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THE DATE AT 2 MACCABEES 11.21
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 June 2020
Extract
In the course of describing the events of the 160s b.c.e., 2 Maccabees presents the texts of four letters: the Seleucid general Lysias to the Jews granting some concessions and referring their other demands to the king (11.16–21); two letters of Antiochus, to Lysias (11.22–6) and to the Jews (11.27–33), granting various concessions; and Roman envoys to the Jews (11.34–8) endorsing Lysias’ concessions. The third and fourth letters have at their ends (suspiciously) the same date, 15 Xanthikos of Seleucid year 148, c. March 164 b.c.e. The second has no date. The first, Lysias’ letter, is dated ἔτους ἑκατοστοῦ τεσσαρακοστοῦ ὀγδόου, διοσκορινθίου τετράδι καὶ εἰκάδι: year 148 on the 24th of a month; but the month name, standardly printed as Διὸς Κορινθίου, is impossible.
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References
1 Hanhart, R., ‘Zum Text des 2. und 3. Makkabäerbuches’, Nachr. Göttingen 1961.13, 473–4Google Scholar; and his Septuaginta IX.2 (Göttingen, 1959), the modern edition.
2 Habicht, C., ‘Royal documents in Maccabees II’, HSPh 80 (1976), 1–18Google Scholar; and his commentary Jüdische Schriften aus hellenistisch-römischer Zeit 9 (1976), 256–60. He had consulted, among others, A. Momigliano, who takes much the same view about the relation of the letters but holds that the Antiochus V text is a forgery: ‘The second book of Maccabees’, CPh 70 (1975), 81–8.
3 Habicht (n. 2), 10–13.
4 In fact, Republican officials, unlike Hellenistic kings, did not date their letters at all (nor did Cicero or Pliny). And when a Greek city dockets a Roman letter with its local arrival date, that entry precedes rather than follows the text: Sherk, R.K., Roman Documents from the Greek East. Senatus Consulta and Epistulae to the Age of Augustus (Baltimore, 1969)Google Scholar, nos 43.1; 58.1, 73, 85; 62.11; 67.1.
5 The Venetus at 11.21 diverges slightly from the Alexandrinus in inserting καὶ and rephrasing the final numeral: ἔτους ἑκατοστοῦ καὶ τεσσαρακοστοῦ καὶ ὀγδόου, διοσκορινθίου εἰκάδι τετάρτῃ.
6 E.g. Charles, R.H., The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (Oxford, 1913), 1.147Google Scholar, ‘most probably, an error for Διοσκυροῦ (i.e. the third month of the Cretan calendar) … the name betrays the king's love of introducing Hellenic novelties into the very calendar of the East’. Similarly, Hanhart (n. 1), 473–4. But a month Διοσκυρός is not attested in the inscriptions of Crete (only in the medieval hemerologia manuscripts: cf. Samuel, A.E., Greek and Roman Chronology [Munich, 1972], 172–5Google Scholar), nor is the cult of the Dioscuri. In fact, no Greek month seems to have been named for Dioscuri: Trümpy, C., Untersuchungen zu den altgriechischen Monatsnamen (Heidelberg, 1997), 291–2Google Scholar.
7 Niese, B., ‘Kritik der beiden Makkabäerbücher’, Hermes 35 (1900), 268–307Google Scholar, 453–527, at 483 saw the similarity to the phrase, but deduced that, if this is what Antiochus wrote, he coined a month-name to honour Corinth; Dittenberger, W., ‘Dioskorios’, RE 5 (1903), 1085–6Google Scholar, at 1085 dismissed this as not credible. The phrase does not seem to have been mentioned since.
8 Cf. schol. Ar. Eccl. 828 ταυτολογία καὶ λῆροι; Zen. 3.21 παροιμία ἐπὶ τῶν τὰ αὐτὰ λεγόντων καὶ πραττόντων.
9 E.g. Demon, FGrHist. 327 F 19; schol. Pl. Euthyd. 292e; Paus. Att. δ 17 Erbse; Phot. Lex. δ 656 Theodoridis.
10 Hude, C., Scholia in Thucydidem (Leipzig, 1927), 227, 331, 379Google Scholar: all from Pal. gr. 252 (X/XI cent.). Many Thucydides scholia are probably late, but some have been shown to go back to Imperial and even Hellenistic scholarship: see Luschnat, O., ‘Die Thukydidesscholien’, Philologus 98 (1954), 14–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 See Kennedy, S., ‘A classic dethroned: the decline and fall of Thucydides in Middle Byzantium’, GRBS 58 (2018), 607–35Google Scholar.
12 He would already have read and doubtless approved 1 Maccabees 15.22, where, after quoting a Roman consul's letter to Ptolemy VII, the narrative continues that the consul ‘wrote the same things’ to other recipients, and does not repeat those texts. The two books of Maccabees quote many documents elsewhere than in 2 Maccabees 11, but each in isolation, and so offered the critic no comparable instance of repetition.
13 Warm thanks to the editor and reviewers at CQ and especially to Dr Thomas Coward, who kindly inspected for me the Venetus in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana.