It should have caused the disappearance of errors noted for a long time. The most remarkable is on page 42, where he gave under the name of Porphyry an extract that belongs to Philo. It says there: "Cronus, therefore, whom the Phoenicians call Israel." One must read *Il* with the other manuscripts, or better still *El* with manuscript 451. Indeed, Damascius, in the *Life of Isidore*, says: "The Phoenicians and the Syrians call Saturn Hel and Bel and Bolath." This passage is cited by M. Orelli himself, p. 26. But if it is excusable not to have corrected the text according to a manuscript that he did not know, it is less so to have ignored or neglected the observations of the scholars who have subjected Eusebius to their criticism. Here is what Walckenaer says of Aristobulus, p. 15: "Grotius seems to have corrected the second error of Scaliger quite aptly, when he says: 'I believe that the word *Israel* was placed by mistake in Eusebius instead of *Il*, because Christian Greeks used this abbreviation to write *Israel*; this is what Huet himself establishes.'" He points out that p. 36 (26 of M. Orelli) bears "Il, who is also Cronus"; p. 37 (28 of M. Orelli), "The allies of Il who is Cronus." That is enough to show he should have made *Israel* disappear from his text, by restoring *Il*. This example suffices to prove that this edition has brought no improvement to the text of Eusebius. He should also, to make his collection as complete as possible, have added what one reads on pages 456 and 484 of the book of the *Preparation*, where the same facts are reported, but with modifications which shed true light on the first portion of the text.
The authenticity of the fragments of Sanchoniathon, for a long time, has not been in any doubt among the scholars who invoked it as an unassailable authority. Joseph Scaliger, at the end of his treatise *De emendatione temporum*, cited the piece of Porphyry, where he attests the sincerity of Sanchoniathon and accompanied it with notes which do not cast doubt that he is the author of this work.
The learned Bochart dedicated to it two entire chapters of his *Chanaan*; the 2nd of the second book and the 17th of the same. He applies his profound knowledge of the languages of the Orient to explain its terms, to correct there what the Greek copyists must necessarily have interpolated in a language which was unknown to them.
Grotius drew great advantage from it in his treatise *On the Truth of the Christian Religion*: he also makes use of it in his *Commentaries on the Gospels*, where, as I have said, he very happily corrected a passage poorly appreciated by Scaliger.
Huet sought support there for his *Evangelical Demonstration*. But he made a use of it so contrary to sound criticism, by attributing to it assumptions as gratuitous as they are foreign to the text, that one does not know if one should rank him among the supporters of this author, whom he has disparaged more than all that has been written against him. As for the rest, the abuse he has made of all the mythologies, for his favorite idea of introducing Moses into them, suffices for one to impute to him alone all the blame for this interpretation, which he found only in his own head.
Gerard John Vossius, in the beginning of his *Treatise on Greek Historians*, devotes a long article to Sanchoniathon and his translator Philo, without raising any doubt about the authenticity of his fragments, which he would have otherwise relegated to the rank of the fables of Annius of Viterbo. He also develops its entire religious doctrine in the 22nd chapter of the first book, *De origine idololatriæ*.
It was toward the middle of the 17th century that it was questioned for the first time. The first writer who entered the lists was J.-H. Ursinus, who, in 1661, published in Germany a *Dissertation on Zoroaster, Hermes, and Sanchoniathon*. Not only does he deny the existence of the latter, but he sees in his name a kind of anagram: *scopulus præparatus asina*; and in this whole fragment a satire against Christianity, of which Philo of Byblos is the author under the mask of translator. I have sought in vain for the attack against Christianity in these pages; and although this imputation has been renewed by Dodwell, who claims that it was to oppose a cosmogony to that of Moses, I have not been struck by the strength of this accusation. When Philo lived, the Christians were in too small a number and too little known to have attracted his attention. It would be more likely to believe that if Philo had supposed this writing, it was against the Jews that it was directed; we will see later that he had made a work *ex professo* about them and in a not very friendly light. As for the reach of the criticism of J.-H. Ursinus, I can give a sample of it in that, in his *Analecta sacra*, lib. IV, p. 219 and following, he discovers King David in the famous Orpheus of the Greeks. That is certainly worthier of Huet.
After Ursinus, Richard Simon also attacked the truth of these extracts, but his sharp tone, without discussion and without proof, did not bring great weight to the balance, and his pyrrhonism, which did not respect the books of Moses, reduces his aggression to very little. Richard Simon has recorded the reasons which make him attribute to Porphyry the supposing of the history of Sanchoniathon, in the *Bibliothèque critique*, published under the name of Saint Jore, in Basel, vol. I, ch. 10, p. 131 and following. He is among the number of those who believe that it is the hatred of Christianity that gave birth to this work. But in summary he proposes as mere conjectures all that he has said on this subject. His arguments have been powerfully refuted by Father Tournemine in the *Journal de Trévoux*, of the month of January 1714.
He finds the extract of this journal, reproduced by Fourmont the Elder in his *Critical Reflections on the Histories of Ancient Peoples*, vol. I, p. 48 and following.
A more worthy and conscientious adversary was Henry Dodwell, who published in 1681 an English octavo volume titled: "A Discourse concerning the Phoenician History of Sanchoniathon." Dodwell’s arguments are distinguished by great learning; his discussion is more profound than it is methodical, and since the majority of those who have written after him on this subject have made use of his methods, they deserve a detailed examination.
The first difficulty for him arises from the small number of writers who have cited an author of such antiquity and importance. He owes almost all his celebrity to Porphyry, according to whom Eusebius cited him. Theodoret knew him only through Eusebius; Athenaeus, it is true, named him, vol. III, c. 10; yet Athenaeus is older than Porphyry, and thus one cannot attribute to the latter a fraud with which Dodwell would gladly have charged him. Why would Porphyry have committed this deception? Because he was a Platonist and a Pythagorean, two sects that were not scrupulous about the attribution of works. But Athenaeus comes to disrupt his plan; he therefore declares Porphyry a "retriever" of a neglected and suspect author. A mistake by Saint Cyril of Alexandria serves his system wonderfully: the latter cited Sanchoniathon according to the *Stromata* of Clement and names Josephus as his translator. These two accusations prove that Saint Cyril was writing from memory and was mistaken, but they contribute nothing to the question.
Suidas, continues Dodwell, speaks of this Philo, but he does not indicate this work. *Rep.* This is true, but by his own admission, he omits several.
Sanchoniathon was not named by the apologists prior to Eusebius: Justin, Tatian, Theophilus, Origen, Athenagoras. *Rep.* But this Athenagoras, whose writings have come down to us, is even less cited, for no Christian writer names him or supports himself with his works. It is said that a Methodius, bishop of Patara, is the only one who has named him.
Several writers on Phoenician antiquities have been cited; these are Mochus, translated into Greek by Laetus; Hieronymus of Egypt, sometimes called "of Tyre" because of the command he exercised in that country; Menander of Ephesus, Dius, Hestiaeus, Philostratus. Except for Mochus, all these writers are recent, and Josephus only knew the former through his translation, and he alone gave the nomenclature that Dodwell repeats.
As a philosopher and theologian, he should have been translated before Philo took the trouble. Pythagoras had traveled to Phoenicia to learn its philosophical opinions, and his existence is fixed between the 50th and 53rd Olympiads, about 600 years before Jesus Christ; he did not speak of Sanchoniathon, although he had associated with the descendants of Mochus, according to Iamblichus. At the time of the conquest of Tyre by Alexander, one must have searched all the monuments of that city, and one does not see that anything has put one on the trail of Sanchoniathon's work.
*Rep.* It does not appear that Alexander was much occupied with knowing the origins of the countries he had subjected, and Babylon, which he inhabited more than Tyre, and whose early history had more illustration, did not owe him anything either.
Philo, Dodwell always says, attributes to the writings of Taautus, and to the mysterious inscriptions of the temples, then to the hidden writings of the Ammonians, τοῖς ἀποκρύφοις Ἀμμονέων γράμμασι, the fact of having been the sources from which our author drew; upon which the critic observes that inscriptions in mysterious characters, on columns hidden from the public gaze, are a great means of deception.
*Rep.* This attack strikes much more at Manetho, who took everything from the columns of Thoth, from the country of Seriadic, which one cannot recognize anywhere. These inscriptions had been translated into Greek after the deluge; that is what is inextricable. The truth is that the early writings of peoples rest on oral traditions, on inscriptions made on columns; these are the necessary elements of all primitive history.
On the occasion of these columns, Dodwell comes to those of Seth, of which Josephus speaks. From Seth, he makes Sothis; from Sothis, Thoth; from Thoth, the Dog Star; then he addresses the Sothic period; we will abandon him in this digression. He concludes, without one knowing why, that all Sanchoniathon's documents being Egyptian, he could not have made use of them.
He passes from there to the son of Thabion, of whom Philo speaks, as the first introducer of mysteries and allegorical explanations in religion; he makes him the Agathodaemon or second Mercury. As this personage is foreign to Sanchoniathon who did not know him, we will give no further attention to this discovery.
Finally, after long aberrations, Dodwell engages in combat with Jerobaal, priest of Ieu, whom he identifies as Gideon. We only know this personage through Porphyry; we would therefore have no motive to investigate his origin and to seek to know if Gideon left memoirs from which Sanchoniathon profited, which could not have been what the latter teaches us.
*Rep.* This objection fails on more than one point: 1st, it is not proven that Jerobaal is Gideon; 2nd, even if he were, according to what Porphyry says, his memoirs would only concern the Jews, and these pieces of information contained in Sanchoniathon's work profited Philo for the one he wrote on the Jews, but they have no relation to Phoenician theology.
Another proof of falsification: The glory that the author attributes to the most famous writers. In the *Treatise on the Nature of the Gods*, book II, n. 7, Cicero names King Hostilius for the same deed for which he had named Tarquinius Priscus, book I, n. 7, *On Divination*; in this, he is in agreement with all writers. In the same work, book II, n. 54, he attributes to Olympian Jupiter the despoiling done by Dionysius of Syracuse, of his cloak, for which he substituted one of wool, whereas according to Aelian, *Various Histories*, book I, n. 20, it was in a temple of Syracuse that he committed this sacrilege; which is much more likely. Van Staveren, *Ad scriptores mythographicos excursus*, p. 957, wanted to justify Cicero against Aelian and Clement of Alexandria, *Protrepticus* 340. But it seems to me after having read it, that he proves rather the opposite of what he wishes to demonstrate. Wyttenbach, following the edition of Creuzer, *De natura D. Ciceronis*, proves with Hensterhuys, on Lucian's *Timon*, p. 106, that Cicero is wrong, and that the authority of Lucian, which one believed to be in his favor, is in no way favorable to him. In effect, between *Jupiter Olympius*, the god of Olympus, and *Jupiter Olympicus*, the god of Olympia, there exists a difference that one should have observed. See such mistakes committed by Cicero, cf. Aulus Gellius, *Noctes Atticae*, l. XV, c. 6, and the 6th of the XII book of the *Letters to Atticus*, where Cicero acknowledges himself guilty of similar errors.
the Tyrian arrogates to himself, by discovering in his own country all the inventors of the arts.
REP. It seems proven that we owe two immense discoveries to the Phoenicians: the alphabet and navigation. But even if it were otherwise, this reproach that he makes against them would be valid against all ancient peoples. At a time when communication between peoples was so rare, whoever endowed a country with any invention whatsoever was its inventor.
"It happened in Greece," says M. Fréret, "what happens in every land whose natives are civilized by foreigners; everything they bring there in the way of laws, arts, customs, and religious ceremonies will appear to owe its origin to them (1)."
Dodwell then becomes indignant at seeing the Dioscuri named, who were much later, he says, than Sanchoniathon.
REP. I do not doubt that it is later than the Tyndaridae, and I flatter myself that I can demonstrate it. But if M. Dodwell understands the sons of Leda here by the term "Dioscuri," he is in complete error; who does not know, if he is the least bit initiated into ancient mythology, that the Cabiri honored in Samothrace bore the name of Dioscuri long before the two Spartan brothers had usurped their name and the honors attached to it? "It is said that the Tyndaridae," says Sextus, "usurped the honors that were rendered to the Dioscuri, which caused them to be admitted into the number of the gods (2)."
If there is one point on which Sanchoniathon deserves to be believed, it is indeed in what relates to the Dioscuri. It is certain that the Egyptians did not know them, any more than they knew the cult of the divinities that have a relation to navigation. "The Egyptians," says Herodotus, "assure us that they never knew the names of Neptune nor of the Dioscuri (3)."
If, in book III, 37, he speaks of the Cabiri associated with Vulcan, whom Cambyses caused to be burned, one sees (l. II, c. 51) that they were divinities of Phoenician origin. Jablonski declares it positively: "As for what concerns the name of the Cabiri, I admit that it is not of Egyptian origin, but that it came from the Phoenicians to the Greeks. The Cabiri, in fact, are, in the opinion of most philologists, the *Cabirim*, or 'great gods' (4)." Damascius, in the *Life of Isidore*, confirms this doctrine: "Sadyc," he says, "had as sons those who are named Dioscuri, which is the translation of the word Cabiri (5)."
Finally, Varro expresses himself thus: "Those whom the books of the augurs designate under the name of *Divi potes* are the same as those in Samothrace called Θεοὶ δυνατοί (6)."
It is while reading the name of Taautus among the Phoenicians that Dodwell appears transported with fury. Who can bear to see Abraham, to see the famous Hermes, become of Phoenician origin?
REP. As for Abraham, it is Dodwell who saw him where he is not in Sanchoniathon. As for Hermes or Taautus, here is an authority very recommendable, very anterior to Philo and Porphyry, which declares him Phoenician. It is again Varro: "The first gods," he says, "heaven and earth, are the same as Serapis and Isis in Egypt, Taautes and Astarte among the Phoenicians, Saturn and Ops in Latium (7)." I am astonished that this testimony, so decisive in the question, has been passed over in silence by everyone. It appears to me today incontestable that Taautus or Taautes, as Varro calls him, is rightfully acquired by Sanchoniathon.
It is the same for Jupiter Belus, who is, according to Dodwell, Assyrian, for the Egyptian Typhon, for Adodus the Syrian, for Aesculapius whom Sanchoniathon makes the son of Sadyc, and whom Dodwell presents as a contemporary of Minerva, who disputed Attica with Neptune under Cecrops before the Trojan War in which the children of Aesculapius took part. When, he says, did the Phoenicians have Egypt, Assyria, and Attica under their dominion?
REP. This outburst against the Phoenician Belus is completely misplaced. His existence is established by the Bible, where he is called Baal, which is only a different pronunciation of the same name. It is to him that Ahab, son-in-law of Ethbaal, king of Sidon, raised a temple in Samaria (8). It is also he whom Hesychius designates under the name of θαλάσσιος Ζεὺς ἐν Σιδώνι τιμᾶται (maritime Jupiter who is worshiped at Sidon). Virgil traces the origin of Dido back to him (9).
Dorotheus, an ancient Sidonian poet, cited by Firmicus, regards him as the founder of Babylon: *Αρχαίη Βαβυλὼν Τυρίου Βήλοιο πόλισμα,* *Ὕστατα δ' Ἀραβίη γείτων χθονός Αἰγύπτοιο.* Ancient Babylon, foundation of Belus the Tyrian, And Arabia, the last country, neighbor of the land of Egypt.
