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Take, then, my watered wine in the name of the Second Maccabaean, for here, as he says, "will I make an end. And if I have done well, and as is fitting the story, it is that which I desired: but if slenderly and meanly, it is that which I could attain unto." I have killed you at the first cast. I feel it. Has any city, save, perhaps, Cairo, been so written out as Florence?
But it is in the Maccabaean Daniel and in the apocryphal Tobit that this doctrine of angels, in its more precise form, first appears; and it is evidently a product of the influence of the Zend religion of the Persians on the Jewish mind. Dr. Leviticus, part ii., pp. 284-287.
That they tried to meet the demand of the East with a new universal cult of imperial utility and that some, like Antiochus IV, the tyrant of early Maccabaean history, tried very hard, is clear. That they failed and that Rome failed after them is writ large in the history of the expansion of half-a-dozen Eastern cults before the Christian era, and of Christianity itself.
Simon Thassi was the only survivor of the brave Maccabaean brothers, but he finished their work, and obtained from Rome, Egypt, and Syria, an acknowledgment that the Jews were a free people, and that he was their prince and priest. He took the castle on Mount Zion from the Syrians, and so fortified the Temple, that it became like another citadel, and he was honoured by all his neighbours.
The Hellenized University of Tarsus, which educated Saul, and the Hellenistic party in Palestine, whose desire to make Jerusalem a southern Antioch brought on the Maccabaean struggle, both owed in a measure their being and their continued vitality to the existence and larger growth of Antioch on the Orontes.
The brave and prudent conduct of the insurrection by the heroic family of the Maccabees and the internal dissension in the Syrian empire did more for them than the letters of their powerful allies; during the strife between the Syrian kings Trypho and Demetrius Nicator autonomy and exemption from tribute were formally accorded to the Jews ; and soon afterwards the head of the Maccabaean house, Simon son of Mattathias, was even formally acknowledged by the nation as well as by the Syrian great-king as high priest and prince of Israel .
Also they have suffered the distresses of disorder so intensely that peace in any form is most welcome to them. Titus approacheth reluctantly. He had rather deliver Jerusalem than besiege it. I am of the loved and dethroned Maccabaean line acceptable to every faction of Jewry, from the Essenes to the Sicarii.
"I am that servant of Amaryllis," he said courteously. "But show me yet another sign." The Ephesian drew from his bosom the Maccabaean signet and flashed its blue fires at the Greek. The servant stepped hastily between the soldiers and the new-comer. "Thy name?" he asked in a whisper. "I am Philadelphus Maccabaeus." The servant bent and taking the hem of the woolen tunic pressed it to his lips.
Making every allowance for the enthusiastic description of an admiring countryman, who has recorded the exploits of the Maccabaean chiefs, there will still remain the most ample evidence to satisfy every candid reader, that in all the great battles the fortune of war followed the standard of the Jews.
The brave and prudent conduct of the insurrection by the heroic family of the Maccabees and the internal dissension in the Syrian empire did more for them than the letters of their powerful allies; during the strife between the Syrian kings Trypho and Demetrius Nicator autonomy and exemption from tribute were formally accorded to the Jews ; and soon afterwards the head of the Maccabaean house, Simon son of Mattathias, was even formally acknowledged by the nation as well as by the Syrian great-king as high priest and prince of Israel .
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