Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies 21

We will examine shortly the fact that the philosophers' doctrines appeared among the Hebrews, but first, as the proper order requires, we must discuss the times of Moses. Through that discussion it will be demonstrated conclusively that Hebrew philosophy is the most ancient of all wisdom. Tatian has already treated these matters precisely in his *Against the Greeks*, and Cassian has done so in the first book of his *Exegetical Works*; nevertheless, our own account also obliges us to run through the relevant chronological statements. Apion the grammarian, surnamed Pleistonices, addresses them in the fourth book of his *Egyptian History*. Although he is an Egyptian by birth and displays a decided hostility toward the Hebrews—going so far as to compose a treatise against the Jews—he still cites Amosis, the Egyptian king, and the events of his reign, and he calls Ptolemy of Mendes as his witness. Ptolemy's words run as follows: "Amosis, who became king in the time of the Argive Inachus, laid waste Avaris," as Ptolemy of Mendes recorded in his *Chronicles*. This Ptolemy was a priest who set forth the deeds of the Egyptian kings in three complete books, and he states that during the reign of Amosis, king of Egypt, the Jews made their exodus from Egypt under the leadership of Moses. From this it follows that Moses flourished in the time of Inachus.

The most ancient of the Greek traditions are the Argolic, that is, those traced from Inachus, as Dionysius of Halicarnassus teaches in his *Chronicles*. Compared with these, the Attic traditions deriving from Cecrops—the two‑natured, autochthonous figure, to use Tatian's exact phrase—are forty generations younger; the Arcadic traditions from Pelasgus, who is also said to be autochthonous, are nine generations younger; and the Phthiotic traditions from Deucalion are younger by two generations. By the time of the Trojan War, twenty generations or a little more are counted from Inachus, amounting, so to speak, to four hundred years. If, as Ctesias asserts, Assyrian history is far older than the Greek, then the exodus of Moses from Egypt under the Egyptian Amosis and the Argive Inachus falls in the four hundred and second year of the Assyrian empire and the thirty‑second year of the eighth dynasty of Belochus. Meanwhile in Greece, during the time of Phoroneus, who succeeded Inachus, occurred the flood of Ogygus and the early Sicyonian kingdom—first Aegialeus, then Europs, then Telchin—along with the Cretan dynasty in Crete. Acusilaus declares that Phoroneus was the first human being to be born; hence the poet of the *Phoroneis* calls him the father of mortal men. Following Acusilaus, Plato writes in the *Timaeus*: