Julius Africanus.

        When the emperor Septimius Severus campaigned against Osrhoene and the region of Edessa on the Upper Euphrates in A.D. 195, one of his officers was a young man from Aelia Capitolina, as the Romans called the city that replaced Jerusalem after the Bar-Cochba War, in A.D. 135. His name was Julius Africanus. He penetrated to Mount Ararat and spent some years at Edessa, where he enjoyed the friendship of King Abgar II and went hunting with the Edessene princes. Later in life we find him settled at Emmaus in Palestine and engaged in literary work. From Emmaus he led a delegation that was sent to the emperor Alexander Severus to ask that the town be restored, and in consequence it was rebuilt as Nicopolis. At Rome he designed a beautiful library for the emperor in the Pantheon. He removed to Alexandria for a time to hear the lectures of Heraclas, who later became the successor of Origen as head of the catechetical school. Africanus knew Origen and, as late as A.D. 240, exchanged letters with him. He was a devout believer in the scriptures, but he was not a presbyter or a bishop but a soldier, at home in both camps and courts, and a man of letters.

        In A.D. 221r he published his Chronography, or Chronicle, in five books. It traced the course of history from the Creation, making use of the Old Testament and other chronological sources, Greek and Jewish, among them the account of the Jewish kings written by Justus of Tiberias.

        The aim of Africanus was to show that human history fell into six days of a thousand years each,[86] that the coming of Christ occurred in the year of the world 5500; that five hundred years later, the final thousand years, the millennium, would begin. Although controlled by this mistaken idea, the main features of this chronology (the so-called Alexandrian era) were widely adopted in the East. The Chronography was full of valuable excerpts from earlier chroniclers, but its scattered fragments have not yet been fully assembled. Yet it has been called the root of Christian chronography and has proved an important source for Hippolytus, for the Chronicle of Eusebius, and later for the Paschal Chronicle early in the seventh century, and Georgius Syncellus, late in the eighth.

        The other chief work of Africanus was his Cestoi, or Paradoxaa sort of notebook of strange pieces of curious information on all sorts of subjects, medical, military, magical, scientific, and literary -the miscellanies accumulated by a traveled and inquiring mind. The book was dedicated to the emperor Alexander Severus, the author's friend and patron.

        The length of the Cestoi was variously given by later writers; Syncellus said it contained nine books, Photius said fourteen, whereas Suidas gave the number as twenty-four. But a papyrus of two columns of it, written in the middle of the third century (almost in the lifetime of Africanus) and found at Oxyrhynchus, solved the problem.[87] It preserves the end of one book and concludes: “Of Julius Africanus Cestus 18.” It is evident that Suidas was right in giving the number at twenty-four. Africanus is discussing a long magical incantation supposed to have been uttered by Odysseus in summoning the shades of the dead, in Odyssey 11. He tells just where the manuscripts are in which he has found itone in Aelia Capitolina, one in Nysa in Caria, and one in the Pantheon library already mentioned. Africanus wondered whether it was Homer himself or the Peisistratidae, the early editors of Homer, who had left the passage out. He recorded the lines as at any rate “a most valuable product of Epic art.”

        Africanus also wrote some very significant letters. One, addressed to a certain Aristides, about the genealogies of Christ, appealing to the Jewish practice of levirate marriage to reconcile their differences in Matthew and Luke, was used by Origen in his earliest homilies, on Luke. But his most famous letter is that written about A.D. 240 to Origen to show that the story of Susanna cannot have been an original part of the Book of Daniel. Africanus argued that, for one thing, Daniel's play upon words when he asked each of the wicked elders under what kind of a tree he had seen Susanna meet her lover was a Greek play and could not possibly be a translation from the Hebrew. This was certainly a point well taken, and Origen in his answer, written from Nicomedia where he was staying, although he said a good deal by way of reproof, was not able to meet it.

        Here, as so often happened, the works of our author have almost entirely perished. But enough remains to show that here was a man, in the Christian church, on friendly terms with kings and emperors, keenly interested in Christian history and prophecy, and bringing a fresh and open mind to literary questions in pagan and Christian literature alike.