One will find learned details on all the Beli in the *Exercitationes Plinianae* of Saumaise, page 1227 and following of the Paris edition; in the *Origines Babylonicae* of Perizonius, page 74 and following; which find nothing strange in the existence of this Phoenician Belus. But why grow irritated against him, when the Egyptians have claimed the origin and have pretended that the father of Danaus and Aegyptus, Belus, founded Babylon (10)? Xiphilin names Jupiter Belus worshipped in the city of Apamea in Syria. That is enough on this personage.
Typhon is a multiple figure who belonged to many mythologies. In Egypt, he is celebrated as the adversary of Osiris (11); he is not so
A less in Greece than as one of the giants, son of Gaia and Tartarus (1). *Οπλότατον τέκε παῖδα Τυφωέα Γαία πελώρη* *Ταρτάρου ἐν φιλότητι διὰ χρυσῆν Ἀφροδίτην* "Earth, immense, bore the youngest child Typhon, having had him from Tartarus, to whom she had united through the mediation of golden Venus." It is in Cilicia that Homer places his tomb: *Εἶν Ἀρίμοις ὅθι φασὶ Τυφωέος ἔμμεναι εὐνάς* "In Arima where they say are the beds of Typhon." It is in Sicily, under Etna, according to Apollodorus and Virgil (2). It is in the Serbonian lake, on the borders of Syria and Egypt, that Herodotus (III, 8) and Apollonius of Rhodes (II, 1215) have him perish. Apollodorus, in his first book, gives at length the often uncertain struggle of Typhon, son of Earth and Tartarus, with Jupiter, the flight of the gods into Egypt before his pursuit, and their metamorphosis into animals, the contrary march of the two enemies until, after having crushed him with the thunderbolt, Jupiter finds no other means to compress him forever than by imposing Etna upon his body. He is the father of all malevolent beings: thus it is from him and Echidna (the viper) that were born the Chimera which Bellerophon fought (3); the Nemean lion, p. 87; the dragon that guarded the garden of the Hesperides, p. 102; the dog Orthrus that guarded the cows of Geryon, p. 100; the eagle that devoured the liver of Prometheus on the Caucasus, page 105; finally, the sphinx B who proposed riddles at the gates of Thebes, which Oedipus caused to perish after having explained them, page 148. This purely Greek name is evidently a translation rather than an alteration of the Egyptian name. To return to the Egyptian Typhon, we see by Plutarch that he belonged as much to Syria and Judea as to Egypt; these are his words: "Those who say that Typhon fled from the fight mounted on an ass, that his flight lasted seven days, and that after arriving in a place of safety he gave birth to Hierosolymus and Judaeus, seem to me to be bringing the account back to the history of the Jews (4)." This is what Bochart did by uniting therein many circumstances (5). From this set of facts, one can conclude that Typhon was an aggressor of the Egyptians rather than an Egyptian himself, and one can without improbability give him a Phoenician or Syrian origin as much as an Egyptian one. The Syrian Adodus may just as well belong to Phoenicia. The limits of these two countries were too mingled for there not to be much reciprocity and confusion between them; moreover, nothing proves that this theogony of the Phoenician is confined within the very narrow limits of Phoenicia, especially since the establishment of the Hebrews, which would have consisted only of a strip of land between the sea and Lebanon. At the first establishment C of the peoples, to which the account of Sanchoniathon goes back, these divisions of political geography did not exist such as Dodwell conceives them. Syria, Assyria, Mesopotamia, Judea, are necessarily included in the whole of the country where Sanchoniathon places us. The pastoral life, which occupies a large surface, joined to the small number of inhabitants of the earth, supposes great mobility in the occupations of lands; this Adod, under the name of Adad or Hadad, or Benhadad, is frequent among the names of the kings of Syria; and Josephus (6) declares positively that the god and the king Adad are the same. I come to Aesculapius; Dodwell seems to know only the god of Epidaurus; but the Phoenician Aesculapius is much older than the son of Apollo. Damascius, in the Life of Isidore, cited by Photius (7), makes a distinction: "The Aesculapius," he says, "whom one adores at Berytus, is not the same as the Aesculapius of the Greeks, nor as that of the Egyptians; he is a native of Phoenicia." *Ὅτι ὁ ἐν Βηρυτῷ Ἀσκληπιὸς οὐκ ἔστιν Ἕλλην, οὐδὲ Αἰγύπτιος, ἀλλά τις ἐπιχώριος Φοίνιξ.* Dodwell has placed in the margin of his book that one should add no faith to Damascius, who has only copied Philo. That is no longer criticism; those are arguments against those who accuse the Christians of this supposition; for Isidore and Damascius were zealous pagans who, if they copied Philo, serve as his guarantors. But against Dodwell, who accuses Philo of imposture, it is not the same. However, nothing justifies D this exclusion given to Isidore, who would take vanity, says Damascius, from his explanation of a very tangled fable which was received by Marinus with the greatest applause: "As he had brought a great light into a thick darkness, Marinus welcomed with much benevolence the discourse of this young man and admired it I cannot say to what point (8)." The Phoenician Aesculapius had a temple in Carthage, in the Byrsa: *μάλιστα τῶν ἄλλων ἐμφανές τε καὶ πλούσιον*, "the most beautiful and the richest of all," says Appian (9); it was the refuge of the last Carthaginians and of the turncoats who set fire to it during the taking of this city by Scipio Aemilianus (10). It appears that this Phoenician Aesculapius had numerous worshippers along the whole coast of Africa. Apuleius in his Apology (11) speaks of a discourse on Aesculapius, delivered at Oea, which did him much honor. Finally, the same Apuleius, speaking of apotheoses, says: "They name as gods those who, having deployed great prudence in the course of their life, have been afterward honored by the erection of temples and religious ceremonies; thus in Boeotia, Amphiaraus; in Africa, Mopsus; in Egypt, Osiris; others in other places, Aesculapius everywhere (12)." His consecration was therefore universal:
1677 DISSERTATION ON THE FRAGMENTS OF SANCHUNIATHON. 1678
herein is enough to calm the nervous irritation of Dodwell.
Dodwell, satisfied with the proofs by which he believes he has annihilated Sanchuniathon, engages in a discussion on circumcision, and pretends that Philo wrongly attributes it to the Phoenicians, seeing that Scripture constantly speaks of the Philistines as uncircumcised. It may be that the Philistines deviated from a practice fairly general in the Phoenician race, but Herodotus incontestably attributes it to them, declaring that they derived this custom from the Egyptians, which is relevant to the usage of circumcision. As for human sacrifices in honor of the Phoenician Saturn, they are so well acknowledged that Dodwell does not try to contest them; yet he still quibbles with Philo on this subject. As this is without cause, I shall pass to an examination of the writers to whom he might attribute this work.
II.
Writers to whom Dodwell has attributed the fragments of Sanchuniathon. — Porphyry and Philo. — Refutation of this supposition. — Period when Greek mythology was explained by allegories. — Period when pagan writers spoke like Moses. — Jackson admits and Van Dale does not reject Sanchuniathon. — Recent adversaries: De la Barre. — Abbé Foucher. — Stillingfleet. — Meiners. — Their refutation.
As I said in my first article, I will examine here which are the writers to whom Dodwell attributes the fragments of Sanchuniathon. The first is Porphyry, but the citation from Athenaeus reduces him to considering Philo as the forger. What could have been his goal? Here is what Dodwell supposed: Philo of Byblos is the same as Herennius Philo, named by Suidas and Origen. One sees from what the latter says that he had an aversion to the Jews, and in order to attenuate the favorable impression that the response of Josephus to Apion had produced, he would have imagined this fable of Sanchuniathon. Josephus was writing during the thirteenth year of Domitian, and Philo lived until the reign of Hadrian.
ANSWER. Behold a fable opposed to what he calls a fable; for I would like to see in what way Philo refutes the arguments of Josephus against Apion, and I am not able to arrive at it. And to show that he has less critical judgment than passion, he gives us his measure in this regard; thus, he sees no impostor among all the authors whom Eusebius cites in his ninth book as having celebrated the glory of the Jews. Hermes Trismegistus is not a Christian for Dodwell, as Casaubon believed, whom he refutes; but a pagan, since he names the sun the greatest God in the heavens. He believes in the existence of sacred pillars; he cites Orpheus when speaking of Abraham, and the oracles in favor of the Jews, as if that could carry authority.
After these proofs of poor criticism, he gives us the exposition of the motives that engaged Philo to compose a cosmogony, and in this part, which is entirely of the imagination, he wanders with great learning, accumulating the most incoherent things that have no bearing on the subject.
Mr. Dodwell makes (page 100) a judicious observation on the type of allegory that Philo wishes to exclude. "It is not," he says, "that he wishes to banish from the body of the fable all poetic imagination, nor all those parables of which the ancients and the Orientals especially were so fond. It is the complete overturning of their early history and its transformation into a system of natural philosophy, which makes Jupiter the ether; Juno, the air; Vesta, the earth, etc. It is this mania for translating the history of living, acting persons into phenomena of nature, by a continuous prosopopeia that degenerates into a novel; this is what he disapproves of, but not allegories such as those of the mystics in the Holy Scriptures. However," he continues, "in the end, these allegories, melted into the body of history, make understanding difficult when primitive traditions have faded away, and, enjoying an authority equal to the rest, they compromise the whole. These are the allegories that introduced themselves into the famous theogonies of Hesiod and the Cyclic poets (οἱ περιηχημένοι κυκλικοί), famous for the gigantomachies and titanomachies which obscured the truth."
Mr. Dodwell finds that Philo, with his pretended Sanchuniathon, has fallen into the same error that he reproaches the Greek poets for. There follows a great digression on the origin of rivers, notably the Nile, which I pass over because it does not pertain to the question. (Page 110) He wants the name Sanchuniathon to be an alteration of Sonchis, the Egyptian priest who made the Atlantis known to Solon; then a digression on the Atlantians who are, according to him, only the Atlantes.
After this meticulous review of the book of Mr. Dodwell, which is not known, which few people have read, and which fewer people will read yet, but upon which one prides oneself as having reduced to powder the false Sanchuniathon, I shall finish by translating his final chapter, which will make known exactly his whole thought in this attack; it will not be, I believe, entirely conformable to that of the greatest number of the adversaries of the Phoenician, who claim Dodwell as their partisan. Let us hear him:
"I cannot see that this discovery of the falsity of the book of Sanchuniathon does the least prejudice to the cause in which are engaged persons as pious as they are learned, who have made use of this author to explain or confirm historical or philosophical passages of Scripture. If there existed among pagan antiquities a single work that could rival the Holy Scriptures, either in antiquity or authenticity, there could be some appearance of reason in bringing these writings together; one could attempt to confirm, by equal antiquities, passages from the Holy Books for the use of those who do not grant them an absolute preference on account of their divine inspiration; but we have never heard in any pagan account prior to the translation of the Septuagint anything that related to the things mentioned in the Holy Scriptures. It was this publication that excited emulation: it is then that Berossus, Manetho, Menander, and Laetus published their researches. No mention of the Chaldean Xisuthrus, of the Egyptian Hyksos, of Abraham or of Moses, or of the universal flood in Ctesias, Xenophon, Herodotus, or such other of the most ancient writers whose authenticity is incontestable."
A These new historians published their accounts, and the purported archives from which they drew them were alone sufficient to render them suspect. They were, in fact, sacred pillars enclosed in sanctuaries inaccessible to those who might have wished to convince themselves with their own eyes. The Holy Scriptures had just then been translated; but the originals had existed from time immemorial in books accessible and intelligible to anyone who would take the trouble to learn the language.
I shall not dwell on the alleged translation made in the time of Plato; the strongest arguments in its favor are the borrowings that it is believed he made from it, which I deny absolutely. This supposition is diametrically opposed to the much better-attested history of Aristeas regarding the translation made by the orders of Ptolemy Philadelphus. I would prefer to adopt the older examples of the historian Theopompus and the poet Theodectes, who saw and understood the books of the Jews before the translation of Philadelphus, as Demetrius of Phalerum assures us in the narrative of Aristeas (1). The book of Daniel was shown to Alexander the Great, if we are to rely on Josephus (2). This is the earliest period for which we have knowledge of these books by the Greeks, whether regarding their desire to know them or their capacity to understand them. One cannot go any further back. Moreover, the contradiction in the accounts of the same facts, whether on the part of the nations among themselves, or of authors of the same nation, is proof that they were not writing with the same mindset, as Josephus observes, nor from the same originals.
« As for the Jews, their agreement proves that they drew from the same sources. The Pentateuch of the Samaritans must, according to all probability, have been received by them before the Septuagint, since at that time the exasperation between the two peoples was at its height, and they would not have wanted to receive anything from the Jews. They would have also received the prophets at the same time; but one must believe that the collection had not yet been made. Finally, the Samaritans have preserved the ancient Hebrew script and did not receive that of Ezra.
For these reasons, I do not at all think it reasonable to oppose these pagan accounts to the Holy Scriptures, nor to draw anything from them to add to their credibility, on account of their agreement with authorities so little worthy of belief. »
Dodwell, as a zealous Christian, saw in Sanchoniathon only an adversary of Moses; this is what determined him to attack his authenticity. He included in the same proscription Berossus and Manetho; he admitted without reservation the account of Aristeas, as well as numerous authorities cited by the early apologists, some of which are very suspect in the eyes of more recent critics.
Dr. John Jackson, who published in London, in 1753, in 3 volumes in-4°, his *Chronological Antiquities*, had knowledge of Dodwell’s dissertation; he expresses himself thus on his account: « I think that these arguments are too weak to merit a particular refutation; they are such as cannot satisfy any learned person, versed in ancient history. » Also, in his Phoenician chronology, he has followed Sanchoniathon, seeking to explain and not to combat him.
One mistakenly counts Van Dale among the attackers on the part of Dodwell, since not only does he not call into question the fable of Aristeas, but he admits as proven one of the most absurd passages of that fable, which concerns Theopompus B of Sanchoniathon. The few pages that he consecrated to him following his *Dissertation on Aristeas*, where he differs entirely in opinion from Dodwell, had no other goal than to refute the strange assertion of Huet that Tautus is Moses, and that the Jerombal of Porphyry is Gideon. Moreover, this writing is not distinguished by its criticism and carries little weight in the balance.
To come to positive attacks, one must descend to much later times. M. de la Barre, a member of the Academy of Inscriptions, left *Memoirs on the Religion of Greece*, of which the first, included in volume XVI of the collection, contains a digression on Sanchoniathon; he seems to have ignored the writing of Dodwell; he gives a very incomplete analysis of the fragments, which he ends by saying that « it is not possible to doubt the bad faith of the author, since he tells such a great number of incredible things, whose falsity is manifest. »
All the theogonies incur the same blame. The order and the connection, to my mind, would accuse them rather of forgery. One does not see that the romance of Euhemerus was incoherent.
