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[121]
Apion also tells a false story, when he mentions an oath of ours,
as if we "swore by God, the Maker of the heaven, and earth, and sea,
to bear no good will to any foreigner, and particularly to none of the
Greeks." Now this liar ought to have said directly that" we would
bear no good-will to any foreigner, and particularly to none of the Egyptians."
For then his story about the oath would have squared with the rest of his
original forgeries, in case our forefathers had been driven away by their
kinsmen, the Egyptians, not on account of any wickedness they had been
guilty of, but on account of the calamities they were under; for as to
the Grecians, we were rather remote from them in place, than different
from them in our institutions, insomuch that we have no enmity with them,
nor any jealousy of them. On the contrary, it hath so happened that many
of them have come over to our laws, and some of them have continued in
their observation, although others of them had not courage enough to persevere,
and so departed from them again; nor did any body ever hear this oath sworn
by us: Apion, it seems, was the only person that heard it, for he indeed
was the first composer of it.
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