Page:Jewish Encyclopedia Volume 2.pdf/185

147 THE JEWISH ENCYCLOPEDIA

147

is found). He was called Ochus by the Greeks. After he had rid himself of the rightful successor, Darius, he mounted his father's throne in the autumn of 359 B.C., and reigned until the summer of 338. Hence the Babylonians and the Ptolemaic canon assign twenty-one years to his reign, while Diodorus (xv. 93; xvii. 5), together with the Greek chronologies, wrongly extends his reign by some years (see Meyer, " Forschungen zur Alten Geschichte," ii. 466, 488 etseq., 496 et seq.). Artaxerxes III. Ochus was a cruel and bloodthirsty despot. He began his reign by murdering all relatives who might become dangerous to him. He was, however, a most energetic ruler, who allowed himself to be discouraged by no obstacle or failure, but ruthlessly prosecuted his His Character, purposes. With the assistance of the

D1D8

unscrupulous eunuch Bagoas and his Rhodian captains of mercenaries, Mentor and Memnon fitting tools for his schemes he succeeded in

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—

cementing the rapidly disintegrating empire of Persia by bloodshed, treachery, and fraud. He crushed several insurrections, notably that of the rebellious Sidonian in 345-344; and after many unsuccessful attempts he succeeded, in 343 or 342, in subduing

Egypt

also,

and made

it

suffer severely

for its

rebellion.

A

certain conflict with his Jewish subjects seems have been connected with these struggles. Josephus ('' Ant." xi. 7, § 1) relates that when the high priest Judas (Joiada) was succeeded by his son Johanan (Jonathan or John compare Neh. xii. 11, 22), his brother Jesus (Joshua) sought to deprive him of the office. Jesus relied for support upon Bagoses, Artaxerxes' general (the Bagoas previously mentioned), and so enraged Johanan that the latter struck him down in the Temple. Bagoses seven years later avenged the murder of Jesus by exacting of the Jews a tax of 50 drachmas for each lamb offered at the daily sacrifices. He also unlawfully and to

Kohut," pp.

Artaxerxes I. Arthur Legend

44*7 et seq.) to refer to

the Sassanian king Artaxerxes

I.

the conquests of

(226-241).

In 338 Artaxerxes III. with most of his sons, was murdered by Bagoas; one of his sons, Arses, was elevated to the throne but after a reign of two or three years he also was put to death by the mur,



derer of his father. «•

Mb.

E.

ARTEMION

Leader of the Jewish insurrection in Cyprus against Trajan, 117. There are but scanty details of this revolt. According to Roman sources,

the Jews destroyed the capital of the island of Salamis and slew 240,000 Greeks. The revolt was quelled by Trajan's general Martius Turbo; and to judge by the atrocities committed by him, the suppression was attended with very sanguinary results for the Jews. The law passed in Cyprus after the revolt, that no Jew should set foot on the island, and that, if cast there by shipwreck, he should suffer death, shows the hatred felt by the Greek Cypriotes toward the Jews. Bibliography Dion Cassius, History, lxviii. 323 Gratz,

Oesch. der Juden,



it.

137-129.

&.

L. G.

ARTHUR LEGEND

The cycle of stories clustering around the semi-mythical hero King Arthur of England, and which finds its place in Jewish literature in a Hebrew translation entitled 10K>n "1SD

n^ivn ("The Book of the Destruction of Round Table"), composed in 1279 by an author whose name can not be ascertained. Only a few Timlin the



Connec-

Temple

forcibly entered the

precincts,

claiming that he was purer than the murdering high priest Johanan. There Jewish History, is no reason to consider this account as being in its essentials untrue (Willrich, " Juden und Griechen vor der Makkabaischen Erhebung," p. 89, declares the episode to be a misunderstanding of events which happened under Antiochus Epiphanes). It is probably to this episode that Eusebius refers in his " Chronicle " (under date of 1657 from Abraham that is, 360 B.C. which date is certainly erroneous; he is followed by Jerome; by

tion with,

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—

and by Orosius, iii. 76), when he Artaxerxes III., upon his march against Egypt, carried a number of Jews into exile in Hyrcania and Babylonia. Possibly one of the uprisings alluded to above may have included a portion of Judea. This is possibly also the explanation of the strange statement of Justin (xxxvi. 3) that Xerxes, the king of the Persians, conquered the Jews. Neither of these statements is particularly reliable. The suggestion that the story of Judith is a reflection of these events lacks all foundation. The statement of Solinus (xxxv. 4) that Jericho was besieged by Artaxerxes and destroyed by him, has been explained by Theodore Reinach ("Semitic Studies in Memory of A. Syncellus, p. 486;

relates that

fragments exist in the Vatican manuscript edited by A. Berliner in "Ozar Tob," 1885, pp. 1-11. These include passages from " The Life of Lancelot (ph bl DI^IXJ?), "The Birth of Arthur," "The Quest of the Grail " 6tfin:iJD i>H KV&p !m TO^). The original seems to have concluded with a sermon on repentance, to which the translator refers in his preface as one of his two motives for translating the work, the other motive being to drive away his own melancholy. From the nature of the translation, which includes several Italian words, Steinschneider concludes that the original was in Italian and that the writer lived in Italy. But the source from which the author drew his form of the story is no longer extant; it was obviously merely a short abridgment of the voluminous romance of chivalry out of which

Legend has been composed. While the book throws no light upon the origin of the legend, or even upon its later literary history, it isinteresting for the contrast it presents between the scenes of bloodshed and unchastity that constitute the romance and the Jewish ideals so opposed to these. "The Quest of the Grail," though possibly in its origin a Celtic legend, has become inextricably the Arthur

associated with the Christian sacrament of the mass; and it is therefore extremely curious to find it The translator seems to have treated in Hebrew. felt this, and gives a somewhat elaborate apology Judaeo-German version of the for translating it. legend also exists among the manuscripts in the

A

library of the city of

Hamburg.

Bibliography Steinschneider, Hebr. Uebers. pp. 967-969 idem, Cat. Hamburg Library, idem, Hebr. Bibl. viii. 16 No. 228 and p. 183.



A.

J.

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