Gibbon’s lines betray a profound knowledge of both Phoenicia and Palestine, which had long and complex histories of shifting back and forth from one part of greater Syria to another. Pontius Pilate was a Roman magistrate (a praefectus, as we now know despite Tacitus’s error in calling him a procurator), and of course he famously charged Jesus for being an aspiring king of the Jews. He was reputedly born in Bethlehem, a village that belonged administratively in those days to the Roman province of Judaea. As for the religion that came from Palestine, Gibbon was certainly not thinking of either Judaism or Islam, but of Christianity, which Jesus brought to the Jews among whom he was born and to whom he was preaching. Gibbon knew well that the Phoenician alphabet lay behind the Greek letters that served to enrich Western literature. Yet Phoenicia and Palestine will forever live in the memory of mankind since America, as well as Europe, has received letters from the one, and religion from the other. The former of these was a narrow and rocky coast the latter was a territory scarcely superior to Wales, either in fertility or extent. Phoenicia and Palestine were sometimes annexed to, and sometimes separated from, the jurisdiction of Syria. As always, Gibbon chose his words carefully: In the opening chapter of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon evoked in a few lapidary sentences the two most ill defined and yet most celebrated regions of the ancient Near East. Edward Lear: Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, Sunrise, 1859
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |