Jews and Others
ported, must on no account serve as the bases for interpreting the thought
of Porphyry, or of other philosophers.
The bare facts of Porphyry’s life are that he was born in the early s,
apparently in his native city of Tyre; at some stage he was in Greece, and he
then joined Plotinus in Rome in /. In / he moved to Sicily, but re-
turned to Rome at some unknown date before his death in the early years
of the fourth century. There is thus no evidence that he lived in Tyre at any
time after his twenties; as noted above, all his known works were written
in Greek.
The first question which arises is therefore that of what presumptions we
are entitled to make about the linguistic and educational background, and
the wider cultural context, of someone born in Tyre in the s.
Tyre and Phoenicia
Tyre, even more than the other long-established cities of the Phoenician
coast, exhibits a complex combination of continuity and drastic change.^1
Like the other cities, it had transformed itself into a Greek city in the Helle-
nistic period, while retaining longer than the others the custom of having its
own coins inscribed with legends in the Phoenician language. These Phoeni-
cian legends seem indeed to have continued up to the moment of its further
transformation—when in the s Septimius gave it the status of a Roman
colony. This was the same moment at which ‘‘Phoenice’’ became part of the
official name, ‘‘Syria Phoenice,’’ of the southern section of the Roman prov-
ince of Syria.
No inscriptions or examples of writing on perishable materials (papyrus or
parchment) in Phoenician are known from any time after the very beginning
of the imperial period. Our most extended, if highly problematic, evidence
for a continuing Phoenician culture, and knowledge of the language, comes
from thePhoinikikaof Herennius Philo of Byblos, written in Greek early in
the second century.., and claiming to be based on the work of a Phoe-
nician writer called ‘‘Sanchuniathon’’ of the later second millennium..^2
. See M. Chéhab, ‘‘Tyr à l’époque romaine,’’Mél.Univ. St. Joseph (): ; F. Millar,
‘‘The Phoenician Cities: A Case-Study of Hellenisation,’’Proc. Camb. Philol. Soc. ():
( chapter of the present volume); F. Millar,The Roman Near East, ..–..
(), chap. ; F. Briquel-Chatonnet, ‘‘Les derniers témoignages sur la langue phénicienne
en Orient,’’Rivista di studi fenici (): .
. Te x t i n F. J a c o b y,Fragmente der Griechischen Historiker, no. , used in the translations
and commentaries by H. W. Attridge and R. A. Oden,Philo of Byblos: The Phoenician History
(), and by A. I. Baumgarten,The Phoenician History of Philo of Byblos().