, 27.

watches over a humble shrine, called, 'The Grave of Iskander of the Two Horns, founder of Alexandria.' But the whole 'habitable earth was long filled,' according to the emphatic saying of Demades, with the odour of that interment.' 'The 'horn was broken,' as the book of Daniel expressed it, and the 'four horns' of the four successors came in its place; and for the long wearisome years through which History passes with repugnance, and which form perhaps the most lifeless and unprofitable page in the whole of the Sacred Volume, Asia, Europe, and Africa resounded with their wrangles.

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In this world's debate Palestine was the principal stage across which the kings of the South,' the Alexandrian Ptolemies, and the kings of the North,' the Seleucida from Antioch, passed to and fro with their court intrigues and incessant armies, their Indian elephants, their Grecian cavalry, their Oriental pomp. It was, for the larger part of the century-and-half that succeeded Alexander's death, a province of the Græco-Egyptian Kingdom.

cities in

Palestine.

It was now that new constellations of towns, some of Greek which acquired an undying fame in Jewish and Christian history, sprang up, bearing in their names the mark of their Grecian origin.3 Judea itself still remained entirely Semitic. But in a fringe all round that sacred centre the Ptolemies or the Seleucidæ, but chiefly the Ptolemies, left their footprints, if not to this day, at least for centuries.

On the sea-coast Gaza sprang from its ashes, now no more a Philistine, but a Grecian city. Close by we trace, in Anthedon and Arethusa, a Hellenic City of Flowers with the reminiscence of the famous Dorian fountain. The seaport of Joppa became to the Alexandrian sailors the scene of the adventure of Perseus and Andromeda. On another rocky headland rose the Tower of Strato, some Grecian magnate now unknown.

Chief of all, the old Canaanitish fortress of

1 Grote's Greece, xii. 346. 2 Dan. xi. 1-29. Reland, Palestina, p. 806.

Grecian travellers.

Accho was transformed by Ptolemy Philadelphus or his father into Ptolemais,' a title which for centuries overlaid the original name, once more to reappear in modern times as Acre. Beyond the Jordan a like metamorphosis was effected in the ancient capital of Ammon, when Rabbah, after the same Prince, was called Philadelphia. In its neighbourhood sprang up the new town of Gerasa, so-called, according to tradition, from the aged men (gerontes) whom Alexander left there as unable to keep up with his rapid march. Further north were two towns, each with its Macedonian name2-one Dium, so called from the Thracian city, where, according to the legend, Alexander had seen in his dream the figure of Jaddua; the other Pella,3 from the likeness of its abundant springs to the well-watered capital of Macedonia. Round the southern extremity of the Lake of Gennesareth the Canaanite Bethshan, from the reminiscence of its Scythian conquerors, became Scythopolis, with a new legend ascribing its foundation to Bacchus; and Sus easily changed itself into the corresponding Greek name of Hippos. High up beyond Dan, the romantic cave which overhangs the chief source of the Jordan became the Sanctuary of Pan, and the town which clustered at its foot acquired, and has never lost (except for the period of the Roman occupation), the name of Paneas.

Through these Hellenic settlements it is not surprising that ever and anon some story reached the outer world from the Jewish settlement which they enclosed. At one time it was Hecatæus of Abdera, the indefatigable traveller who in his vast researches had included the British Islands and the Egyptian Temples. He travelled with the first Ptolemy into Palestine, and saw with admiration the sanc

Relard, 918. 2 Ibid. 458.

Ibid. 924.

Pella in Moab.

There was another
Ibid. 101.

• Clermont Ganneau, Revue Archiologique, July 1875.

5 Diod. i. 46; ii. 47.

tuary at Jerusalem; and there heard how the Jews in
Alexander's army refused to join in rebuilding the Temple of
Bel at Babylon; he long remembered the Jewish bowman,
Mosōllam, most famous of all the archers in his day, who
acted as the guide of Hecatæus' party' by the shores of the
Red Sea, and showed at once his professional skill, his
national courage, and his religious superiority to the super-
stition of all around him, by shooting the bird from which the
soothsayers were drawing their auguries. At another time
it was Agatharchides who was struck with a mixture of awe
and contempt at the rigid observance of the Sabbath which
led them to leave their city unguarded to be taken when
on that same expedition Ptolemy invaded Judæa and captured
Jerusalem. Most memorable of all, 'the great master of all
'the peculiarities of nature and of men, and the eager inves-
'tigator of all the varieties then pouring out of Asia, the
'mighty Aristotle himself, met with a Jew who had de-
'scended from his mountain fastnesses to the Hellenised
'sea-board of his country, and thus in his travels encountered
'and conversed with Aristotle on the philosophy of Greece,
'and himself replied to the great master's enquiries on the
'wonders of his own people.' Questions and answers are alike
unrecorded. But no 'imaginary dialogue' can be conceived
more instructive than this actual conversation of which the
bare fact alone remains in the fragment of Clearchus, to
whom it was repeated by Aristotle himself.

Within that inner circle of mountain fastnesses, for the The Chronicles. long period from Alexander the Great to Antiochus Epiphanes, there are but few events which throw any light on the religious history of this now secluded people. We discern the fact, slightly, yet certainly indicated, that the last book of the Jewish annals which has come down to us in the Hebrew tongue was now finally concluded in its present form. The 1 Jos. c. Ap. i. 22. 2 Jos. c. Ap. i. 22. • Ewald, v. 247,

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