ur nation, and to set before them such as upon occasion have made
mention of us in their own writings. Pythagoras, therefore, of Samos,
lived in very ancient times, and was esteemed a person superior to all
philosophers in wisdom and piety towards God. Now it is plain that
he did not only know our doctrines, but was in very great measure a
follower and admirer of them. There is not indeed extant any writing
that is owned for his [15] but many there are who have written his
history, of whom Hermippus is the most celebrated, who was a person very
inquisitive into all sorts of history. Now this Hermippus, in his first
book concerning Pythagoras, speaks thus: "That Pythagoras, upon the
death of one of his associates, whose name was Calliphon, a Crotonlate
by birth, affirmed that this man's soul conversed with him both night
and day, and enjoined him not to pass over a place where an ass had
fallen down; as also not to drink of such waters as caused thirst again;
and to abstain from all sorts of reproaches." After which he adds thus:
"This he did and said in imitation of the doctrines of the Jews and
Thracians, which he transferred into his own philosophy." For it is very
truly affirmed of this Pythagoras, that he took a great many of the laws
of the Jews into his own philosophy. Nor was our nation unknown of
old to several of the Grecian cities, and indeed was thought worthy
of imitation by some of them. This is declared by Theophrastus, in his
writings concerning laws; for he says that "the laws of the Tyrians
forbid men to swear foreign oaths." Among which he enumerates some
others, and particularly that called Corban: which oath can only be
found among the Jews, and declares what a man may call "A thing devoted
to God." Nor indeed was Herodotus of Halicarnassus unacquainted with our
nation, but mentions it after a way of his own, when he saith thus, in
the second book concerning the Colchians. His words are these: "The only
people who were circumcised in their privy members originally, were the
Colchians, the Egyptians, and the Ethiopians; but the Phoenicians and
those Syrians that are in Palestine confess that they learned it from
the Egyptians. And for those Syrians who live about the rivers Thermodon
and Parthenius, and their neighbors the Macrones, they say they have
lately learned it from the Colchians; for these are the only people that
are circumcised among mankind, and appear to have done the very same
thing with t