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FOUR BEASTS IN ONE--THE HOMO-CAMELEOPARD
Chacun a ses vertus.
--Crebillon's Xerxes.
ANTIOCHUS EPIPHANES is very generally looked upon as the Gog of the
prophet Ezekiel. This honor is, however, more properly attributable to
Cambyses, the son of Cyrus. And, indeed, the character of the
Syrian monarch does by no means stand in need of any adventitious
embellishment. His accession to the throne, or rather his usurpation of
the sovereignty, a hundred and seventy-one years before the coming
of Christ; his attempt to plunder the temple of Diana at Ephesus; his
implacable hostility to the Jews; his pollution of the Holy of Holies;
and his miserable death at Taba, after a tumultuous reign of eleven
years, are circumstances of a prominent kind, and therefore more
generally noticed by the historians of his time than the impious,
dastardly, cruel, silly, and whimsical achievements which make up the
sum total of his private life and reputation.
Let us suppose, gentle reader, that it is now the year of the world
three thousand eight hundred and thirty, and let us, for a few minutes,
imagine ourselves at that most grotesque habitation of man, the
remarkable city of Antioch. To be sure there were, in Syria and other
countries, sixteen cities of that appellation, besides the one to which
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