This is stoutly denied by Eichhorn, who contends that the Mede or Medo-Persian is the second—if I recollect aright. But it always struck me that Eichhorn, like other learned Infidels, is caught in his own snares. For if the prophecies are of the age of the first Empire, and actually delivered by Daniel, there is no reason why the Roman Empire should not have been predicted;—for superhuman predictions, the last two at least must have been. But if the book was a forgery, or a political poem like Gray's Bard or Lycophron's Cassandra, and later than Antiochus Epiphanes, it is strange and most improbable that the Roman should have escaped notice. In both cases the omission of the last and most important Empire is inexplicable.
Ib. p. 521.
Yet we have it on authority of Josephus, that Daniel's prophecies were read publicly among the Jews in their worship, as well as their other received Scriptures.
It is but fair, however, to remember that the Jewish Church ranked the book of Daniel in the third class only, among the Hagiographic—passionately almost as the Jews before and at the time of our Saviour were attached to it.
Ib. p. 522-3.
But to a Jewish eye, or to any eye placed in the same position of view in the age of Antiochus Epiphanes, it is utterly impossible to admit that this superior strength of the Roman power to reduce and destroy, this heavier arm of subjugation, could have revealed itself so plainly, as to warrant the express deliberate description of it.
Quære
. See Polybius.