Early Greek Philosophy

to which we shall return), though, if he had known of an Egyptian philosophy, it would have suited his argument better to mention that. It is not until later, when Egyptian priests and Alexandrian Jews began to vie with one another in discovering the sources of Greek philosophy in their own past, that we have definite statements to the effect that it came from Phoenicia or Egypt. ✓ But the so-called Egyptian philosophy was only arrived at by a process of turning primitive myths into allegories. We are still able to judge Philo's Old Testament interpretation for ourselves, and we may be sure that the Egyptian allegorists were even more arbitrary; for they had far less promising material to work on. The myth of Isis and Osiris, for instance, is first interpreted according to the ideas of later Greek philosophy, and then declared to be the source of that philosophy.

✓ This method of interpretation culminated with the Neopythagorean Numenius, from whom it passed to the Christian Apologists. It is Numenius who asks, "What is Plato but Moses speaking Attic?"¹ Clement and Eusebius give the remark a still wider application.² At the Renaissance, this farrago was revived along with everything else, and certain ideas derived from the Praeparatio Evangelica continued for long to color accepted views.³ Cudworth speaks of the ancient "Moschical or Mosaical philosophy" taught by Thales and Pythagoras.⁴ It is important to realize the true origin of this prejudice against the originality of the Greeks. It does not come from modern researches.

¹ Numenius, fr. 13 (R. P. 624), Τί γάρ ἐστι Πλάτων ἢ Μωυσῆς ἀττικίζων;
² Clement (Strom. i. p. 8, 5, Stählin) calls Plato ὁ ἐξ Ἑβραίων φιλόσοφος.
³ Exaggerated notions of Oriental wisdom were popularized by the Encyclopédie, which accounts for their diffusion and persistence. Bailly (Lettres sur l'origine des sciences) assumed that the Orientals had received fragments of highly advanced science from a people which had disappeared, but which he identified with the inhabitants of Plato's Atlantis!
⁴ We learn from Strabo (xvi. p. 757) that it was Posidonius who introduced Mochus of Sidon into the history of philosophy. He attributes the atomic theory to him. His identification with Moses, however, is a later tour de force due to Philo of Byblos, who published a translation of an ancient Phoenician history by Sanchuniathon, which was used by Porphyry and afterwards by Eusebius.