Pseudo-Phocylides

Abstract

Pseudo-Phocylides is the anonymous author of a 230-line Greek hexameter wisdom poem, the Sentences, likely written in Alexandria between 100 bce and 100 ce. Unlike other writers of Second Temple Jewish literature, the author of the Sentences camouflages his ethnic and religious identity, synthesising the wisdom of Moses with Greek epic, lyric, and philosophical traditions. He attributes his new work to the 6th-century poet Phocylides of Miletus. So great is the author’s facility with Greek metre and topics that the Sentences’ pseudonymous authorship was not recognised until the studies of 16th- and 17th-century humanists, like Joseph Scaliger (1606). The Jewish (or philo-Jewish) nature of the author is betrayed by the use of the Decalogue in the poem’s opening section (Sent. 3–8). Since the work’s editio princeps in the early modern period, it has been a favourite educational text—a use which reflects one possible Sitz im Leben in its own historical milieu, as a vehicle for Jewish students learning Greek. Other possible rationales for the pseudepigraphical strategy include the desire to attribute a Mosaic origin to Greek wisdom (the “theft of philosophy”) or to compete in the public arena of gnomic wisdom declamation.