186 LATIN LANGUAGE 



Tarsus or Soli or some other centre of Stoic teaching! But of the 

 Hellenization of Palestine we know more: how from Alexandria, as 

 a centre of influence, the process went on quietly during the third 

 century B.C. until the violent attempt of Antiochus ^Tu^av^s or 

 'ETri/xavT/s to force the gods of Greece upon Judsea, and his insults to 

 the Temple and the Torah, led to a violent reaction, and Judaism 

 asserted itself again under the Maccabees. But not till Hellenism 

 had left a deep mark upon Jewish thought and Jewish literature. 

 All this is fully recognized by Jewish as well as by Christian histori- 

 ans. The Greek cities to the east of the Jordan, alluded to by Jose- 

 phus, cannot have been without their influence. But even if Hellen- 

 ism was at a low ebb in Palestine between Antiochus and the birth 

 of Christ, the labors of the learned in the flourishing Jewish colony at 

 Alexandria, though directed primarily to spreading a knowledge of 

 the Jewish scriptures among the heathen and reconciling the teach- 

 ings of the Law with Greek philosophy, were not without their re- 

 action on Judaism itself. A knowledge of this Hellenized and 

 humanized Judaism must have been spread over the world by the 

 dispersions and settlements of the Jews which followed the over- 

 throw of Jewish independence by Pompey in B.C. 63. At Rome the 

 Jews formed a regular colony on the west of the Tiber, and we 

 hear of them in Cicero and Horace. 



The converging streams of thought from Greece and from Judsea 

 were bound to meet; and the phraseology of St. Paul can hardly 

 be explained except on the supposition that Christianity and Hel- 

 lenism had already met in him. But at Rome the effective union 

 came later. The old religion maintained its ground for centuries, side 

 by side with the new; and when Christianity triumphed, it triumphed 

 rather by taking its rival up into itself than by destroying it. Thus 

 if Stoicism prepared the way for Christianity, Christianity made 

 Stoicism for the first time a force capable of appealing to all sorts 

 and conditions of men. The earliest extant product in the Latin 

 language of this fusion of elements is the Octavius of Minucius Felix, 

 in which Christianity and Stoicism are so blended that it is sometimes 

 difficult to say whether the argument adduced is Christian or Stoic. 

 Its date is not certain; but its latest editor, Waltzing, places it at 

 the end of the second century. The latter part of that century had 

 witnessed the production of the first Latin translation of the Bible, 

 the Itala, and the beginning of the fifth century saw the completion 

 of Jerome's Vulgate. Boethius, " the last of the Romans whom Cato 

 or Tully would have recognized for their countryman," as Gibbon 

 calls him, closes our second period, a period, no doubt, of de- 

 cadence in literature, as literature; but a period of full vitality and 

 efficiency in the history of the Latin language. By the close of the 

 fifth century Latin Christianity had taken definite shape, a body of 