« No one, he says, before Philo, named Sanchoniathon. »
One can say as much of Mochus, who is known only by Josephus, who spoke of him following the Greek translation of Laetus. Mochus was a contemporary of Sanchoniathon; they had a similar fate of owing all their celebrity to Greek translators and of having been named only by very recent writers: Diogenes Laertius, Josephus, Athenaeus, Iamblichus in his *Life of Pythagoras*, Damascius in his book *On Principles*. This fact demonstrates how little the Greeks sought to know the history of other peoples, except for the Egyptians and the Persians; but the ancient decadence of Syria and Phoenicia had rendered them very indifferent to their history. The Romans acted similarly regarding Carthage. The negative argument drawn from the silence of ancient authors is entirely insignificant.
« He wants Sanchoniathon to have lived under Alexander, an epoch, he says, when the fine minds maintained that the gods had been men. »
This anachronism merits no refutation. Sanchoniathon is a very ancient author, or he is not in reality at all. Moreover, M. de la Barre does not discuss; he decides without having studied the question.
The Abbé Foucher has also enrolled himself among the adversaries of Sanchoniathon (3). « The history of which the fragment is given, he says, was it composed by a Phoenician prior to the Trojan War? This is what we are given no proof of. »
REP. What other proof does he want than the assertion of Porphyry, a Tyrian himself, who declares it?
« But the authority of Porphyry is null on this point. »
REP. Is a writer as learned as Porphyry rejectable for the sole reason that he is Porphyry? This is what Dodwell tried to make people believe, for the reason that he saw in this writing an attack on the Christian religion, of which Porphyry was the avowed enemy. But he was obliged himself to abandon this means of attack and to fall back upon Philo, whom he makes into a forger. One does not know if M. Foucher and Theodectes. C D
A M. Foucher had to discuss and exhaust each of the works he cited, his entire plan would have been overturned. One does not even know what it could have been.
One sees, from what these gentlemen have said, that the Sanchoniathon whom they have attacked is an imaginary being, filled with allusions that belong to them and with suppositions that they attribute to him. One can apply to them this remark by the editor of Cumberland’s work, regarding Dodwell: “What M. Dodwell has written on this subject is rather the expression of his inclination not to believe than a series of proofs against the authenticity of the work.”
Stillingfleet, in his *Origines sacrae*, proposing to establish the preference of the cosmogonic and historical account of Moses over other accounts, combats Sanchoniathon just as much as Manetho and Berossus, without concerning himself with their authenticity; he combats the anachronism of which Porphyry seems to him to be convicted, by making Sanchoniathon at once a contemporary of Semiramis and of the Trojan War; this point will be discussed. Examining the opinion that Jeroboal and Gideon are the same person, he recognizes that Sanchoniathon could have drawn upon his memoirs without them being from a contemporary. As for the author, in himself he accuses him of much implausibility and even absurdities, but believes it is wrongly that the first antagonist, Ursinus, said that the Gnostics had provided Philo with the names of Protogonus and Aeon, which are significant; it is the latter whom he accuses of plagiarism, and believes that they owe more to Sanchoniathon than to Hesiod. It is without motive, according to him, that one wishes to make this work modern for the sole reason that it lays claim to a high antiquity. If it had been so, the adversaries of Porphyry, with Eusebius at their head, would have unveiled this fraud.
Stillingfleet did not know, it seems, the work of Dodwell, of which he says nothing.
Doctor Meiners, in a work *On the Knowledge that the Ancients had of the True God*, published at Lemgo, has aligned himself with the number of the adversaries of Sanchoniathon who recognize the pagans as falsifiers. No new argument on his part has been added to the force of those that we have combated, whether coming from Dodwell or from the others; it will suffice to have cited his name.
After having exhausted, or nearly so, the series of the adversaries of Sanchoniathon who have seen in his fragments an attack against religion, or at least a supposition emanated from paganism, I will come, in the next article, to those who believed it to be the product of a pious fraud.
III.
Writers who believed the book of Sanchoniathon the product of a pious fraud. — Lobeck. — Examination of the reasons he gives for it and the authorities he cites. — Of which Semiramis Sanchoniathon was a contemporary. — Summary.
As I announced in my last article, I am now going to examine who are the writers who believed that the book of Sanchoniathon was the product of a pious fraud; what led them into this thought is the use that certain modern authors have made of this document to confirm the Mosaic traditions. From there they concluded that Eusebius had the same design in publishing them, or rather in supposing them, and that he was the true author. M. Lobeck, professor at Königsberg, has summarized their means of attack in a work entitled *Aglaophamus* (1). I am therefore going to follow him step by step as I did with regard to Dodwell.
OBJECTION. M. Lobeck begins by combating
C the opinion of those who, like Heyne, Beck, and M. Orelli, mitigate the verdict against Sanchoniathon, and have seen it as an ancient work, but one interpolated in certain parts. This compromise is inadmissible, he says; how is one to distinguish between truth and falsehood? The reason upon which they rely, that there is truth in this fable, would only prove that the falsifier wished to give it some appearance of truth. Annius of Viterbo could use the same excuse. And then, who would the falsifier be? The whole question reduces itself, says M. Lobeck, to knowing whether the theology of the ancient Phoenicians is indeed such as Sanchoniathon gives it to us. REP. Jablonski takes it upon himself to answer: The traditions of the book of Sanchoniathon, whether one considers it an authentic writer or not, are such that one cannot doubt that everything he said is drawn from the ancient and true theology of the Phoenicians (1). This authority seems to me above anything I could say, for no one was more versed than Jablonski in the theological depths of ancient religions. La Croze, who might be compared to him, was an avowed partisan of Sanchoniathon, but since it is not through authorities, but rather through reasoning, that the question must be resolved, let us follow those of M. Lobeck. OBJ. It will not be possible to judge, he says, whether this work is a faithful expression of Phoenician theology unless one has in its favor the testimony of the ancients and follows the characters of truth in its context. The strongest argument for rejecting this writing is the silence of all Greek and Roman authors before Philo. REP. If the silence of authors were a sufficient cause for repudiating ancient works, then among the Latins, Phaedrus and Velleius Paterculus would be apocryphal works. Athenagoras, among the Christians, is passed over in silence. Polyaenus is named only by Suidas, and his work on Stratagems is not cited, such that one may doubt if it was known to Suidas, and if those he names are not homonyms. The only one who speaks of it is the anonymous writer in Gale, *De pace*, c. 11. Not to deviate from the Phoenicians, Hypsicrates, whom Laetus had translated according to Tatian, although his name is certainly corrupted, is named only by this writer. If Eusebius cited him, one would therefore have to deny the citation. There was, moreover, a good reason why one did not speak of Sanchoniathon before it had been translated by Philo. It is that before Laetus translated Mochus, the name of the latter was equally unknown, for the reason that the Greeks, similar to our French, knew and cared only for their own language. When one sees that Plutarch, after having spent a great deal of time in Rome and Italy, confesses his ignorance of the Latin language (2), one can judge if they learned Phoenician, a language all but dead, and where, save for a few historical documents, there was nothing to be gleaned. M. Lobeck is astonished at the indifference of Greek authors on this subject, because of the ancient and numerous relations of commerce between Greece and Phoenicia. Numerous Tyrian, Sidonian, and Berytian writers figure among the Greek philosophers, grammarians, and historians. M. Lobeck does not appear to make the distinction D necessary to establish between the Tyre of Hiram and that since Alexander. This latter was a Greek city like Alexandria of Egypt; neither the one nor the other cared much for ancient Phoenician or Egyptian glory; let one search among the numerous Alexandrian writers, save for Eratosthenes, for details on the history and religion of ancient Egypt; let one ask the writers of Roman Carthage for information on the ancient Phoenician colony; let one consult the numerous Spanish writers who flourished at Rome under the emperors on the primitive state of Baetica or Lusitania, and one will obtain the same silence.
"The Turdetanians," says Strabo, "are, of all the peoples of Baetica, those who have most completely embraced Roman customs: they no longer even have the memory of their mother tongue (3)."
Philo may have placed more value than his predecessors on exhuming a forgotten historian of whom few manuscripts remained; this elevated his fatherland and favored his religious doctrines. The antiquity of the holy books is incontestable; the Greeks who went to Tyre also went to Joppa, Gaza, and Ascalon; and yet, does one see that a single Greek said a word about it before the translation known as the Septuagint? One hardly thought of it. We confuse our position too much with that of the ancients. At the time of the Renaissance, antiquity presented itself to the gaze of astonished peoples as the most admirable development of all the sciences and all the arts; not only did two beautiful languages and a rich literature reward the efforts of those who dedicated themselves to studying them, but one found there sciences all ready-made. History with its two supports, chronology and geography, mathematics with its branches, medicine with botany, philosophy with all its appendages, even unto architecture and music; that to which the barbarism of the Middle Ages had nothing to oppose but miserable novelists. The ancients, on the contrary, what had they to take from the excavations of earlier times? A history disfigured by absurd tales, nothing more. Sanchoniathon gives us the proof of it; Herodotus and Diodorus of Sicily show us what one could draw from it; and I believe that the so-called Phoenician antiquarians whom Josephus names, and after him M. Lobeck—Dius, Menander, Philostratus, Theodotus or Diodotus, Hieronymus, Hestiaeus, and Teucer—would only instruct us by drawing nearer to more modern times. For the rest, M. Lobeck himself agrees on the impossibility of founding a proof on this argument in the midst of the shipwreck of all antiquity.
He then renews the attack concerning Taautus, whom he wishes to pass off as an Egyptian. REP. I have cited, in response to Dodwell, a text of Varro which seems to me so peremptory that, if there was plagiarism between the two nations, one should rather accuse the Egyptians of it (4).
He speaks of Tyre, which was not founded until after Semiramis, in such a way that he would have spoken of it before it existed. REP. I shall soon discuss what concerns the epoch of the Semiramis contemporary with Sanchoniathon; and I shall observe that Tyre here is not the city, since he names it after Byblos, founded by Saturn, as the most ancient Phoenician city.
A It is, therefore, the position of Tyre that he designates; and what shows this is that he only speaks of it to say that Hypsouranios settled there and was the inventor of reed huts, which hardly gives the idea of a city. Furthermore, the Tyre of Sanchoniathon is not at all the one which was built on an island after the destruction of Palaetyrus by Nebuchadnezzar. This Tyre preceded the fall of Troy by quite a long time; since the island Tyre, built from the debris of the first, is already cited in the prophets. The old Tyre is named in the book of Joshua (1).
He reproaches the author of this mythology for the mixture of Greek fables and Jewish traditions. REP. Besides the fact that the first reproach affects other mythologies, it is incontestable that the Phoenicians planted many colonies in Europe. One must attribute more of them to them than to the Egyptians, who, by the admission of Herodotus, were not devoted to navigation; it is therefore natural that their religious ideas are found again in the peoples who trace their origin to them. As for the Jewish traditions, they are all in the interpretations of the moderns and in no way in the Phoenician author.
He examines thereafter if the work on the Jews, cited by Porphyry in his *Book against the Christians* (2), is indeed by Sanchoniathon or by Philo. Origen (3) speaks of it as the work of Philo; but Mr. Lobeck is inclined to believe that Philo was still only a translator, and that the author was Sanchoniathon, who had profited from the memoirs of Hierombal, priest of the god Jao. REP. I believe this opinion erroneous; it is entirely contradicted by Origen, who names the author of the work against the Jews as Philo, who accuses the work of Hecataeus on the same subject of pseudonymity, because of the pompous praises that the latter gives to the wisdom of the Jewish people. One sees therefore that Sanchoniathon cannot find his place there; but Sanchoniathon had consulted the writings of Hierombal, priest of the God of the Jews, who had offered them to Abibal, king of Berytus. This king and this Hierombal are almost contemporary with Moses, says Porphyry; but it is not the same for Sanchoniathon, who is much later, having lived under a Semiramis, queen of Assyria, who reigned toward the time of the fall of Troy to the Greeks. The passage of Porphyry, which is cited twice in the same terms by Eusebius (4), has been poorly understood by all those who have interpreted it; they have attributed to Sanchoniathon an *os* [a relative clause] which evidently concerns Hierombal, which puts Porphyry in contradiction with himself. The Greek writer had done everything he could, however, to avoid this confusion; but no one paid any attention to it. Having named Abibal and Hierombal, he adds (5): “The times of these fall before the times of Troy, and approach almost to those of Moses, as the genealogies of the kings of Phoenicia prove. As for Sanchoniathon, he lived in the time of a Semiramis, queen of the Assyrians, who is inscribed before the time of the Trojan War or simultaneously with these events.” This chronology of Porphyry B is that of Philo in his work *Peri poleon*, as one can judge by Stephen of Byzantium under the word *Babylon*, and it has been adopted by Suidas (6): “Sanchoniathon,” he says, “a Tyrian philosopher, who lived in the time of the Trojan War.” But it completely contradicts that of Eusebius, as one can convince oneself.
Following him, Semiramis is contemporary with Abraham, so that he plunges into inextricable troubles; but let us let him speak (7). Here is what Porphyry says: “But one must submit this assertion to the calculation of times as follows: If Sanchoniathon was contemporary with Semiramis, and if she, as is generally recognized, preceded the times of Troy by much, it will follow that Sanchoniathon was anterior to these same times; but it is said that he received memoirs of personages more ancient than himself regarding the times, and yet it is barely, they add, that they approach the epoch of Moses. But by how much is it reasonable to believe that Moses preceded these personages? This is what is embarrassing, and why I believe I must abandon all this chronological discussion. Setting as a fact that Sanchoniathon is contemporary with Moses and not anterior to him, I shall continue my thought thus. If Sanchoniathon made himself known under Semiramis, queen of the Assyrians, granting that Moses was not more ancient than he, but having flourished in the same time, it will follow that Moses was also contemporary with Semiramis. But what we said above has demonstrated that Abraham was born under her. However, the narrative of the philosopher establishes that Moses was more ancient, and this Semiramis is proven to have preceded the Trojan War by eight hundred years well counted: Moses will therefore be, according to the calculations of the same philosopher, by as many years anterior to the Trojan War.”
I ask now how Eusebius, according to Mr. Lobeck, the inventor of this whole narrative, could have arranged it in such a way as not to be able to explain it on the one hand, and on the other to draw from it a consequence which would destroy from top to bottom his whole system, I do not say only chronological, to which he certainly attached some price; but his apologetic system of religion, to which he must have held much more than to the slight advantage which the invention of making Sanchoniathon, Philo, and Porphyry speak procured for him; it was to prove that Genesis took precedence over all known cosmogonies. Thus he expands with complacency on this proof that he would have destroyed himself by a fiction of very little help.
Philo, whom Porphyry followed, had said in his book *peri poleon* what is repeated by Stephen of Byzantium under the word Babylon. “Babylon, very ancient foundation of Babylon, very wise man, son of Belus, not, as Herodotus says, founded under Semiramis; for Babylon was more ancient than her by two thousand years, as Herennius wishes (8).”
If the foundation of Babylon is more ancient by 2000 years than Semiramis, this queen would be carried back well after the fall of Troy. Also Ussher (year of the world 2789) proposes in his chronology to read 1002; and he observes that 1022 years would coincide perfectly with the astronomical calculations that Callisthenes had sent from Babylon.
