EUPOLEMUS

Summary

Eupolemus, author and diplomat

The fourth-century ad Christian historian and theologian Eusebius uses Book ix of his Praeparatio evangelica to demonstrate that ‘the most illustrious of the Greeks themselves have not been unacquainted with the affairs of the Hebrews’, and to prove his point he quotes from Porphyry (a third-century ad philosopher), Hecataeus (a third-century bc historian from Abdera), Clearchus of Soli (fourth to third century bc), and others. Above all he uses a first-century bc historian, Alexander Polyhistor (105–30 bc), who drew on a number of Jewish writers – Eupolemus, Artapanus, Molon, Philo, Demetrius, Theodotus, Ezekiel – and quoted from them extensively, thus preserving them for posterity. His work perhaps met a growing interest in the Jews at Rome in the first century bc. From Eupolemus, Polyhistor preserves a short passage about Moses, a longer passage summarising history from Moses to Solomon, and describing the foundation and building of the Temple, and probably a shorter piece on the fall of Jerusalem to Nebuchadnezzar. (He also preserves a piece from a Samaritan writer which he, or some predecessor, has falsely attributed to Eupolemus.)

A century before Eusebius, Clement of Alexandria had mentioned Eupolemus as showing (along with other Jewish writers such as Philo, Aristobulus, Josephus, and Demetrius) that Moses and his people existed long before the Greeks. Clement quotes three other passages from Eupolemus, in one case revealing his source as Alexander Polyhistor.