)
Try to follow my train of thought. I watched the most recent episode of The Office a week ago, when Pam and Jim finally have their baby. Spoiler alert: she’s named Cecilia Marie Halpert. My brain immediately floated to the name “Cecilia,” which sounds like an Anglicized version of the Latin name “Caecilius,” who was a character in my freshman year Latin textbook. It turns out the name derives from the gens, or tribe, the “Caecilii.” Naturally, when I began to write this blog, I Google searched “Caecilius” and “Jewish.” To my surprise, I found something somewhat relevant: a first-century C.E. Greek rhetorician named Caecilius of Calacte, a Jew.
I could only imagine how rare it was in the Augustan Age for a prominent scholar to be born Jewish. A native of Sicily, Caecilius wrote numerous treatises on such varied topics on great Athenian orators and Sicilian slave wars. Still, how could such a man be Jewish in a world that probably looked down on the country of Judaea? And why?
The only extant record we have of Caecilius’s Judaism is a Greek lexicon, or dictionary of a sort, allegedly compiled by a man named Suidas from the tenth century C.E. Clearly, that makes such a claim dubious by distance in time. The lexicon says that Caecilius’s parents were Jewish slaves. Before he became a Roman who adopted the Caecilii name of his patron, the man’s name, reports the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography, was “Archagathus.†The name means “good beginning,†a tradition very in line with the Jewish faith.
Once I found out the significance of Caecilius’s contributions and his original name, the historicity of his Judaism ceased to matter as much. The Jewish tradition attached to his name is enough for me to associate Caecilius’s remarkable contributions with the many other intellectual gifts Jews have given the world. For the ancient Roman world, I find it amazing that a man born of Jewish slaves, two lower echelons of society, could have risen as high as he did. Even the possibility of a slave or Jewish “taint” would have kept him down, I would have thought. Yet he was clearly renowned in both his comments on orators and his histories, a scholar of much renown. He is often considered one of the most important literary critics of the time (see Jewish Virtual Library link). We see the social mobility available in the Roman Empire. For the son of people so poorly regarded by the Romans as the Jews (and slaves, at that) to become one of the great intelligentsia of his day, Caecilius must have been very special.
I see no reason to doubt the fact of his Jewish birth, though he may have not continued following the faith in later life. The Jewish traditions of scholarship and study go back as far as the periods of the ancient Israelites, but we see it pop up even in periods dominated by other faiths. If Jews contributed significantly ideas and genres that the ancients valued so much like rhetoric and history, then chances are we’ve been at least an undercurrent in places where we otherwise were unknown. Like Caecilius’s original name, I can say that’s a “good beginning†to Jewish scholarship, indeed.