A Thus it is that, as Simplicius informs us in his Treatise on the Heavens (1)—and this according to Porphyry—this philosopher was in agreement with Philo and with himself, and in total disagreement with Eusebius, and that he found support in the calculations provided by Callisthenes. This chronology, moreover, entirely accords with the data of Herodotus, who, speaking of the duration of the Assyrian empire, says: "The Assyrians having dominated upper Asia for five hundred and twenty years, the Medes were the first who revolted (2), and the other nations imitated them (3)." The same Herodotus places Semiramis only five generations before Nitocris (4).
I do not wish to undertake a comparison of this chronology with that of Ctesias, which gives 1360 years of existence to the Assyrian empire. It has excited enough debate; but I will confine myself to concluding that there is nothing absurd in a computation of time which has Herodotus as its leader, Callisthenes, Philo, and Porphyry as its support in antiquity, and which in modern times has been supported by Ussher and Marsham, without citing a host of less famous names. It is, after all, that of Philo, repeated by Eustathius on Dionysius, around 1005.
I shall summarize Porphyry's synchronism. A short time after Moses, Hierombal presented to Abibal, king of Berytus, the writings which contain the principal facts of the history of the Jews up to that epoch. These memoirs were approved by the critics whom this king had charged to examine them; and as the Canaanites and the Jews had been continually at odds since the exodus from Egypt, they had to know each other's history. At the time of the siege of Troy, a period contemporary with one of the queens of Assyria by the name of Semiramis, Sanchoniathon received these memoirs and took advantage of them to draft the history of Phoenicia, his homeland. Under Hadrian, Philo of Byblos exhumed this document to translate it into Greek; he also wrote a work *ex professo* regarding the Jews, in which it is thought that, sharing the national prejudices of his ancestors, he treated them rather poorly; he nonetheless took advantage of the information contained in the book of Sanchoniathon regarding this people, which, according to what has just been said about it, deserved full confidence.
Regarding the difference of eight or nine books attributed to the work of Philo, Dodwell (5) defended Eusebius in this regard and proved by similar examples that this variation was nothing extraordinary. Thus, the Gospel of Saint Luke has been called a "first account" (*prōtos logos*) on account of the Acts of the same writer; the *Life of Josephus* has been cited as a book of his *Antiquities*; Cassiodorus even includes in it the two *Books Against Apion* (6), when, instead of twenty books, he attributes twenty-two to his work; the *Octavius* of Minucius Felix was already taken in the time of Saint Jerome for the eighth book of Arnobius, *Against the Nations*. In fact, the first edition of that author given at Rome presents it this way. Here is what Saint Jerome says about it (7): "The book falsely titled the eighth book of Arnobius is by Minucius Felix; it is proven that Arnobius only composed seven books, and this eighth is a dialogue between a Christian and a pagan, the title *Octavius* of which results evidently—in the eyes of the reader—from the fact that the Christian interlocutor bears that name." B
We read in the *Ecclesiastical History* of Eusebius that Philo the Jew wrote in five books the account of what happened to the Jews of Alexandria under Gaius Caesar. There exist in this regard only two books; one titled *Against Flaccus*, the other *Embassy to Gaius*; and Henri de Valois proves in his note that there could not have existed a single book more on this subject. The book of Theophilus, *Ad Autolycum*, has enjoyed a title apart, that of *Liber de temporibus*. The *Protrepticus*, the *Paedagogue*, and the *Stromata* of Saint Clement are separate parts of one and the same work. The book *De Martyribus Palaestinae* of Eusebius has often been considered as the 8th of his *Ecclesiastical History*; the three *Against Marcellus of Ancyra* and the two of *Ecclesiastical Theology* form a whole; the seven books of the *Divine Institutes* of Lactantius each have a distinct title; the books of Lucifer of Cagliari follow one another without title or number to indicate it. To the proofs of Dodwell, I will add the following: Suidas, in the entry "Theopompus," enumerating his works, says that he wrote an *Abridgment of the Histories of Herodotus* in two books; and the scholiast of Apollonius of Rhodes, on verse 272 of the 4th book of the *Argonautica*, comparing Herodotus to Theopompus regarding the true name of a king of Egypt, says that the latter names him Sesostris in his book. Cephalion, cited by Photius (8) as author of a *Universal History* from Ninus to Alexander in nine books, to which he gave the names of the nine muses, says that *Urania* contained the facts of Alexander. The same Photius, speaking of the excerpts that Sopater made from this book, says that *Erato* contained the *Relation of the Reign of Alexander* (9).
These reasons do not convince M. Lobeck (10); he says: Porphyry is in disagreement of no small importance with Eusebius; one counts nine books and the other eight. An attempt is made to excuse this by saying that Porphyry omitted the book of the Jews, or separated theology from history (11); these two excuses have no appearance of reason.
REP. This sharp tone does not prove anything. I hope to provide a proof that will justify the presumption of Bochart; I will gather the texts. Eusebius says (12): "This Philo who has divided into nine books the whole of the work of Sanchoniathon, etc." The same, p. 156, citing Porphyry on Sanchoniathon, after the *Treatise on Abstinence*, says: "Philo of Byblos translated into the Greek language and into eight books the history that Sanchoniathon had written." Here, then, is the same Eusebius who gives eight and nine books to the same work, which proves the little importance he accorded to this division. But let us continue:
In the same citation, Porphyry says (what is found again in the original text): "I will cite from the first book of the Phoenician history of Philo the following: 'Cronus, whom the Phoenicians name IL, reigning in this region, etc.'" C We see that for Porphyry what has relation to the life of Cronus is taken from the first book of the Phoenician history. Here is a very late writer, whose first publication is due to the care of our colleague, M. Hase, Lydus, who, in a Fragment...
on the months, following the treatise *De ostentis* (p. 274), ranges the same facts relative to Cronos in the second book of Philo. I shall cite it with a few changes that the state of the manuscript authorizes. "The Phoenicians, whether through the confusion resulting from homonymy or for some other cause, render the history of Cronos quite differently; as it is easy to be convinced by the second book of the Phoenician Histories of Herennius Philo."
On this occasion, may I be permitted to make this digression relative to the publication of the Sanchuniathon of M. Wagenfeld; it is because it is in contradiction with Porphyry and with Lydus. Like the former, he ranges the acts of Cronos in the first book; and like the latter—and presumably Eusebius—he recognizes nine books in the work, which, very indirectly, it is true, seems nonetheless to weaken the authenticity of this production.
To return to the discussion with M. Lobeck, I will say that he does not go so far as to attribute to Eusebius the passage of Porphyry drawn from a book that has escaped the destruction that reached almost all the writings of this philosopher, namely, the book on *Abstinence*. For that one, there is no way. What he does declare to be a pseudonym is Philo’s prefaces and the citations from Sanchuniathon.
IV. *Did Eusebius invent the prefaces of Philo and the fragments of Sanchuniathon? On Orpheus. His poems are by Onomacritus. On the Sibyls. Their verses interpolated by the Jews and the Christians. Is Euhemerus the only one to maintain that the gods had been men? The Greeks did not receive all their religion from the Egyptians. Of Porphyry’s symbolism. Why the Christian apologists did not speak of Sanchuniathon.*
M. Lobeck deduces the motives that lead him to believe that Eusebius fabricated the preface of Philo and the fragments of his translation of Sanchuniathon: it is not only, according to him, because many ancient books are supposed, but because of the interest he had in this trickery in a work destined to demonstrate the folly of the religions of paganism. Now, nothing reached this goal more certainly than by showing that the objects of ancient cult were only men disguised as gods. All the apologists insist on this proof which gives them so much advantage. "Believe me, O Greeks," says Tatian, "do not suffer allegories in your mythology nor among your gods." Clement, Arnobius, all finally gather the force of their dialectic on this point. It was therefore an immense advantage for Eusebius to make Philo of Byblos, a pagan, speak in the same terms. He would not, consequently, be able to escape the reproach of having permitted himself a pious fraud.
*Reply.* When Dodwell accused Porphyry of the supposition that is now brought to bear against Eusebius, he asked himself this question: why do I accuse Porphyry of having forged this writing, or at least of having contributed to the publication of a forged, unknown, and suspect writing? It is because the principles of the Pythagoreans and the Platonists permit trickery, and Porphyry was attached to these two sects. Indeed, we read in the *Timaeus*: "Just as in illnesses we cure bodies with remedies, which are themselves the causes of illnesses, when we cannot do so with mild remedies; so we lead souls by fallacious discourses when we cannot do so by the truth." Plato professes absolutely similar doctrines, and made use of them in the mythological fables that adorn his dialogues.
Also, the historian Socrates, speaking of the works of Porphyry and Julian against the Christians, accuses them of alterations and falsehoods in their use of sacred texts; "putting everything into play," he says, "in their writings against the Christians; they have tried to do violence to the truth, whether by altering certain sacred texts, or by inserting supposed parts, in a way to reach their goal."
This passage, overlooked by Dodwell, went more to his goal, because it accused Porphyry himself of bad faith in the controversy. What to conclude from this? That there was it on both sides, because one rarely becomes passionate for the truth against the interest of one's cause. Huet, whose credulity is notorious, and whom M. Lobeck treats with enough contempt to say: *quæ Huetianis sæculis credere decorum fuit*, as if it were a question of the Middle Ages, and not of the 17th century, the most illustrious of modern times, which Huet qualified and dominated the century in which he lived; Huet, I say, so credulous in general, has nevertheless pushed aside the testimony of Orpheus and the Sibyls, of which the first apologists make great use. Here is what he says of the first: "What Aristobulus the Peripatetic in Eusebius, what Justin, Clement of Alexandria, Cyril and others report of Orpheus, appears to have been forged by ancient Christians from scraps taken from the sacred books." Walckenaer relieved the Christians of this sentence in his *Treatise on Aristobulus*, in shifting the blame onto the Jews, as I shall have the occasion to show.
Huet speaks of the Sibylline verses in the same terms: "One must think the same thing of the Sibylline verses, namely that they are the work of recent authors and convinced of supposition." He refers consequently to the work of Blondel. These are writings that are incontestably pseudonymous, which no one will take under his patronage. This fraud was so visible that Celsus, in a passage reported by Origen, abused it for the blasphemy that follows:
A “You would have done much better to put the Sibyl at the head of your religion, declaring her the daughter of God, since you make use of her, inserting many impieties into her verses; instead of this, you go and take for your God one whose life is decried and whose death is the most shameful one possible.” But Celsus did not know that it is the very baseness of Christ that constitutes the glory of his religion.
Thus, there have existed books falsely attributed to certain authors. Let us see now if the analogy is perfect between the Orphic and Sibylline verses on one hand, and the preface of Philo joined to the extracts of Sanchoniathon.
Orpheus was recognized as a fabulous character even in antiquity. Herodotus declares that Homer and Hesiod are the two first poets who spread theogony among the Greeks, who gave names to the gods, and assigned to them the honors that are rendered to them; who, finally, arranged them in the generally admitted order. He was therefore unacquainted with the poems attributed to Orpheus; or rather, when he speaks of the Orphics, he relegates them among the Egyptian or Pythagorean productions. B The same Herodotus attributes to Onomacritus, a contemporary and friend of the Pisistratidae, the poems that passed under the name of Musaeus; one may believe that he also caused Orpheus to speak. Sextus Empiricus cites Onomacritus among the Orphics. The scholiast of Aristides, on the speech in defense of Miltiades against Plato, says: “Orpheus preceded Homer, but his doctrines were put into verse by Onomacritus.”
Aristotle, in the *Treatise on the Soul*, says: “The reasoning contained in the poems called Orphic is in the same case.” Philoponus, in his commentary on this passage, asks himself why Aristotle calls these poems Orphic: it is, he replies, because these poems do not seem to be by Orpheus, as Aristotle states himself in the *Books of Philosophy*. It is indeed said, he continues, that the doctrines are his, and that Onomacritus put them into verse. It is based on this passage invoked from Aristotle in the lost *Books of Philosophy* that Cicero was authorized to say that, according to Aristotle, Orpheus the poet never existed.
Dionysius the Thracian, according to Suidas, expressed the same opinion as Aristotle. His scholiast, in fact, says: “If some people recognize poets anterior to Homer, such as Musaeus, Orpheus, Linus, it is wrongly; there exists no poem more ancient than the Iliad and the Odyssey.” But, one will say, how can that be, since we possess writings more ancient? We will answer that some are not by those to whom they are supposed to belong, while others bear the titles of recent authors who are homonyms of ancient characters. Suidas, at the article “Orpheus,” enumerates the authors of his different poems, among whom Onomacritus figures.
Tatian, in his *Discourse to the Greeks*, cited by C Eusebius, says that Orpheus was a contemporary of Hercules, but that the poems which bear his name were composed and put in order by Onomacritus around the 50th Olympiad. Josephus, in his first book *Against Apion*, affirms that among the Greeks there is no acknowledged work anterior to Homer.
Among the moderns, I shall cite the only one, Gerard Jean Vossius; he is not an author of a faith difficult to convince; he says however: “This triumvirate of poetry, Orpheus, Musaeus, Linus, did not exist; these are names of the ancient Phoenician language that Cadmus and his descendants spoke.”
As for the Sibyls, the supposition is even more evident, because it is more recent and entirely within Christian ideas. The writing of Blondel, entitled: *Faith of the Fathers on the state of the soul after this life*, will provide abundant proofs. Now, how did these forgers go about it? They simply insinuated their dogmas into so-called Orphic or Sibylline verses. Orpheus owes to Onomacritus, then to the Pythagoreans, finally to the Jews or to the Christians, the verses spread under his name; the Sibyl owes them almost all to the latter.
Is this how Eusebius went about it in the supposition admitted by Mr. Lobeck regarding the extracts from Sanchoniathon? His course was diametrically opposite. It is by distancing himself as much as possible from the doctrines he wishes to bring into honor that he shows himself a forger. That one might try to bring readers to one’s opinion by presenting it under a revered name, I can conceive; but the tortuous path that Mr. Lobeck attributes to Eusebius seems to me as little comprehensible as the one that Dodwell had attributed to Porphyry or to Philo. Independently of the Phoenicians, did not Eusebius have the Egyptians, the Atlantians, the Greeks, and the Romans to deify men? Is this doctrine not placed above all attack by irrefutable authors: Homer, Hesiod, Diodorus, Plutarch, Dionysius of Halicarnassus? D What force could the weak addition of the Phoenician theology give to his demonstration? And then, this theology existed somewhere; more or less known, it was so nonetheless. All the civilized world was instructed that it was by human victims that one rendered the Phoenician Saturn propitious, that Astarte and Baal or Bel were worshiped at Sidon. The Tyrian Hercules had an anciently venerated temple, a veneration of which Alexander wished to make a pretext to penetrate into Tyre. What, then, could Eusebius do in the deceit of which he is accused? Repeat what everyone knew, or be silent. If he admitted into Phoenician theology fables of his own composition, to what end did they serve him? And how can we distinguish them today? But by their absurdity, it will be said, he has cast ridicule and odium upon this fraction of paganism; but he does not show it to us as more ridiculous nor more odious than the other theogonies. Besides, if Eusebius had contented himself with combating fables such as the poets give them to us...
he would not yet have fulfilled his object; he recognizes the triple theology of Varro—poetic, philosophical, and political; he attacks them equally in his book; he did not, therefore, win a great victory by shifting the difficulty.
