The Greeks in Bactria and India c12.91

c12.91

These Questions of Ptolemy II, though embodied by Pseudo-Aristeas in a Jewish propaganda work, are in no sense Jewish propaganda. A reference has been thought to be detected in 228 to the fifth commandment of Moses; but even if this be so it has no propaganda value, for many people beside Jews honoured their parents.³ In 263 occurs a statement which is very close to James iv, 6, and I Peter v, 5, ‘God resisteth the proud but giveth grace to the humble’;⁴ but attempts to find the source of 263 in the Old Testament have not been very successful,⁵ and it is centuries earlier than the two Epistles. There is nothing else. The Questions never mention Jewish religion or customs or even the Jewish people; these were not the things on which, in that document, Ptolemy was seeking information. His questions are about himself and his own rule—the duties, privileges, ambitions of a king; and this is underlined in 294, where at the end he thanks the Elders, not for telling him anything about their own religion or ideas, but for giving διδαχὴν ἐμοὶ πρὸς τὸ βασιλεύειν, ‘teaching me how to rule’. The document is in fact a περὶ βασιλείας or treatise on kingship,¹ but written by a hellenised Jew and not by a Greek. At the turn of the fourth-third centuries B.C., and right down the third, nearly every Greek philosopher wrote a περὶ βασιλείας as a matter of course;² the Hellenistic kingships were a new thing, and philosophy worked hard at shaping the theory of the new phenomenon, though most of the literature is lost. The Questions are full of the well-known third-century terminology of the matter:³ beneficence,⁴ equity,⁵ good feeling towards all men,⁶ and above all the famous φιλανθρωπία or love of one’s subjects,⁷ which is said (265) to be the most necessary possession of all for a king.