Fichamentos

FichamentosMomigliano alien wisdom limits of helenizationPag. 2

The Persian Empire was indeed another story altogether: it had ruled over Greeks. But even for the Iranians the Hellenistic era meant a change in appreciation: the prophet Zoroaster took the place of King Cyrus as the most characteristic Iranian figure. Rome replaced Persia as the empire by which the Greeks were directly challenged. Parthia was by now a remote state, though formidable: the Magi had some of the prestige of the mysterious region from which they came and offered spiritual goods of their own.Pg 4

About 24o-230 B.c. Eratosthenes put together Carthaginians, Romans, Persians and Indians as the barbarian nations that came closest to the standards of Greek civilization and specified that Carthaginians and Romans were the best governed (Strabo 1-4-9, p. 66).Pg. 9

During the Persian Empire Aramaic did not function as an international language in the same way in which Greek did in the period after Alexander. Aramaic did not penetrate deeply into Greece or Italy. There are exceptions. I would take as one of them the letters in Assyrian characters sent from Persia to Sparta which the Athenians intercepted and managed to translate in 425 B.c.: for surely by Assyria grammata Thucydides must mean an Aramaic text (4.50). If Democritus, who was supposed to have appropriated the sayings of Ahiqar, was not in fact acquainted with them, at least Theophrastus was (Diog. Laert. 5.50; Clem. Alcx. Stromata 1.15.69).Axial Age. No vivido no Egito e Mesopotmia, mas na Grcia, Prsia e Israel.

Papel da Prsia Egito e Mesopotmia na Basse poque. Pg 11Persia, Mesopotamia and Egypt remain more or less where Hellenistic erudition put them as the holders of barbarian wisdom.Origem de Elefantina e uso na poca persaPg 76

In Egypt native and Persian kings attracted not only Greek and Carian but also Jewish mercenaries. The origins of the military colony of Elephantine are unknown, but the author of the letter which goes under the name of Aristeas must have found somewhere the piece of information that Jewish soldiers helped Psammetichus in his campaign against the king of the Ethiopians ( 13). The Psammetichus in question is Psammeticbus II who had the support of Greeks, Carians and perhaps Phoenicians in his expedition of 589 against Nubia. The graffiti left by these soldiers at Abu Simbel in Lower Nubia are famous. If the information of Aristeas is correct, Jewish and Greek soldiers must have rubbed shoulders in the same campaign. The absence of Hebrew graffiti at Abu Simbel is perhaps not sufficient to throw doubt upon Aristeas. A recent papyrological discovery shows that in the fourth century b.c. a story like the judgement of Solomon was known in Greece (Pap. Ory. 2944), but there is no sign that it came from the Bible.Pag 81

Both Greeks and Jews were living on the borders of the Persian Empire. Nehemiah' s work can best be understood if compared with Greek events. In political terms Nehemiah was a tyrant imposed by the Persians just as much as Histiaeus and others had been imposed as tyrants over Greek cities by the Persian government.Pag 123Xenophanes de colophon fr. 18 Diehl == 22 Edmonds: 'Such things should be said beside the fire in winter-time when a man reclines full-fed on a soft couch, drinking the sweet wine and munching chick-peas - such things as: "Who and whence are you? and how old are you, good man? how old were you when the Me de came? "Cyrus was as epoch-making for the Greeks as he was for the Jews - though the reasons were different.Pag. 126

But there are serious limitations even to our knowledge of the Greek reactions to Persia. Almost nothing is preserved for the period before the Ionian rebellion. Indeed the texts transmitted to us reflect a completely different situation: a situation in which the Persians are mili.tarily inferior to the Greeks and have already been defeated at Marathon and Salamis. What was written before 500 B.c. by Scylax and perhaps by Hecataeus of Miletus has disappeared.Final do sculo VI. Exportao da Filosofia dos magos pela Persia triunfante? Influncia Grega

The sudden elevation of Time to a primeval god in Pherecydes, the identification of Fire with Justice in Heraclitus, Anaximander's astronomy placing the stars nearer to the Earth than the moon these and other ideas immediately call to mind theories which we have been taught to consider Zoroastrian - or at any rate Persian - or at least Oriental.