OBJECTION. After all, it is not so much the absurd fables that make this collection suspect, says our adversary, as the claim of Philo that one must not interpret it symbolically.
REPLY. To which I respond that one must distinguish Philo from Sanchoniathon. Philo does not want allegories, but Sanchoniathon did not think of them. After the latter, but before Philo, Thabionides had attempted to introduce into Phoenician religion this type of interpretation, against which Philo rises up. Do we not see the same dissension among the Greeks? The Stoics twisted the whole of religion to be nothing but an emblem of nature. But Celsus in his book against the Christians, and Velleius the Epicurean—but Cotta the Academic in Cicero’s books *De Natura Deorum*—fight with all their might against this scaffolding; they are, however, the organs of two powerful sects of Greek philosophy. These doctrines, although professed in part by Varro, seemed to him of a nature to be confessed more easily in the retreat of the school than in the full light of the public square. Now, what is an explanation reserved for a small number of a religion common to all?
Euhemerus before Philo had treated Greek mythology as the latter did the Phoenician; it is true that he excited a strong storm against himself, and was qualified as an atheist; but upon whom has this insult not been lavished? The Jews and the Christians were atheists to the pagans; Anaxagoras and Socrates to Aristophanes and the people of Athens; it is not until the different sects of Christianity that they even gave this denomination to each other; Saint Justin himself says: "You speak to us of those who call themselves Christians, and who in the depths are only atheists and heretics."
The true atheists are those who, like Theodorus of Cyrene and Diagoras of Melos, deny the existence of the Divinity. Those who worship the sun, man, or the ox, deceive themselves as to its essence, but are not atheists A. Ennius certainly did not believe he was making a public profession of atheism in translating Euhemerus’ *Sacred History* into Latin. Cicero and Varro, who have cited it, and Diodorus Siculus who, in his sixth book, from which Eusebius B has preserved a fragment for us, appears to have taken it as a guide in this part of his *Universal History*, are not atheists. C In publishing the book of the *Months* (p. 274) of Lydus, M. Hase, of the Academy of Inscriptions, has made known to us a very curious passage concerning this Euhemerus. Unfortunately, the state of depravation of the text leaves much to guess; I have supplemented it as best I can, and I shall give an account of my restitutions. Here it is:
"The Phoenicians, whether by the confusion that results from homonymy, or by any other cause, speak in a manner very different about Saturn, as one can see by the second book of the Phoenician History of Philo of Byblos. Ancient history also lets us know, as we have already reported, that Saturn reigned in Africa, in Sicily, and in certain regions of Italy; that subsequently he founded a city called by his name Saturnia, as Charax reports, which now bears that of Hierapolis, according to the testimony of Isigonus in his *Treatise on the Gods of Africa*, that of Palaemon, and that of Aeschylus in his *Etna*. The *Sacred History* of Euhemerus has likewise recorded very diverse accounts regarding those who are called gods, who, according to him, were at first terrestrial, and whom later races have called celestial. Palaephatus the Peripatetic, in his *Treatise on Bacchus*, says that those among kings and magicians who have distinguished themselves by their benefits enjoy the same honors as the gods, and are venerated under similar appellations; that if one has been able to deliver oneself to plays of imagination in fable, it is by altering the truth of history."
Why would Philo, more shocked by symbolism than by anthropotheism, not have shared these opinions?
OBJECTION. But Eusebius, says M. Lobeck, used the ninth book, c. 4, of the *Attic Nights*, as having collected fables. Polemon is indicated by Macrobius in the fifth book of the *Saturnalia*, c. 19, as the author of a treatise *On the wonders of rivers in Sicily*. The same Macrobius (ibid.) has preserved four verses of the tragedy of Aeschylus which bears the title *Etna*. Palaephatus is well enough known as having interpreted the fable historically, by the fragment that remains to us of his book *On Incredible Things*, and by the citations from his other works collected by Fischer, p. 64 of his edition of this writing. John Tzetzes in his *Exegesis of the Iliad* published by Prof. Hermann, following the *Draco Stratonicensis*, p. 3 and 4, says: "Cephalion and Palaephatus and Domninus and others regarding the heroes and prodigies have allegorized rhetorically (read: historically) for the most part, and not physically or mathematically." D That is to say: Cephalion, Palaephatus, Domninus and others have employed historical allegory more generally, instead of the physical or mathematical. The city of Saturnia is named by Tertullian (c. 10 *Apolog.*) as still bearing this name: *Civitas quam deparlaverat, Saturnia usque nunc est*. See ch. 22 of the *Octavius* of Minutius Felix.
I have called the gods "terrestrial" according to Diodorus Siculus, 1. III, p. 250, "Regarding the earthly gods, many and various accounts have been handed down." The same Diodorus says that Saturn founded the monarchical government in all the regions of the West: "They say that Saturn reigned in Sicily and Libya, and also over Italy, and in general in the regions of the West, and established the kingdom."
A of an unknown author by the early apologists.
*Rep.* The plan of Eusebius differs from that of the other apologists. The latter had proposed only to defend the Christians against the imputations spread about them, and to deliver them from the cruel persecutions to which they were exposed. Common authors and contemporary writings sufficed for their needs. Instead of this, Eusebius wishes to demonstrate the economy of God in the calling of the Gentiles, and he goes back to the sources. Would one be better satisfied to see the Sibyls figure in twenty pages of his collection, as they reappear ceaselessly in Lactantius and in Clement of Alexandria? Not that I accuse them of being their authors, but of having made a use of them that could not be in good faith. As for the citation common to all, that of Orpheus, it does not turn on the authenticity of the passage, but on the sincerity or bad faith of Eusebius in copying Aristobulus, which we shall attack presently.
*Obj.* "If Sanchoniathon," continues M. Lobeck, "a contemporary of Semiramis, found in the ancient monuments of his fatherland the proofs of what he advances, his authority is irrefutable."
*Rep.* No, no more than that of Manetho and Berossus with their sacred pillars, which are much less subject to alteration, and consequently to leading one into error; and then, I believe there is an equivocation here. M. Lobeck speaks of Semiramis, the contemporary of Abraham, according to the chronicle of Eusebius, and one must place her 800 years later, according to the calculation of Philo, that is to say, toward the time of the city of Troy. How could one conceive that in the time of Semiramis I there were already old written monuments? It is impossible to think so; however far back one might wish to push the origin of writing, it cannot go that far. Sanchoniathon, a contemporary of Priam, preceded Homer and Hesiod by only about a century.
*Obj.* After having briefly reviewed what Sanchoniathon says of the divine generations, M. Lobeck adds: "If anyone can believe that the most ancient Phoenician theologians narrated to us the high deeds of Caelus, of Saturn, of Jupiter, in the manner of Hesiod and Apollodorus, yet while setting aside the idea of divinity; that they recorded them in their writings; I shall not dispute it, and I shall be content to admire how there is still some Epimenides, who, having slept for two hundred years, wakes up all of a sudden to believe what could be honorable to believe in the century of Huet."
*Rep.* After this certificate of imbecility given to Huet and to the seventeenth century, who will dare to stand as a defender of such absurdities? It will be M. Münter, bishop of Seeland, who, in his *Treatise on the Religion of the Carthaginians*, does not let escape any occasion to cite Sanchoniathon; I will not speak of Bochart, a man from an eminently ignorant century; but Lacroze, Jablonski, who while denying the existence of Sanchoniathon recognized in his fragments the true Phoenician theology, then the orientalists, better judges in this question, who have all admitted, without resistance, the accuracy of these accounts. B But cannot one say to M. Lobeck: You, sir, who handle pleasantry so agreeably, do you not lay yourself open to it, when you admit that the same things which are so unreasonable in the Phoenician are found again in Hesiod and Apollodorus? Why wish that I admire in Alexander what I abhor in Attila? Because these authors enjoy an authenticity that Sanchoniathon does not possess. What! Because entire literatures have disappeared, must one not believe in any of the debris that escaped the shipwreck? To whom do the Greeks owe their first civilization and their first notions of religion? Is it not to the emigrants come from the western littoral of Asia? One wishes to attribute the honor of it to Egypt; but it is in error. If Egypt contributed to it, it was for a small part; the Egyptians, by the admission of Herodotus himself, were not navigators; they were a species of Chinese attached to the soil, who did not go out from their home. That in the centuries of civilization some Greeks went there to study their institutions, I grant it; but it was the first navigators who carried the sacred fire among the populations of Greece. Before visiting Italy, Spain, and Africa, the Phoenicians must have touched at these shores closer to their fatherland. It is Phoenicia which first entrusted to the power of the winds the admirable machine that one calls a ship. It is therefore to it that one must attribute the first steps of the Greeks in the career of civilization; nothing, consequently, is more natural than the borrowings that were made from them by the latter: as for those that one wishes they made from the Greeks, it would be necessary, as the proverb says, to make rivers flow back toward their source and confound everything.
"Why do you add, while setting aside the idea of divinity? Eusebius imposes upon us by maintaining, according to the following passage of Porphyry, that the gods had been men? Here is this Porphyry who, in continuing, deifies, not any longer the supreme God nor those of the sky (the stars), but mortal men, and who renders this testimony that such are the gods to whom the universe renders homage."
Eusebius, I say, imposes upon us. Porphyry, no more than Hesiod, Sanchoniathon no more than Apollodorus, did not render this testimony: they admitted divine generations whose nature they did not explain well, but which they separated from humanity. Porphyry is more commonly a symbolist: let one read the *Treatise on the Cave of the Nymphs*, and all his observations spread in the Homeric Scholiast of Venice; let one read the *Fragments of the Treatise on Statues* in the third book of the *Evangelical Preparation*, one will remain convinced of this truth. Now, it is presumable that Eusebius, by this remark, wished to put him in opposition with himself, since he supports with his authority a doctrine entirely contrary. In another circumstance, he opposes his collection of the *Philosophy from Oracles*, which prescribes animal sacrifices, to his *Treatise on Abstinence*, which rejects them. I find nowhere that Sanchoniathon declared, any more than Hesiod, that the gods were men.
*Obj.* M. Lobeck returns to the silence of the first apologists, and of Josephus who claimed to have searched the archives of Tyre.
Rep.* But I doubt that there were any archives in Tyre since the ruin of that city by Alexander; all the authorities of Josephus are recent, except for Mochus, whom he knows only through the translation of Laetus; they are Hypsicrates, Theodotus, Dius, Menander, and Hieronymus of Ephesus. And then, what would Josephus have sought in Sanchoniathon that could be useful to him? the deluge and the confirmation of the Mosaic writings? this is precisely what he passes over in silence. He needed Berosus, who declares that, in his time, that is to say after Alexander the Great, parts of the ark still subsisted, despite the eagerness of the inhabitants to remove the bitumen which was used for spells. Certainly, Sanchoniathon is surpassed in exaggeration by Berosus in this account, if it is indeed authentic. Nicolaus of Damascus, also cited by Josephus, says likewise that these remains subsisted in his time, that is to say under Augustus; this is what Sanchoniathon could not offer to Josephus.
To answer the question of the silence of the apologists, one must observe that the other apologists found in the contemporary or most widespread authors everything they wished to prove. Their plan differed from that of Eusebius. And furthermore, even if they had cited Sanchoniathon, would M. Lobeck have deferred blindly to their testimony? I do not believe so, and I support my opinion on what he says: "It is constant that in these times when religions, both ancient and new, foreign and domestic, were struggling among themselves, sacred and profane books were interpolated with the greatest imprudence, and they went so far as to attribute to Homer verses that are purely foreign to him."
Since he envelops all Christian writers in a general condemnation of interpolation, Eusebius would have had only accomplices, if others besides him had cited the same fragments; in fact, the numerous citations from the Sibyls do not give them any more authenticity. In general, the apologists were not very delicate in their choice of authorities; the Sibylline verses, especially after what Celsus had said about them, should no longer have appeared, and yet several cite them, among whom Eusebius is an exception. Nevertheless, having to accuse Clement of Alexandria in this regard, I see that M. Lobeck is his defender, and that in the citation of Orpheus common to both, but increased by a few verses in Eusebius, he sees nothing falsified other than this augmentation. "One sees," he says, "the stupidity of Eusebius in the invention of similar fables, through the verses taken from the Testament of Orpheus; I am not speaking of those which are common to him with Clement of Alexandria, but of those of which he alone makes use, and which are completely Judaic."
In taking Clement of Alexandria under his protection, here is a very explicit certificate of imbecility, added to that of bad faith, with which Eusebius had not yet been graced. The accusation is too grave not to excuse some development in the response, which is what we shall do in the following article.
V. Examination of the verses drawn from Orpheus, cited by Saint Justin, Clement of Alexandria, and Eusebius. Eusebius did not invent them, but borrowed them from Aristobulus. Proofs of the existence of Aristobulus.
As we promised at the end of the previous article, we are going to defend Eusebius against the accusation brought by M. Lobeck of having invented the verses of Orpheus which are found in the *Evangelical Preparation*. Among the authors cited by Eusebius, we note Aristobulus, a learned Jew and Peripatetic philosopher who lived at the court of Ptolemy Philometor, to whom he dedicated interpretations of the Holy Books. To make the doctrine contained therein valued by this prince, he did not fear to interpolate the ancient Greek poets, whose testimony he alleged as supporting these very doctrines. Eusebius, in a fragment of this author, reports Orphic verses which are part of it, evidently supposed, where are professed not only the unity of God and his infinite power, as well as all the Judaic doctrines, but even Abraham is clearly indicated therein, as well as Moses. To whom does this supposition belong? Walckenaer, who left a posthumous Dissertation on Aristobulus, imputes it completely to him; whereas M. Lobeck accuses Eusebius of it, but only for the two verses that designate Moses. Is it out of indulgence for Eusebius that he thus limits his accusation? No; it is by the force of circumstances. Let us explain ourselves: It is not possible that these verses were totally fabricated by Aristobulus. He worked on an initial canvas owed to the Pythagoreans, who made Orpheus speak a great deal. He therefore added, according to the appearances, that which is foreign to their ideas and outside their knowledge.
The Orphic verse cited by Eusebius goes back to a high antiquity; numerous allusions have been made to it, and it appears to have been a sacramental formula in the mysteries. Here it is:
Φθέγξομαι οἷς θέμις ἐστὶ, θύρας δ᾽ ἐπίθεσθε [βεβήλοις.
Callimachus parodied it in the *Hymn to Apollo*:
Οἷον ὁ τῶ πόλλωνος ἐσείσατο δάφνινος ἔρπηξ, Οἷα δ' ὅλον τὸ μέλαθρον, ἑκὰς ἑκὰς ὅστις ἀλι [τρός.
Platon makes an evident allusion to it in the *Banquet*:
"But as for the servants and if there is anyone else who is a profane person and boorish, shut the very large doors to your ears."
A Moreover, the expression *βεβήλοις*, profane, had no reception except in relation to the mysteries, and the allusions to this verse were preserved even in Christian mysteries. This formula was employed at that point in the sacrifice where those who were not entirely initiated were made to leave.
But, without going through the history of each of these verses, I will limit myself to saying that they have been cited with more or less extent by Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Eusebius.
Justin recalls them in two works: the *Exhortation* and the *Book of the Monarchy*, to the number of 21. In both one and the other, he recognizes the supreme God:
*Εἷς ἔστ', αὐτογενὴς, ἑνὸς ἔκγονα πάντα τέτυ- [κται* (3) :
but he gives him the name of Jupiter:
*Πᾶσιν γὰρ θνητοῖς, θνηταὶ κόραι εἰσὶν ἐν ὅσο- [σοις* *Ἀσθενέες δ' ἰδέειν Διὰ τὸν πάντων μεδέοντα* (4).
He announces these verses as taken from the poem addressed to Musaeus, a Pythagorean production. One must therefore conclude that this Father was not acquainted with the edition of Aristobulus or neglected to use it.
It is not the same with Clement of Alexandria; not only did he know it, since he names it, but in the citation he makes of 7 verses, in the *Exhortation to the Gentiles*, they are similar to the first 7 of Justin. Then he adds the first word of the 8th following the edition of Aristobulus: *ἀθάνατον*; and, discarding the end of this verse:
*Παλαιὸς δὲ λόγος περὶ τοῦδε φαείνει*,
which smells of Judaism, he continues: *Εἶτα ὑποβὰς διαρ- ῥήδην ἐπιφέρει*
*Εἷς ἔστ', αὐτογενὴς, ἑνὸς ἔκγονα πάντα τέτυ- [κται* (5),
8 verses by Justin, and which would thus be the 9th of Clement. Already he had discarded a 3rd verse which betrayed the Jew:
*Φεύγοντες δικαίων θεσμοὺς θείοιο τεθέντος* *Πᾶσι νόμου* .... (6)
If, however, Clement had cited only this snippet, one might misunderstand the use he made of Aristobulus; but in the Vth of the *Stromata*, p. 723, he recalls the last ones finishing with *ἀθάνατον*, and adds: B "Orpheus said these things about God, whom he represents as invisible, and who was known only by a single Chaldean, either Abraham or his son, whom he wishes to indicate by these verses (7):
*Οὐ γὰρ κέν τις ἴδοι θνητῶν μερόπων κραίνοντα,* *Εἰ μὴ μουνογενὴς τις ἀποῤῥὼς φύλου ἄνωθεν,* *Χαλδαίων* (8)."
Certainly, Clement shows that he drew his citation from Aristobulus; but he avoids naming him, passes over in silence the name of Jupiter, and attributes to the alleged Orpheus the knowledge of Abraham: now, it is doubtful that he could believe what he was writing.
Let us see what Eusebius did. In a long fragment that he cites from Aristobulus the Jew, one finds the same verses, but increased by several others with all the marks of interpolation: thus the 2nd and the 8th verses suppressed by Clement, those concerning Abraham, finally two others, designating evidently Moses and the law inscribed on the tables, are found here:
*Ὡς λόγος ἀρχαίων, ὡς ὑδογενὴς διέταξεν,* *Ἐκ θεόθεν γνώμαισι λαβὼν κατὰ δίπλακα θε-[σμὸν*
"As the law has prescribed, as he who is born from the waters has taught, having received from God himself the code engraved on the tables." (Verses 36, 37.)
Now, these are the verses that earned the title of "idiot" for Eusebius, at the hand of Mr. Lobeck. Let us continue, and see if it is the result of a wise and profound critique. C
That Eusebius believed in the authenticity of these verses, I will not say as coming from Orpheus, no one believed him to be the author; but as from Onomacritus, Cercops, or some Pythagorean, I do not suppose it: he does not seek to make it believed. But citing Aristobulus, who published them, he gives them as he finds them in this author, who becomes his guarantor. For him to be a prevaricator, he would have had to forge the whole citation or only a part. For him to be the author of the whole, one would have to make Aristobulus a being of reason. This is what Richard Simon, who does not hesitate when it is a matter of creating pseudonyms, does not restrain himself from declaring (9); the books of Aristobulus and of some other ancient authors who have written so favorably of the Jews have been supposed; he leaves to others the care of demonstrating that a Jew could not write favorably of his nation. D
Van Dale and Hody, in refuting the narrative of Aristeas, bothered by what Aristobulus says of the translation of the Bible under Philadelphus, also seek to annihilate it. Their great argument is the silence of Josephus and Philo. But Isaac Vossius (10) says quite rightly, in speaking of the former: "What cause would have
prompted Josephus to speak of Aristobulus in his history?" One might say the same of Philo. There are too many guarantors of the existence of Aristobulus for it to be called into doubt. Now, if Aristobulus lived, if he composed commentaries on the books of the Law, do we have sufficient reason to believe that he did not alter the verses he borrowed from Hellenic literature? Would it be because of his character? We do not know it; or because the verses attributed to him could not have come from his pen? Such would be an allusion to Jesus Christ and the New Law, as the Sibylline verses are filled with. But Abraham, Moses, and the tables of the Law are better placed in the mouth of a Jew than in that of a Christian. How, when the New Law which had come to destroy the old one, was shining with all its splendor in the eyes of its adherents, could Eusebius have had any poetic talent only to celebrate the cult he was deserting? It would be then that he would well merit the epithet that M. Lobeck has granted him.
Was the candor of the Jews so great that one cannot attribute any pious fraud to them? The apocryphal books of the Old Testament, the fables included in the account of Aristeas on the Septuagint version—are these historians, to whom Josephus refers us (2) as authorities foreign to his nation, writings exempt from suspicion? If, finally, one saw the guilty only among the Christians, Clement would share the blame of Eusebius, for he opened the way by indicating Abraham, just as the latter did for Moses, with this difference that Clement assigns to Orpheus himself what Eusebius only traces back to Aristobulus; or else one would have to believe that Aristobulus is guilty of the first interpolation, and that, having sufficiently falsified the text to introduce the father of believers there, he will not have been bold enough to indicate Moses. One senses how improbable this supposition is.
To these arguments, Walckenaër has added one that seems peremptory to me. If Eusebius had assumed verses of Orpheus that would give him knowledge of the true God such as the Jews possessed, and if he had made Abraham and Moses appear in his writings, he would have been careful not to overturn this combination by making him speak in a sense quite contrary to the language he would have lent him. This is, however, what he has done in another passage (3), where we read a citation from Porphyry, in which this philosopher, wishing to found symbolism, cites a long Orphic passage where Jupiter is not the soul of the world, but is the world itself:
*Πάντα δ' ἐν μεγάλῳ Ζηνὸς τάδε σώματι κεῖται.*
The sky is his head, the stars his hair, the sun and the moon his eyes, the ether his spirit, the earth his belly, the sea his girdle, etc. Here is Eusebius’s reflection on this piece: "Such is, therefore, O Porphyry, the painting that the verses cited by you make for us of Jupiter. But I perceive in all that only the visible universe: the ether forms his understanding, and the other parts of the world, his body. How then could Orpheus the Thracian, or anyone else, have conceived such a divinity without recognizing in it anything intellectual, nothing that pertained to an invisible and incorporeal essence?"
I believe I have said enough, perhaps too much, to discharge Eusebius from the imputation of having inserted two verses of his own composition into an Orphic citation. M. Lobeck accuses him again (for of what does he not accuse him?) of having added in Josephus the famous passage on Jesus Christ; but as this is not contained in the 15 books of the *Evangelical Preparation*, I set aside the discussion of it, and I will pass in the following article to the examination of modern writers who have made themselves the supporters of the authenticity of the fragment of Sanchoniathon.
VI.
Modern writers who have supported the authenticity of the fragments of Sanchoniathon. Vossius. Bochart. John Jackson. Van Dale. Fourmont. Huet. Cumberland. Goguet.
Among the authors who have admitted the authenticity of the fragments of Sanchoniathon, and who have founded some theory on the traditions they contain, there are none who have undertaken a justification of his work properly so called, without mingling into it their systematic ideas on this book. If they have answered some critics, it is only transiently: they have rather considered these extracts as a solid foundation upon which they have built the systems that their imagination brought forth. Thus, some have used them to confirm the accounts of Moses, like Huet and Fourmont; others, to disentangle the chronology of ancient peoples, like Cumberland; and by the fruitless attempts of a wandering imagination, they have decried these fragments as much as those who have argued them to be fake (1).
Thus it is that nothing is more dangerous than an imprudent friend.
Gérard Jean Vossius, in his *Treatise on Greek Historians*, gives the first place to our historian, and simply gives an account of what Eusebius and Porphyry have reported of him. He is stopped, like all those who have spoken of this author, by the chronological difficulty resulting from the passage of Porphyry. For the rest, he raises no doubt about the sincerity of this account, and maintains with Ephorus against Diodorus Siculus (4), that the Barbarians had historians before the Greeks.
Bochart, in the 2nd chapter of the *Canaan*, reviews all that remains of the account of our historian; he explains by the Phoenician language the proper names that it contains; but it is only in the 17th chapter of the same book.
A
He first justifies the translation of his name given by Theodoret, where Sanchoniathon is translated as "lover of truth" (*philalêthēs*) in the passage of the *Praeparatio* of Porphyry, while Eusebius gives the reading "lover of the word" (*philalêthēs*); he distinguishes Abibal, king of Berytus, from the father of Iram, a contemporary of Solomon. He recognizes Abraham in Cronus, and Sara in Anobret. He is convinced that Jerombal, priest of Jevo, is Gideon, and explains at length how he could have been qualified as a Hebrew priest while not being a Levite, and how, having lapsed into the idolatry of Baal-berith, just as his successors, he could have made an alliance with a king of Berytus. He painstakingly exerts himself to link Gideon to Sanchoniathon. The difficulty resulting from the founding of Tyre, which precedes the fall of Troy by only a small number of years, stops him. He accounts for this only by proving that the name of Tyre was common to several localities, and declares that this word means "Rock" in Phoenician. When Astarbe sacrifices an eagle—a type of bird—*en Tyrou te hagia nêsôi*, "in Tyre, the holy island," it was not a city, according to Bochart. B
The work of Dr. John Jackson, which is a *Chronological Revue of Ancient Peoples*, contains in the third volume the Phoenician chronology, drawn entirely from Sanchoniathon. In the notes, he discusses the chronological difficulties of the text, such as the coincidence of the times of Semiramis and of the Trojan War, Abibal, Sanchoniathon, and Jerombal.
He believes at first that Porphyry said that Jerombal and Sanchoniathon had lived at the same time, namely, under Abibal. I have shown that he says expressly the opposite; he traces Semiramis back to the era where Eusebius, in his *Chronicle*, placed her, 800 years before the Trojan War. This is an indifferent question for understanding the era in which Sanchoniathon lived; it suffices to recognize that—rightly or wrongly—one has made him a contemporary of the fall of Troy. If one does not admit this point, there exists nothing but trouble and confusion in the statements of Philo and Porphyry. Ussher adopted this chronology; he therefore believed it rational. But once again, that does not concern us; it is enough for us to know the thinking of our guides. Jackson seeks, after Bochart, what the writings in Ammonian characters are, which Philo says Sanchoniathon made use of for the redaction of his history: this is what we shall look into later. Then he translates all this piece; after which he examines the author's claims to credibility. C
After having said that the writing of Dodwell did not merit a serious refutation, he seeks to give dates to the events contained in the accounts, and declares that Bochart, Cumberland, and especially Huet, understood nothing of them. I do not know if other chronologists will not make the same reproach against him; for he mixes the account of Moses, the flood, and the dispersion into a narrative which is entirely foreign to it. I think this is a poor procedure; besides, his work, not supposing any doubt about the veracity of Sanchoniathon's account, does not even seek to prove it.
Huet, that modern apologist, greatly imitated the ancients by the critical fire with which he adopts testimonials favorable to the *Evangelical Demonstration*. We have seen, however, that he rejects Orpheus and the Sibyls. One should not, therefore, accuse him of total bad faith. But following his favorite plan, which places Moses as a common divinity in all mythologies, he seized upon the cosmogony of Sanchoniathon as being copied from that of Moses, and makes comparisons which are far from being admissible.
Taautos, whose writings Sanchoniathon consulted, is none other than Moses. The proof is palpable. Taautos described the origin of things: Moses likewise. It is true that the one is a bit materialistic, that he recognizes no first cause other than matter, while the other makes everything depend on the divine will; but he does not take account of this difference. Taautos found the letters; Eupolemus, cited by Clement of Alexandria, attributes the same discovery to Moses, and all the reasoning that follows is of the same force. Jerombal, who is Gideon, gave him his commentaries. What is this other than the books of Moses? But then how did he profit so little from them? By such conclusive arguments, he seeks to prove that the Tyrian Hercules, Melicertes, is none other than Joshua. Is it not deplorable that with great erudition, and I suppose, the love of truth, Huet believed he could bring conviction to minds by a similar abuse of science; and that, wishing to raise a monument to the defense of religion, he disfigured it by resting it upon such frail bases? If things were as he says, evidently one would have to attribute the redaction of the fragments of Sanchoniathon to a pious fraud; but one would also have to declare false all the mythologies of which he made the same use. D
Van Dale directed against this personification of Moses and Gideon a response that was easy: his own [work] is distinguished neither by penetration nor by erudition. The anachronism of which he believes Porphyry guilty regarding Gideon-Jerombal, whom he supposes to be a contemporary of Sanchoniathon, stems only from a false interpretation of the Greek text. By re-establishing the true meaning, one will repel the means of attack used by Van Dale, and will leave to Sanchoniathon the possibility of having profited from memoirs furnished by Gideon to a king Abibal, his contemporary.
What Huet had undertaken summarily in his *Evangelical Demonstration*, what Bochart had developed more fully in his *Chanaan*, Fourmont has indeed amplified in his *Critical Reflections on the History of Ancient Peoples*, in which an entire volume is almost devoted to comparing each generation of Sanchoniathon, and each member of that generation with the biblical races that he believes are represented by the divinities of the Phoenician theologian, sometimes drawing closer to, sometimes moving away from the expositions given by his predecessors. He is so confident in his own discoveries that he proposes them with a confidence which does not allow him to believe that one could fail to applaud his system. In effect, it would take no less than the blindness which characterizes all system-makers not to bear witness to the uncertainty of a work similar to his; and the impossibility of conveying into the mind of his readers the conviction with which he is imbued. Will it be by means of some resemblances of names, or some coincidences of any kind whatever, that one will justify this parallel, which would become precisely suspect due to a conformity which, moreover, does not exist at all in [the cases of]: Eacus, Esculapius, Amphion, Anubis, Apis, Apollo, Aristaeus, Bacchus, Cecrops, Evander, Eumolpus, Faunus, Janus, Linus, Marnas, Mercury, Minos, Mnevis, Orpheus, Osiris, Pan, Perseus, Priapus, Prometheus, Rhadamanthus, Serapis, Silvanus, Tiresias, Typhon, Vertumnus, Vulcan, etc.
A these accounts? How to suppose that a book where the origin of things is set forth without the great upheaval of the flood being mentioned, could have any analogy with the account of Moses? How to confuse in one and the same individual (and this is the favorite idea of Fourmont) the Cronos of Sanchoniathon, so inhumane toward all his own kin, with the Abraham of Moses who distinguishes himself among the descendants of Noah by religious sentiment and by domestic and social duties, and is justly called the father of believers? Moreover, Fourmont’s book encountered, from its very appearance, a nearly universal disfavor. His presumption even made him commit an error of precipitation by making Thabion the father of Sanchoniathon, whereas Philo declares positively that Thabionides had distorted by allegories the traditions of Taautos which Sanchoniathon had faithfully represented. One would be tempted to believe that Fourmont had not completely studied the writing that served as his theme.
Be that as it may, this manner of wishing to bring together different mythologies that are absolutely foreign to each other dates from long ago. Herodotus exhausted himself in vain efforts to find among the Greeks the representatives of the gods of Egypt. Varro and Cicero, in the same spirit, compared the divinities of Greece and Italy. The moderns have related to Holy Scripture the religious traditions of the various nations of antiquity, without the equally unfruitful efforts of their predecessors deterring newcomers from embarking upon the same career with a like result. It seems that simple common sense ought to have dissuaded them. By what secret communication did peoples who had become savage after the dispersion, and were all absorbed by the cares of animal life and the embarrassments of a nascent society, agree to render a unanimous cult to identical gods, although differently named, and who have nothing in common in their deeds? That, indeed, is what I cannot explain B (1). Cumberland, Bishop of Peterborough, left at his death a large volume in-8°, entitled: *Sanchoniatho's Phænician history*, where, by a path opposite to Huet, far from seeing in this account a kind of parody of Genesis, he believes it to be entirely opposed to it (2). He rejects any spiritualist interpretation of its ensemble, and combats Bochart who, by the *Zophasemim*, τουτέστι Οὐρανοῦ κατόπται, wishes to understand the angels residing in the stars, *Zwa noera*. He recognizes in them the stars themselves. Here, moreover, is his system: Moses transmitted the genealogy of Seth up to Noah, among whom was preserved, not without alteration, the knowledge of the true God. Sanchoniathon found, in the accounts dictated by Taautos and edited by the Cabiri, the history of the descent of Cain, which soon embraced uranotheism and anthropotheism. A number of generations, almost equal, according to him, on both sides, gave rise to comparisons C that go quite well up to the tenth generation: that of Noah.
But here a nearly insurmountable difficulty presents itself. The universal flood in Moses destroyed the entire race of Cain. Only one descendant of Seth survived this disaster. Sanchoniathon does not say a word about it, any more than any of the writers prior to Berosus (129th Olympiad), nor Diodorus Siculus, who is much later than Berosus. It is, therefore, by a very suspicious seam that the Bishop of Peterborough attaches to the line of Noah the following generations which Sanchoniathon derived without interruption from the Cainites. With the help of changes or deletions of letters, for which it seems the oriental languages have a quite particular flexibility, he makes the first kings of Egypt reappear according to the canon of Eratosthenes, which he thus attaches to the generations of Sanchoniathon, while pushing aside the dynasties of Manetho as fabulous. A digression on the Phoenician shepherds, whom he is far from taking for the Jews as Josephus did, presents some interest. But it is impossible to enter into a detailed examination of this work unless one reproduces it. He does not confuse Cronos with Abraham, as do Bochart and Fourmont; he makes him Ham, and Uranus is Noah. Chna is the first Phoenician, son of Ham, and Misor the same as the Misraim of Moses, as the Menes and the Meon of Eratosthenes, as Osiris who was later Bacchus and the Sun, and finally Isis, who, according to Sanchoniathon, discovered three letters, and is especially called brother of Chna, the first Phoenician, that is to say, the founder of the Egyptian monarchy; that Thoth is the Athotes, second king, according to Eratosthenes, and the last link in the chain of Sanchoniathon. By this means, he establishes an uninterrupted succession from Adam to the first Olympiad, through Sanchoniathon and Eratosthenes.
These ingenious combinations, the fruit of great research, so flattered their author that thirty years after the writing of his manuscript, he told his publisher that the more he thought about these things, the more he was convinced of the truth of his discovery. Unfortunately, the learned public did not confirm this verdict. And among chronologists and historians, I see none who have ratified by an explicit declaration the data of Cumberland, whose application, however, if it were justified, would throw great light on the earliest ages of the world.
I have already said that Dr. Jackson holds it in little account, although he has not been without profiting from it. His chronological table, which presents a duration of 2256 years before the flood, places Cronos two generations below Nimrod. This is what makes, he says, this history never to have been well understood; that the learned Bishop Cumberland, and before him Bochart, and especially Huet, were mistaken as to the individuals and as to the times reported by Sanchoniathon. D (1) We let these words of M. Séguier stand; but we are not of the same opinion. The cause of our disagreement with the learned academician comes from the fact that we start from two diametrically opposed points of view. We maintain that the first peoples were not savage and without relations among themselves. On the contrary, they commenced by being all united, and united in a civilized society; the savage state, limited to a small number of tribes, only came long afterwards. The communications of peoples were therefore not secret, and they could have worshipped identical gods under diverse denominations. This doctrine is founded on the Bible first, and on all research afterwards. We do not doubt that M. Séguier, Christian and learned as he is, adopts these principles and these consequences, if he wishes to make them the object of his studies.
We make almost the same reservations for the questions of the sibyls and of Orpheus; without pretending that their verses are all authentic, we believe that what remains of them was made according to ancient traditions current among the peoples; which explains their general adoption. For Moses also, we do not believe that one must recognize him in all the characters cited by Huet; but we believe that he was the type for several characters of fable. The Director A. BONNETTY. (2) P. 10. Whosoever, says he, distinctly understands his cosmogony, will see that it is directly opposite to Moses' scope.
Likened to all chronologists, Jackson has his own system which he prefers to others. But, like his predecessors, he has not found the secret of uniting all opinions, and one can say of him what he has said of his forebears. As for his putting Huet, Bochart, and Cumberland on the same level, I find that he has not sufficiently appreciated the distance between the first and the other two. Goguet placed an express dissertation on the authenticity of the work that occupies us at the end of the final volume of *The Origin of Laws*, to justify the borrowings he made from it. He removes Eusebius and Porphyry from the case, and defends only Philo from the accusation of having invented what he claimed to have translated. Christians were too few at that time to be a special object of attack; it would therefore have been against the Jews that he would have directed this entire invention. But the Jews avoided polemics and did not seek to make converts.
This assertion is not correct; we see from Josephus himself, who wrote against Apion, that they treated matters of religious polemic. Aristobulus and Philo the Jew, as well as all the supposed historians and philosophers cited by them and by Eusebius, Hecataeus, Eupolemus, Artapanus, Aristeas, are evidently Jews who engaged in polemics. Eusebius, in his *Ecclesiastical History*, states it upon the authority of Clement of Alexandria: Philo (the Jew, of course) and Aristobulus, Josephus and Demetrius, as well as Eupolemus, are Jewish writers. Philo of Byblos appears to be the author of a work on the Jews, where they are not well treated, judging by the excerpt one reads in Origen.
Goguet believes that Clement of Alexandria was able to speak of Sanchoniathon, since Saint Cyril declares it, and that a part of that Father’s *Stromata* is lost. It is highly probable that this Father did not speak of him, and that Saint Cyril named him from memory, in place of Eusebius, just as he wrongly designated Josephus in place of Philo as having translated him, whereas he did not even cite him. One must incontestably set aside the testimony of Saint Cyril. It is probable that Theodoret drew from Eusebius what he says of it. However, a rather important variant would lead one to believe the contrary. Theodoret says that the name of the Phoenician should be translated as *philalèthēs*, which Eusebius does not say at all. As for Suidas, it is clear that he followed another guide than the Bishop of Caesarea in his biography of Sanchoniathon.
Goguet believes that Philo had in view, by publishing this book, to lower the vanity of the Greeks by showing them a barbarian writer prior to the time of their civilization, who had explained the origin of the world. This idea is hardly presumable. The Greeks knew well that the Asiatic peoples had preceded them in civilization, and they recognized as their first instructors in this genre the Phoenicians and the Egyptians. I see, however, no motive for Philo to forge this work. He only wanted to place his fatherland back on the stage of the world, eclipsed by the conquests that the Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans had made of one another. As for his disposition to reject the allegories of the body of fable, he shared it with other thinkers, and Diodorus Siculus, who says: “One finds many accounts very different from one another concerning the earthly gods other than the stars, as much among the historians as among the mythographers.” But the reflections which mingle with the primitive narrative reveal by the nature of the ideas and the variety of style that Sanchoniathon cannot be the author. And in all the rest, one recognizes the stamp of the original.
Goguet fixes the existence of Sanchoniathon to the time of the Judges through the effect of a faulty interpretation of a passage of Porphyry, and against his positive declaration that he lived at the time of the fall of Troy. I have already discussed this point of chronology.
VII. Continuation of the examination of authors who believed in the authenticity of the fragments of Sanchoniathon. The Abbé Mignot. Biography of Philo. Complete and unpublished list of his works. What reasons could he have had to invent the writing of Sanchoniathon? Conclusion.
The Abbé Mignot, member of the Academy, read there a series of *Memoirs on the Phoenicians*, and as he believed in the authenticity of these fragments, he pointed out the causes of his conviction. His arguments do not differ from those of his predecessors, only he believed that *grammata Ammouneōn* indicated a writing peculiar to the Ammonites. Jerombaal is to his eyes Gideon, and he believed he had justified the title of priest of the living God given to him by the right that Scripture recognizes him to have in wearing the ephod, the garment of the Hebrew priests. He goes to great pains to make disappear the anachronism he finds in linking Semiramis to the fall of Troy.
The Abbé Mignot then discusses the diverse and often contradictory objections of the adversaries of Sanchoniathon and Philo. He admits too easily, in my opinion, that Saint Clement named him, because of what Saint Cyril says about it. Regarding Suidas, he thinks he took his information on the Tyrian philosopher from elsewhere than Eusebius; I believe the same. One can hardly think otherwise, for they present no resemblance between them.
Coming to the proofs drawn from the work itself, he is not at all wounded by the similarities with Moses and Hesiod: all early cosmogonies resemble one another in their main features; he does not find it astonishing that the Gnostics took names from the Phoenician, since a large part of their ideas are owed to oriental fables.
Thoth, whom one wants to render exclusively to Egypt, according to Sanchoniathon, belongs to both countries: I have given Varro as a guarantor for this. The objection drawn from the foundation of Tyre, which one claims is subsequent to Sanchoniathon, is thus countered by him. Josephus declares that it was founded 240 years before the temple of Solomon. It is therefore 68 years before the fall of Troy. Moreover, it is a question here of Palaetyrus, of which Joshua speaks as a city already ancient.
Athena, who takes possession of Attica, is the Minerva or celestial Venus, already honored in Attica before Cecrops, for whom Porphyrion, ancient king of the country, had raised a temple. He believes he recognizes in this name the leader of a Phoenician colony. The Cabiri present more difficulty. Born of a daughter of Cronus and of Sydyc, mention is made of them...
1709 DISSERTATION ON THE FRAGMENTS OF SANCHUNIATHON. 1710
before the reign of this prince, as shipbuilders. Furthermore, the third Cabirus alone is the son of the Titaness, and in making the invention of ships known, he does not fix its date; it is only later that he does so after the foundation of Byblos.
As for the distribution of the earth which Cronos makes, it is limited to Attica and Egypt, which must have been inhabited after Phoenicia. The gradual propagation of men over the globe demonstrates this.
As for the significant names given to the children of Ouranos, they correspond to Phoenician names of similar value; for one sees from the Bible that oriental names all have a meaning.
It has been judged that the apotheoses were so many proofs of the fraudulence of these fragments. To which M. Mignot replies that the guarantors of this custom are numerous; he contents himself with referring to Cicero (1) and to Proclus (2). Finally, he says, if it had not been a general conviction that men could attain to divinity, how would it have occurred to any prince to attribute to himself divine honors and a religious cult?
After having exhausted the list of works favorable or contrary to the writing of Sanchuniathon that have come into my hands, I propose to examine this question *a priori*, and I will divide this examination as follows:
1° In the case of a supposition of the text of Sanchuniathon, can one believe that Eusebius was its author?
2° Porphyry, failing Eusebius, can he incur the blame?
3° Could Philo of Byblos be the author of the book, of which he named himself the translator?
First, I am convinced that in general Eusebius did not suppose or interpolate the citations of authors he alleges, and that in the special case which occupies us, he is far from being the true author of the fragments of a pseudonymous Sanchuniathon.
The first proof that I give is the scrupulous accuracy in the citations of preserved authors, namely: Diodorus Siculus, Plutarch, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Xenophon, and especially Plato, finally Porphyry in the *Treatise on Abstinence from Flesh*, not including Josephus, Philo the Jew, Tatian, Clement of Alexandria, of whom he makes frequent use. It was not given to him to foresee which of the authors he relied upon would reach posterity, or which ones time would take from us. We cannot, therefore, reasonably conclude that he altered some while respecting the others; it would be acting against all the rules of criticism.
What, in effect, would be the instrument that would help us distinguish among lost authors the suspect fragments from those to which we owe belief? It will be, one might say, the use he made of them to combat paganism and confirm the truth of Genesis and the Gospel. But everything in his book tends to this goal, so everything would be struck by the same disapprobation. Not all, one will say, have the same character of fraud.
A The greatest mark of fraud would be the insinuation of Mosaic or Christian doctrines. Thus the passages of Hecataeus, Eupolemus, Artapanus, Numenius, Demetrius, Aristeas or Aristobulus are rightly suspect; but this suspicion does not reach Eusebius. It reaches these authors themselves named by Josephus and Clement of Alexandria, and whose Jewish origin, for some of them, was only revealed to us by the same Eusebius (3).
As for Sanchuniathon, nothing in him betrays the Jew or the Christian: this touchstone is without efficacy regarding him, and his mythological similarities with Apollodorus, for example, cannot have the same value. I look at them, on the contrary, as an argument that confirms his authenticity (4).
If I do not find sufficient reason to believe in the duplicity of Eusebius in the current state of the question, how much more must I reject it from the point of view of contemporary readers? Paganism still had numerous adherents; hardly had Constantine just deserted it, and those schools of Athens and Alexandria which produced famous men even under the successors of Theodosius were not mute, and would not have left unpunished the audacity that would have deposited in a polemical work proofs of such evident bad faith. The forgeries then were directed at ancient works or those reputed as such: the Sibyls, Orpheus, Homer himself, and Hesiod, whose copies altered by time gave opportunity for such a stratagem (5). But by publishing a work of high antiquity, to make it appear under the name of a very recent translator, since Philo is from the end of the 1st century of the Christian era, that this Philo made himself known in Rome, where he had ended a long existence during which he had composed numerous writings, it seems to me very absurd to attribute to Eusebius the intention of attributing an entire work to him.
He would have done more, he would have usurped the name of Porphyry, that formidable adversary of Christianity, whose writings were studied by his friends as well as by his enemies: he would have drawn from them two attestations favorable to this Phoenician born of his imagination; but that cannot be, since one of the citations is found in the *Treatise on Abstinence*, which has escaped the shipwreck of so many ancient writings.
One must therefore recognize that Sanchuniathon was read by Porphyry, or rather his translator, Philo. This alone suffices to settle the question.
As for Eusebius, with what great advantage would he have composed the incoherent and detached lines which form the whole of the pieces preserved of this author? It is certainly not to confirm the Cosmogony of Moses. His differs to the point that Dodwell and Ursinus saw in it a work composed with the design of combating it, and that he himself cries out (6): "Behold then this creation of the universe without the concurrence of the Divinity!" Would he have invented a fable to give himself the right to this exclamation? All those of the philosophers before Anaxagoras gave the subject, as one sees, by the treatise of Plutarch on philosophical opinions.
