In our previous lectures we have had occasion more than once to refer to the effect of the conquests of Alexander in opening up the nearer East to the European West, and in making easy the contact between Greeks and Orientals, especially those of Semitic and Persian stocks. Greece, Egypt, and western Asia were for a brief period united in one great empire; and although that political empire quickly broke into many units, the sway of the Greek language and of Greek ideas was permanently extended over wide areas where they had not had potent influence before, and by this extension a door was opened for the entrance of oriental ideas into the West. No doubt the Macedonian conqueror simply accelerated a process which had been going on imperceptibly through the channels of trade and of war from prehistoric times. Now with regard to the question of oriental influence on the Greek world from the earliest period, there has been much extravagant statement and conjecture: the Orphics, Pythagoras, Plato, and others too are said to have derived many of their ideas from the East. Such inaccuracies I wish to avoid. Indeed I will take this opportunity to state that apart from certain cults which we shall presently consider I am unable to see any clear proof of direct and concrete eastern influence on Greek or Roman philosophic and religious thought until the second century B.C., at the earliest; and that I believe that the amount of such influence later—up to the time when the Jewish and the Greek streams of thought united in Christian theology—has been greatly overestimated. Nevertheless it is true that in certain places, especially at Alexandria in Egypt, the greatest intellectual center in the ancient world after 300 B.C., there was some mingling of Hellenic and Semitic thought. The translation of the sacred books of the Jews into Greek, which we know as the Septuagint, began as early as the third century, but this translation was made for Hellenized Jews of the dispersion and had little interest for Greeks until the Christian period. But in the middle of the second century before our era a certain Aristobulus endeavored to reconcile Greek philosophy, especially that of the Peripatetic School, with Jewish wisdom, and to show that the Greeks drew their philosophy from the Mosaic laws and the prophets. The so-called Wisdom of Solomon also betrays the influence of Hellenic thought on Jews at Alexandria; and we have in an earlier lecture seen how the Greek and the Jew met in Philo. Moreover all the later Platonists, Pythagoreans, and similar sects were in some degree at least in accord with the Jewish thought of the time; and in general we know that the intellectual metropolis of the ancient world showed a fusion of West and East in society and ideas such as was hardly found elsewhere.