had been inserted in the first edition, which cai Ill
in 1706. This was done at tin- persuasion of Dr. Sykes, who had suggested to Clarke that an undue sire" had been laid upon the passage. Whiston,who informs us of'this affair, expresses great displeasure against Sykes.
and calls "the suggestion gi lless." Upon this Sykes
published -1 Dissertation on tic Eclipst mentioned In/ Phlegon, or an Inquiry whether that Eclipse had any Relation to tin Darkness which happened at >>nr Sav- iour's Passion (1732, 8vo). Sykes concludes it to be most probable that Phlegon had in view a natural eclipse, which happened Nov. 24, in the first year of the two hundred and second < Olympiad, and not m the fourth year of the Olympiad in which Christ was crucified. Many pieces were written against Sykes. who replied
to some of them, hut it. may well he i sidered as a
controversy still unsettled. The principal objections against the authority ol the passage in cpiesiion are thus briefly summed up by Dr. Adam Clarke (Comment, on Matt, xxvii, 45); l. All the authors who quote Phle- gon differ, and often very materially, in what they say was found in him. 2. lie says nothing of "Judaea^" what he says is that in such an Olympiad (some say the one hundred and second, others the two hundred and second) there was "an eclipse in l'iiliynia." and ••an earthquake at Nice." '). lie does not say that the earthquake happened at tin' time of the eclipse, i. He does not intimate that this "darkness" was "extraordi- nary," or that the eclipse happened at the "lull ol the moon," or thai it lasted ■• three hours;" all of which cir- cumstances could not have been omitted by him if he had known them. .".. He speaks merely ol an ordinary though perhaps total eclipse of the sun. and cannot mean the darkness mentioned by the evangelists. And,
6, lie speaks of an eclipse that happened in some >ear ol the one hundred and second or two hundred and Sec- ond Olympiad, ami therefore, upon the whole, little stress can he laid on what he says as applying to this event. Some fragments of his works are all that re- main, the longest belongs to a treatise. Ilfui §av\xaa't- (.<)', De Mirabilibus. It is a curious work. di\ ided into thirty-live chapters (some of which are very short i. and containing (as might he expected from the title) a great many absurd fables. The same may he said of a shorter fragment of four chapters, [Tepi uaKpofiiwv, />■ Longcs- vis. The third fragment that remains is a chapter, Ilfoi twv 'OAumtti'wj', /'' Olympus, which is supposed by Salmasius (Ad Spart'um. p. 13) to he the preface to a lost work. /'< Olympionicis. These fragments were first published in 1568 (Basil. 8vo. Greek and Latin), by \"\ lander, together with Antonini Liberalis, Transform, Conger., Apollonii Tlist. Mirab.; Antigoni Carystii Hist. Mirab.; and M. Antoninus, />< Vita sua. An improved edition, with notes by Meursius, appeared m 1620 (Lugd. Bat. 4to, Greek and Latin), which is re- printed by Gronovius in his Thesaur, Antiqv.it. Grox. viii. 2690 sip. ami •_'7'.'7. .and ix. 1289 sip; and also in- serted among the works of Meursius, vii, 77 aq. The host edition is by Westermann, in his Scriptores /arum Mirabilium Greed (Bruns. 1839). See. besides the ref- erences already given, Engl. Cyclop, a. v., Gen. Biog. />iii. s. v.. Smith. Diet. <<f Gr, and Rom. Biog. and Mythol. s. v.
Phobetor (tf>o iqTiup.frightener'), an attendant <>n Somnus, the god of sleep, in the ancient heathen my- thology. It was his office to suggest to the mind im- ages of animated beings, and in this capacity he is men- tioned by Ovid in his Metamorphoses,
Phobus t <f>d/3oc), 'he personification of /', ar among the ancient Greeks, lie is said to have been the son of Ires and Cythereia, and a constant attendant upon his father, lie was worshipped by the Romans under the equivalent name ol Mi tus,
Phobus is the name of a number of Jews who dis- tingiiished themselves in Hebrew literature. We men- tion the following as most important:
1. s ami ii, of Warcislaw, flourished in the last quar
PHOCAS
147
PHCEBUS
ter of the 17th century, was rabbi at Fiirth and Schidlow, and wrote, biMaTIJ 11*3, a commentary on the codex Eben-Eeer, making use of other commentaries on the same, as the 3itT 1T13 of Chajim Kohen, etc. (Dyrhenfurt, 1689; corrected edition, Fiirth, 1694; Wil- na-Grodno, 1819) : — a commentary on the codex Orach Chajim: — a commentary on Jore Dea: — Discourses on the Pentateuch, which have not been printed.
2. Samuel ben-Joseph ha-Kohen Falk, of Vienna, died in Palestine, where he went after the Jews had been ex- pelled from Vienna in 1670. He wrote, bxird u2£^, a kind of haggadistic dictionary of proper names, where- in he speaks in alphabetical order of E^X, max, "pHX, etc., collected from different sources (Venice, 1694) : — bx!n3»3 ^"H, discourses on the Pentateuch (ibid. 1714). : See Wolf, Bibl. Ihbr. iii. 1122 sq.
3. Uri ben- Aharon ha-Levi, a typographer at Am- sterdam, was born in 1623, and was still living in 1713. He published the Hebrew Old Testament, with many additions of Jacob Blitz, and a Preface in Judseo-Ger- man by the editor (Amsterd. 1679). He also published Neuer Abendsegen, a prayer-book, in Judaeo- German (ibid. 1677). See Gratz, Gesch. d. Juden, x, 329 sq.