as a trace of your name.'
This probably indicates that the author is writing 500 years after
Heracleitus' supposed age. His age was differently estimated. But
'500 years after Heracleitus' would mean, according to all reckonings,
about the first half of the first century A.D. All the other
indications of age in the letters agree with this. (See Jacob Bernays'
_Heraclitischen Briefe_, Berlin, 1869, p. 112.) They were written
presumably at Ephesus, and all or most of them by a Stoic philosopher.
I do not think that it is necessary to assume traces of Jewish
influence in these letters, any more than in the writings of Seneca.
And the bulk of the letters is so thoroughly Stoic and contrary to
Jewish feeling, that a Jew is hardly likely to have interpolated them.
They illustrate therefore the current philosophic ideas which were at
work in the world in which St. Paul lived and taught, when he was
outside Judaea. That St. Paul was familiar with these ideas, however
his familiarity may have been gained, is shown beyond possibility of
mistake by his speeches--supposing them substantially genuine--at
Lystra and Athens.

The following passages in these letters are interesting:

(1) (From Heracleitus' defence of himself against {254} a charge of
impiety in letter iv) 'Where is God? Is he shut up in the temples?
You forsooth are pious who set up the God in a dark place. A man takes
it for an insult if he is said to be "made of stone": and is God truly
described as "born of the rocks"? Ignorant men, do ye not know that
God is not fashioned with hands, nor can you make him a sufficient
pedestal, nor shut him into one enclosure, but the whole world is his
temple, decorated with animals and planets and stars? I inscribed my
altar "to Heracles the Ephesian" [Greek: ERAKLEI TOI EPHESIOI] making
the God your citizen, not--he continues--to myself "Heracleitus an
Ephesian" [the same letters differently divided], as I am accused of
doing by you in your ignorance. Yet Heracles was a man deified by his
goodness and noble deeds; and were his virtues and labours greater than
mine? I have conquered money and ambition: I have mastered fear and
flattery,' &c. Then after a passage about the certainty of his own
immortal renown, he returns to ridicule idolatry. 'If an altar of a
god be not set up, is there no god? or if an altar be set up to what is
not a god, is it a god--so that stones become the evidences (witnesses)
of Gods? Nay