x PREFACE. 



1593, says that Hermes lived some time before Moses, and 

 quotes Eusebius in his " Chronicle " as stating that Cath 

 or Tat his son flourished in the first year of Armeus, king 

 of Egypt, which was twenty years before the death of 

 Moses. On the other hand, John Albert Fabricius, the 

 learned author of the " Bibliotheca Grseca " (published 

 1705-1728), has relegated all the " Hermaica," in his 

 " Historia Literaria," to the later times of Jamblichus and 

 r Porphyry. Even Pietschmann, whose dissertation has 

 ^ been already mentioned, makes no distinction between 

 ( the legendary Hermes and the author of " Poemandres." 



Notwithstanding these opinions, it is certain that the 

 Hermes who was the author of the works here translated 

 must, as Causabon and later writers (such as L. Menard, 

 who thinks he was probably contemporaneous with St. 

 John) have shown, have been a Greek living at Alexandria, 

 subsequently to Philo Judseus and Josephus, in the end 

 of the first and beginning of the second century; who, it 

 would seem, assumed the name of Hermes in order to give 

 greater weight to his teaching. The Fathers above quoted, 

 Lactantius himself, and the editors of Hermes above named, 

 may have been misled as to his great antiquity by the 

 hieroglyphical representations of him; but the facts, then 

 unknown, but now demonstrated, that the use of these 

 characters lasted in Egypt down to the tenth year of 

 Diocletian (he died A.D. 313) at the least, and that, as 

 Henry Brugsch and later investigators have shown, the 

 ordinary writing on papyrus in the National Library at 

 Paris, some of which is entirely in Greek characters, is 

 not earlier than the times of Nero, refute their supposi- 

 I tions. It is, moreover, quite impossible that an author 

 who shows an intimate acquaintance with the phraseology 

 of Plato, with the Hebrew Scriptures as extant in the 

 Septuagint version (sometimes using the very expressions 

 therein contained), who reproduces the language of the 

 Sermon on the Mount and of the Gospel, Epistles, and 

 Eevelation of St. John, and sometimes of St. Paul, can 

 have flourished at so early a period. 



