No less are the numerous Syrian proper names that have come to us mainly non-Greek, and double names are not rare; the Messiah is termed also Christus, the apostle Thomas also Didymus, the woman of Joppa raised up by Peter “the gazelle,” Tabitha or Dorcas. But for literature, and presumably also for business-intercourse and the intercourse of the cultured, the Syrian idiom was as little in existence as the Celtic in the West; in these circles Greek exclusively prevailed, apart from the Latin required also in the East for the soldiers. A man of letters of the second half of the second century, whom Sohaemus the king of Armenia formerly mentioned (p. 76) brought to his court, has inserted in a romance, which has its scene in Babylon, some points of the history of his own life that illustrate this relation. He is, he says, a Syrian, not, however, one of the immigrant Greeks, but of native lineage on the father’s and mother’s side, Syrian by language and habits, acquainted also with the Babylonian language and with Persian magic. But this same man, who in a certain sense declines the Hellenic character, adds that he had appropriated Hellenic culture; and he became an esteemed teacher of youth in Syria, and a notable romance-writer of the later Greek literature.[125] [Sidenote: Later Syriac literature.] If subsequently the Syrian idiom again became a written language and developed a literature of its own, this is to be traced not to an invigoration of national feeling, but to the immediate needs of the propagation of Christianity. That Syriac literature, which began with the translation of the writings of the Christian faith into Syriac, remained confined to the sphere of the specific culture of the Christian clergy, and hence took up only the small fragments of general Hellenic culture which the theologians of that time found conducive to, or compatible with, their ends;[126] this authorship did not attain, and doubtless did not strive after, any higher aim than the transference of the library of the Greek monastery to the Maronite cloisters. It hardly reaches further back than to the second century of our era, and had its centre, not in Syria, but in Mesopotamia, particularly in Edessa,[127] where the native language had not become so entirely a dialect as in the older Roman territory. [Sidenote: Syro-Hellenic mixed culture.] [Sidenote: Tomb of Antiochus of Commagene.]