The Author of Wisdom and the Cultured Environment of Alexandria

Abstract

The Book of Wisdom has already attracted the attention of the historians of antiquity by reason of the light which the author throws on some aspects of religious psychology and on society and institutions in the Hellenistic and Roman world. In his thesis, by now rather dated, Pierre Boyancé noticed the author’s interest in the heroicisation of the young dead when set in parallel with the text of Hellenistic funerary foundations.1 More recently, Simon Price, an historian of the religions of the Roman Empire, has observed the skill with which the author analyses the recent evolution of the cult of images in relation to the mediating of the imperial power.2 The development of the studies devoted to Alexandria, its youth and its intellectuals, to the religious trends which can be observed there, as well as to the complex triangular relationships among the Greeks, Jews, and Egyptians,3 justifies a more extended and more complete historical treatment of the Book of Wisdom today with the aim of assessing more accurately just how far the author pays attention to the reality and the particular conditions of his own Alexandrian milieu. We can also draw suitable elements of comparison from the accounts of the Greek travellers who visited Alexandria and Egypt at a date near to the composition of the book, such as Diodorus in 60/594 or also Strabo around 25, that is at the very time when the Roman kra, thsij was being set up, “the dominion with force.”5 Both were aware of the cult of animals and that of images as well as the savage practices of the mystery religions which would have included human sacrifice.6