first.  It became also a great intellectual centre, and its famous library was the largest ever collected in classical antiquity.  This city was the home of scholars and philosophers from all parts of the world.  Under the auspices of an enlightened monarch, the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek, the version being called the Septuagint,—­an immense service to sacred literature.  The Jews enjoyed great prosperity under this Grecian prince, and Palestine was at peace with powerful neighbors, protected by the great king who favored the Jews as the Persian monarchs had done.  Under his successor, Ptolemy Euergetes, a still more powerful king, the empire reached its culminating glory, and was extended as far as Antioch and Babylon.  Under the next Ptolemy,—­Philopater,—­degeneracy set in; but the empire was not diminished, and the Syrian monarch Antiochus III., called the Great, was defeated at the battle of Raphia, 217.  Under the successor of the enervated Egyptian king, Ptolemy V., a child five years old, Antiochus the Great retrieved the disaster at Raphia, and in 199 won a victory over Scopas the Egyptian general, in consequence of which Judaea, with Phoenicia and Coele-Syria, passed from the Ptolemies to the Seleucidae.

Judaea now became the battle-ground for the contending Syrian and Egyptian armies, and after two hundred years of peace and prosperity her calamities began afresh.  She was cruelly deceived and oppressed by the Syrian kings and their generals, for the “kings of the North” were more hostile to the Jews than the “kings of the South.”  In consequence of the incessant wars between Syria and Egypt, many Jews emigrated, and became merchants, bankers, and artisans in all the great cities of the world, especially in Syria, Asia Minor, Greece, Italy, and Egypt, where all departments of industry were freely opened to them.  In the time of Philo, there were more than a million of Jews in these various countries; but they remained Jews, and tenaciously kept the laws and traditions of their nation.  In every large city were Jewish synagogues.

It was under the reign of Antiochus IV., called Epiphanes, when Judaea was tributary to Syria, that those calamities and miseries befell the Jews which rendered it necessary for a deliverer to arise.  Though enlightened and a lover of art, this monarch was one of the most cruel, rapacious, and tyrannical princes that have achieved an infamous immortality.  He began his reign with usurpation and treachery.  Being unsuccessful in his Egyptian campaigns, he vented his wrath upon the Jews, as if he were mad.  Onias III. was the high-priest at the time.  Antiochus dispossessed him of his great office and gave it to his brother Jason, a Hellenized Jew, who erected in Jerusalem a gymnasium after the Greek style.  But the king, a zealot in paganism, bitterly and scornfully detested the Jewish religion, and resolved to root it out.  His general, Apollonius, had orders to massacre the