[78]. One of the magnificent sarcophagi found in 1887 at Sidon by Hamdi Bey. They are all published in sumptuous form by Hamdi Bey and Reinach, Une nécropole royale á Sidon, Paris, 1892. An excellent and convenient description may be found in Hans Wachtler, Die Blütezeit der griechischen Kunst im Spiegel der Reliefsarcophage, Teubner, 1910 (Aus Natur u. Geisteswelt, no. 272).
[79]. Strato, king of Sidon in 360 B.C.E. Athen. xii. 531. Cf. Gerostratos of Arados at about the same time.
[80]. Herodotus, ii. 104 (cf. ii. 37).
[81]. Aristotle states the fact in the Meteorologica, II. iii. 39, but does not mention the Jews.
[82]. Textes, p. 8. n. 3.
[83]. In the royal tombs at Sidon excavated by Hamdi Bey (see above, n. 9.), one of the monuments bears a long Phoenician inscription of a king of Sidon. It begins: “I, Tabnit, priest of Astarte and king of Sidonians, son of Eshmunazar, priest of Astarte, and king of the Sidonians.”
[84]. Plato, Euthyphro, 3 C., and passim.
[85]. Aristotle, Rhetoric, III. vii. 6.
[86]. Reinach, Textes, pp. 10-12. Müller, Frag. hist. graec. ii. 323, quoted in Josephus, In Ap. i. 22.
[87]. The untutored philosophers of Voltaire’s stories were quite in the mode of the eighteenth century, which had discovered the “noble savage,” and were quite convinced that civilization was a retrogression from a state of rude and primitive virtue. It was, further, a convenient cloak behind which one might criticise an autocratic régime. Hence the flood of “Turkish,” “Chinese,” “Japanese,” etc. “Letters,” of which Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes are the most famous. Modern instances are “The Traveller from Altruria” of Mr. Howells, and Mr. Dickinson’s “Letters of a Chinese Official.”