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Rh there, no less than in Greek cities such as Antioch. Farther south, Ascalon was a centre of Hellenistic culture, but most of the other coastal cities of Palestine stood desolate, ruined by the militant Maccabean Jews, who also chastised the pro-Hellenes in their own midst and in Samaria and Galilee.

Despite the general recognition of the superiority of Greek literature and civilization, the many educated Syrians who studied Greek and wrote in it produced little of lasting value. Aramaic persisted throughout as the vernacular of the people, who remained Semitic in their customs and manner of living. Basically they were no more Hellenized than modern Syrians were Frenchified. What the introduction of Greek thought did do was to disrupt the purely Semitic political and intellectual structure and to open the door for subsequent Romanizing influences. A thousand years had to pass before a reintegration was pos- sible. Nor has Aramaic literature of Seleucid Syria left any remains, as indigenous literary activity apparently shrank to almost nothing, out of a sense of inferiority. Presumably some was written but did not survive. Certain Hebrew works would have met the same fate had they not found a Greek translator and been accepted among the Apocrypha. One of our main sources of knowledge of this era, i Mac- cabees, was evidently written between 105 and 63 B.C. and translated into Greek from a Hebrew original. Two Hebrew works of the Seleucid era worked their way into the canon: Ecclesiastes, written about 200 B.C. by an aristocratic Hel- lenized Jew, and Daniel, composed in the second pre- Christian century. Of the two, Ecclesiastes has much the closer affinity with Greek thought.

No part of the Seleucid empire developed into a real centre of artistic, literary or scientific creativeness. The kings were never munificent patrons of learning, though they established libraries in the capitals ; Antioch had an outstanding one. Considering the improvement in com- munication and the spread of a common civilization with Rh