Date of Award

Spring 1970

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Department

Ancient Languages

Abstract

The study of ancient literature and society is a dynamic one. As each age brings its unique experience and understanding to this study, new explanations,interpretations end insights are developed. However, each age also tends to impose its own likes and dislikes on works and events of a prior time, with the result that the same personality, event, or piece of literature may be praised in one age and damned in the next, interpreted in one way in a particular century- and in quite the opposite way in succeeding ones, adopted as its own by one society and shunned.

We may use the Jewish writer Philo as our example of the varying manner in which an ancient author is viewed. For many centuries Philo was judged a renegade by his fellow Jews and as an early coreligionist by many Christians. He was thought to have owed little debt to Judaism on the one hand, and to the Greek world on the other. Philo has also suffered gross and intentional misinterpretation at the hands of anti­ Semitic scholars.

by- another.

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