(1) *Tusc.* 1, 12. (2) *Theology of Plato*, lib. III. (3) *Hist. eccl.*, lib. 6, ch. 15. (4) We approve this last remark of M. Séguier; and yet we do not admit the principle that it suffices that a pagan author insinuates Mosaic or Christian doctrines for him to be suspect. Not only do all authors contain more or less doctrines and facts relating to those of Moses, but also this must have been, and proves the veracity of these authors. The human race, having had the same origin, must have had the same traditions. A. BONNETTY. (5) It is evident that this proves that the Fathers, by using these pagan authors, only cited them because they knew they were accepted by everyone. Thus it was not in their time that they had been interpolated. A. BONNETTY. (6)
introducing atheism.
*Prepar.*, p. 55.A What especially distinguishes the doctrine of Moses from all others concerning the origin of things is that for him, God is before all else. In other philosophies and mythologies, on the contrary, the heaven and the earth, the dwelling-place of the divinities, preceded their appearance. As to all those generations which form the chain of the fabulous times of Phoenicia, it is difficult to believe that Eusebius would have devoted his time to such inventions, which had neither the merit of wit nor utility for his plan. Moreover, in the chronological reports, there is a marked difference between the citation of Porphyry taken from his work against Christianity and the chronology of Eusebius, regarding the era in which Sanchuniathon lived, a contemporary, he says, of Semiramis. I believe I have sufficiently demonstrated that our Eusebius could not have been the fabricator of Sanchuniathon.
2° Can the blame for it be imputed to Porphyry? This is what Dodwell had attempted, and what he was forced to renounce himself. Porphyry, in order to attack Christianity, had no need to mask himself; he even prided himself on showing himself as its aggressor. For what guarantee of success did he find in this roundabout way more than in his dialectic? This cosmogony, where divine intervention is excluded, could not even please a Neoplatono-Pythagorean who recognized at least the *nous* as having presided over the clearing up of matter and the organization of the universe. Nothing in all of antiquity justifies such an assertion, and the pious zeal of Dodwell, joined to his vast erudition, could not arm him with convincing proofs. He himself yields to the passage of Athenaeus, earlier than Porphyry, who names this Phoenician while altering his name.
Then, how could Porphyry not have given himself as the translator of the primitive work? He was a Tyrian as well as Philo. The glory of Phoenicia and the knowledge of its ancient idiom were as well placed in him as in his compatriot. Was it reasonable for him to count on the credulity of the readers to the point of supposing a writing of this length by Herennius Philo, who, having lived under Hadrian, was close enough to the era in which he himself appeared on the world's stage, since he died very old under Diocletian? It is superfluous, I believe, to dwell on a hypothesis abandoned by the very one who put it forward.
3° I come to Philo of Byblos; but it is necessary to preface the nomenclature of his works and the examination of the accusation brought against him with a short biography.
Suidas, whose biographies are in general so brief, expresses himself thus on his account: B ‘Philo of Byblos, a grammarian, was born toward the times of Nero, and prolonged his career greatly. He declares himself that he was consul under the name of Severus Herennius, in the 78th year of his age, corresponding to the 220th Olympiad. We have, written by him, 12 books of the *Acquisition and Choice of Books*; 30 of the *Cities* and the famous men that each of them has produced; on the reign of Hadrian, under whom he still lived, and other works (1).’
The same Suidas adds (2): ‘One must know that Philo, surnamed Herennius, was consul, as he says.’ This addition does not permit giving any other meaning than I have done to the preceding translation, namely that it is indeed Philo who was consul, although Kuster, in his note on Suidas, contests it.
Eudocia, in her *Ionia*, published by Villoison (3), repeats Suidas more or less, by adding furthermore to this author some epigrams, and terminates by saying: ‘He was also consul under Hadrian.’
There is, therefore, hardly any way to refuse the consular dignity to Philo, and Salmasius does not put it in doubt (4).
Nevertheless, a new citation from Suidas seems to cast uncertainty on this point. In fact, ‘Hermippus,’ says Suidas again, ‘was from Berytus, of the village situated in the middle of the lands, a disciple of Philo of Byblos, by whom he was recommended to Herennius Severus, under the Emperor Hadrian; a freedman by birth, he was nevertheless very learned and composed numerous works (5).’
Following this version, Philo of Byblos is no longer anything but a familiar of the consul's house (for I believe one must add *hypatos* to the text above after *Severus*), Herennius Severus, who recommends his disciple and his compatriot Hermippus to him.
Reinesius (6) supposed that Severus Herennius was the same personage as Serennus or Serenus Granus, or Granianus, named in the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius (7), as having written to Hadrian that one should not condemn the Christians on mere public clamor. C
What would give some support to this supposition is that a Serenus abridged the treatise of Philo, *Peri poleon*, On Cities, in three books (8).
New difficulty. Suidas entertains us, in effect, regarding this Serenus, to whom he gives the first name Aelius; but he is an Athenian grammarian (9).
What to conclude from these contradictions? Nothing positive on the political existence of Philo; but the certainty of the era in which he lived, and of his quality as a man of letters, author of numerous writings. For it matters little to us today to know if the consular dignity came as a supplement to his literary titles. The surname Herennius seems to have fallen to him from the patronage of the consul Severus Herennius. These two names, Philo of Byblos or Herennius Philo, are therefore identical; that seems incontestable. Many writings are cited under his name and under very different titles.
Besides those of which we have just spoken, I can still cite the following:
In the *Etymologicum magnum*, at the word *aentes*, a writing *On discourses* (*eis ta rhematika*).
At the words *aistos* and *atmetos*, a writing *On discourse* (*eis to rhematikon*), which could well be the same as the preceding. D
A At the word *geranos*, a writing *On the desire for learning* (*en tō peri chrēstomatheias*). The work *On Cities* (*peri poleōn*) appears to have been the most important of his writings; it fell within the framework of what we have been given since Stephen of Byzantium, who often made use of it. We still see traces of it in the extract of this Dictionary by Hermolaus. See the entries Argura, Bura, Iopé, Lampé, Babylon. This last article is remarkable for the borrowing made from Sanchoniathon. "Babylon, a city of Persia," he says, "metropolis called (later) Seleucia, a foundation of Babylon, a wise man, son of Belus, the wisest; and not, as Herodotus says, founded by Semiramis: this city is 2,000 years older than her, as Erennius says." At the word *Mégalopolis*, a city of Iberia, according to Philo. At the word *Mélitée*, the orthography of which he discusses, according to Philo. At the word *Andanie*, he cites Philo (*en tō peri poleōn*) in the work on cities. The description of Byblos is also taken from Sanchoniathon: "City of Phoenicia, the oldest of all, a foundation of Cronus." Béryte is in the same case: "City of Phoenicia, having become great from small; a foundation of Cronus." The article *Laodicée* seems drawn from the same source. "Laodicée, says he, a city of Syria, formerly named (leukē aktē), white shore: before all these names, it had that of Rhamita; a shepherd, named Rhamanthas, having been crushed by a thunderbolt in this place. This name signifies the God from on high (*ap' hypsous ho theos*); Rhaman, signifying height, and Athas, God. It is Philo who expresses himself thus (*houtōs Philōn*)."
Constantine Porphyrogenitus also authorizes himself by this work, as well as Stephen, at the word *Dyrrachium*. "After Rhizonicus, they say, is the city of Lisse, and Acrolisse, then Epidamne, a colony of the Corcyreans, which now bears the name of Dyrrachium, the name of the peninsula where this city is built, according to what Philo writes." As in his work on *Cities*, Philo indicates the famous men of each city, by continuation Stephen cites Philo in his book of *Physicians* (*en tois iatrikois*), and speaks of Philonides of Dyrrachium; which, in my sense, means that he names Philonides among the famous physicians of Dyrrachium. B One finds, however, the same title of work attributed to Erennius Philo in the article *Cyrte*. "In the city of Cyrte was born Denys, a famous physician, named Cyrte (*Kyrtos*), because of his fatherland and not by the physical turn of his body." Erennius Philo makes mention of it in his treatise (*peri iatrikōn*). One sees here that it is a separate work; it treats rather of famous physicians than of the art itself. However, a passage of Galen cites it as having given an allegorical name to honey, which he called the stream of the daughters of the Bulls (*nama thugaterōn Taurōn*), according to the fabulous opinion of the origin of bees reported by Virgil. At the entry *Nisibe*, of the same Stephen, Philo is cited *en Phoinikikois*, which well indicates the translation of Sanchoniathon, and the etymology which is given there of the name of this city is entirely drawn from the Phoenician language.
The scholiast of Apollonius of Rhodes has also authorized himself by the doctrines of Philo, but in a grammatical relation. One reads there, in effect, on verse 118 of the first book: "*Ephiāōnto* instead of *epaizon*; but Philo [says it is used] instead of *hōmiloun* regarding the epic." This cannot belong except to a book of grammar. Is it the same as the *Great Etymological* calls *ta rhēmatika*? I believe so. Is it this work whose extract has reached us, which Walckenaer has placed after his *Ammonius*? Or rather, is it not instead the very book printed under the name of *Ammonius*? The resemblance of the two treatises, and even more the use that Eustathius makes of it, by citing the diverse values of words reputed to be synonyms, would attribute them to our author rather than to Ammonius. In effect, he names Erennius Philo incessantly in his book on the difference of words reputed to be synonyms (*en tō peri diaphorōn sēmainomenōn*), and never does he cite Ammonius; which gave to Paul Leopardus the idea that the work which passes for being by Ammonius was actually by Erennius Philo. He repeats it in his *Emendationes* every time that he cites this vocabulary. Ménage, cited by Bayle, shared this opinion openly. The *Great Etymological*, which invokes Erennius Philo often, names Ammonius only twice, and for things which have no bearing on grammar.
Be that as it may, Walckenaer has defended with warmth, in his Preface, the rights of Ammonius to the composition of this work. I abandon this controversy, while maintaining, according to Eustathius and the *Great Etymological*, that Philo made a work on the synonyms of the Greek language, of which an abridgment at least has reached us under the altered name of Eranius Philo. Philo, in the *Ethiopics*, is alleged by Antigonus of Carystus. "Ctesias," writes this narrator, "that there exists in Ethiopia a fountain whose water is red like cinnabar, and those who drink of it become mad. Philo, who wrote the *Ethiopics*, says the same thing." Is it our author? One could believe it, by bringing together with this relation that which Philo, cited by Eusebius, says of himself: "Seeing the divergence of opinions which reigns among the Greeks, I confirmed myself in the opinion that it was so, and I decided to..."
write three books under the title of A *Wonderful History*? It could be that the *Ethiopics* were a part of it. However, I must admit that Strabo speaks of a Philo who wrote a navigation in Ethiopia (τὸν συγγράψαντα τὸν εἰς Αἰθιοπίαν). This homonym would be earlier than Philo of Byblos.
The Royal Library possesses a manuscript commentary, no. 1885, titled: *Herennii philosophi expositio in metaphysica Aristotelis*, or *Commentary of the philosopher Herennius on the Metaphysics of Aristotle*. This work appears incontestably to belong to our author. By adding to this nomenclature the epigrams of which Eudocia speaks, one will considerably advance the list of real or probable works of Philo of Byblos.
Finally, there remain the *Phoenician History* or *Phoenica* of Sanchoniathon, attributed as a translation to Philo by Eusebius, alleged by Porphyry and Stephen of Byzantium in the article *Nisibis*.
We have given, in what preceded, the opinion of Lydus on the authority of this historian, following the restitutions of M. Hase, my learned colleague, and my own. In his treatise *On Months*, different from this one and published by Schow, the same Lydus did more than merely rely on it; he extracted two fragments from it which we find verbatim in Eusebius. The first concerns serpents.
'The dragon is the most lively of all animals and all fire (Eusebius adds to what Taautos says), which makes it possess an inconceivable velocity through its respiration (Eusebius, "through the lungs"). Without feet and without hands, without any of the external aids by the help of which other animals execute their movements, it moves itself and provides the types of numerous transformations. It is also endowed with the greatest longevity; not only because by shedding its skin it returns from old age to youth, but because it is natural for it to reach a measureless length; then, when it has arrived at the final time, it dissolves and annihilates itself.'
The second passage is this one:
'The circle is of all figures the most perfect. That is why the Egyptians, tracing the figure of the universe, represent it by a winged circle of a fire-color, and place in the middle a serpent with a hawk’s head as if enclosing the Agathodaemon.' Lydus adds: 'The whole of this figure is as the letter Θ is for us.'
The discussion of the few variants of the two texts would be misplaced here: it will be found in the publication of the *Evangelical Preparation*, in Greek, with a French translation, which we are preparing.
Finally, to exhaust all the writings of Philo, as far as it has been possible for us to do so, we will recall what we have already mentioned, the B *Treatise on the Jews*, of which Celsus speaks, cited by Origen in response to this philosopher, where he shows great animosity against this people.
It now remains for me to discuss the causes that could have engaged Philo to suppose the work that he gave under the name of Sanchoniathon; which I have already attempted in response to Dodwell.
I see from what precedes that this author was 78 years old under Hadrian, during the 220th Olympiad. At that time, one could hardly distinguish the Christians from the Jews, of whom they were thought to form a sect. One should not believe that it was they whom he would have wanted to attack by this fiction, and how poorly would he not have set about it? The cosmogony of Moses, although acknowledged by the Christians, belongs more especially to the Jews. He was not, therefore, attacking them directly by inventing the one he supposedly attributed to the name of Sanchoniathon. As for his theogony, it was as indifferent to them as all the others borrowed from the Egyptians, the Chaldeans, or the Greeks.
Are these only the Jews whom he wanted to attack (for such is the principal argument of Dodwell), in order to prevent the favorable effect that the recent writing of Josephus against Apion could produce? Let us see how he arrived at his goal. His cosmogony was different from that of Moses. But all those of the various peoples who bordered Judea had the same character: their fable was as extravagant as that of Sanchoniathon, and as devoid, in the explanation of the origin of things, of divine intervention. All, like the Phoenicians, claimed to hold their science from an ancient and irrefragable authority, whether from sacred pillars or from authors approaching divinity. They had no inferiority to the Phoenician accounts for attacking the Jews. Philo would therefore have gone to a very useless trouble to compose a fable that had no chance of success over the others in opposition to Genesis. I know, through Celsus, that Philo, of Canaanite race, hated the Jews. But from that to the supposition of an entire theology given to the public for the first time around the 220th Olympiad, there is a long way.
I lose myself, therefore, in the search for the motives that one attributes to each of the three writers whom one wishes to present as pseudonymous authors of the fragments that occupy us, and I do not see in the rules of criticism any reason to attribute them to them. What does one find strange about an old Phoenician historian, contemporary with the siege of Troy, not being more reasonable than Hesiod, than Ovid, than Diodorus of Sicily, in the exposition of the origins of the world? If the proof that he is not more absurd than them, resulting from the comparison of the texts, could present some interest to the readers of the C *Annales de Philosophie chrétienne*, I would soon have accomplished this work as a follow-up to the present memoir.