Page:Selections. Translated by H. St. J. Thackeray (1919).djvu/166

 The Essenes

The characteristic of the Essene creed is that all things are left in God's hands. They hold that souls are immortal, and that the rewards of righteousness are a prize worth a battle. Although they send dedicatory offerings to the Temple, their rites of purification when sacrificing are peculiar; they are consequently excluded from the precincts of the national shrine and offer their sacrifices apart. In other ways they are most estimable men, whose whole energy is devoted to agriculture. In this particular they deserve more admiration than all professedly virtuous persons, because a habit which has never prevailed, even for a while, in any nation, whether Greek or barbarian, has been with them a long-established and uninterrupted custom. Their goods are in common, and the rich man enjoys no more of his possessions than he who owns nothing at all; this rule is followed by a body of men numbering over four thousand. Marriage and slavery they abjure, the latter as tending to promote injustice, the former as giving occasion for discord; they live by themselves and minister to each other's needs. They elect good men to act as receivers of their revenues and of the produce of the soil, and priests as bakers and cooks. Their manner of life bears the closest resemblance in all points to that of the Dacian tribe known as the Polistæ. (i.e. "Founders" or "Colonisers"), Scaliger's emendation of the MS reading [Greek: pleistois]; cf. the allusion in Strabo 296 to a Thracian tribe who live without wives and are called Founders ([Greek: ktistai]).]