seducer did not go unpunished. She, however, fell into a melancholy which ended her days a little while after. Art. BURGUNDY. ROMAN WRITERS. PRIOLO was no great admirer of Cicero; he admired Livy and found him so inimitable, that despairing to copy his excellences, he resolved to imitate Tacitus. He was extremely fond of Seneca, and preferred Lucan to Virgil, and the tenderness of Catullus to the majesty of Horace. Rhodius his good friend and his panegyrist, wonders at the oddness of his taste. "Senecam deperibat: nescio quo malo genio M. Tullium ingentem virum, Romanæ eloquentiæ patrem, non admiratus est: cæteros ad unguem tenebat. Tit. Livium inimitabilem prædicabat, ideoque desperans, nobis posterisque Tacitum repræsentavit. Lucanum præferebat Virgilio: quis hoc credat? Et teneras Catulli amationes Horatianæ majestati." It is certain that this judgment is wrong; for a man who prefers Livy to Tacitus, should place Cicero above Seneca, and Virgil above Lucan. The eloquence and charactar of Cicero, Livy, and Virgil, are much of the same kind. Those authors do not affect to be bright; they cast without any affectation, a light which adorns the whole work; but does not dazzle the reader as those of some other writers, who instead of letting every ray pass through its proper medium, have recourse to a kind of dioptric in order to collect together an infinite number of rays to cast the greater light. It is their chief study; it was the method of Seneca, the two Plinys, and Tacitus. Lucan in like manner, toils and labours hard to express himself in an uncommon manner, and to appear great and lofty. It must be confessed that they were men of very great parts, and perhaps they would have taken a more natural course, if they had lived in the time of Cicero, Livy, and Virgil; but they began to study when the true taste began to be depraved. It was with the Romans as it is with those who are used to drink excellent wines; their taste grows dull, nothing will serve their turn but brandy or the strongest liquors. A majestic, natural, and uniform eloquence, became insipid when people were used to it: they were for witty strokes and flights; the day-light was not sufficient for them, they wanted flashes of lightning: the French begin to be sick of the same distemper. Seneca and Tacitus complied with the common taste, they were afraid of being slighted if they should write like the authors of the golden age: however it be, their style is quite different from that of Livy. How comes it then that Priolo so much admired that historian and Seneca at the same time? How could he prefer Lucan to Virgil, and Seneca to Cicero? There is no uniformity in such a judgment, but we must not dispute about tastes; we must be contented with the matter of fact.-Art. PRIOLO. SADDUCEES. SADDUCEES, a sect which arose among the Jews two hundred years or thereabouts, before the birth of the Messias. It is thought that Sadok, a disciple of Antigonus Sochæus, was the founder of it. He and Baithus, who was also a disciple of the same Antigonus, put a wrong sense on the doctrine which their master taught them; they concluded that there is neither paradise nor hell, that there are neither rewards nor punishments after this life, from his exhorting them to serve God, not like mercenaries who act only in hopes of getting by it, but like those generous servants who are faithful and obedient to their masters without expecting any reward. This fine maxim ill interpreted by those two disciples of Antigonus, set them up for heads of a party. They founded two pernicious sects, which utterly subverted religion; and foreseeing that they should be put to death, if they ventured to declare publicly all the consequences arising from their principles, they durst not reject the authority of the Scriptures, they only rejected the traditions. Those who embraced the sect of Sadoc were called Sadducees; they made already a considerable figure in the time of Jonathan, brother to Judas Maccabeus, that is, about the year of Rome, 600; for Josephus informs us that there were at that time three sects among the Jews, viz. that of the Pharisees, that of the Sadducees, and that of the Essenes. He adds that the Sadducees rejected the doctrine of predestination, and taught, that man is the only cause of his own prosperity or adversity, according as he makes a good or an ill use of his free-will. He says in another place that the Sadducees and Pharisees had many quarrels between them, and that the rich people sided with the Sadducees, but the vulgar stood for the Pharisees. The latter prescribed many rites as being transmitted and handed down to them from their ancestors, though they were not written in the law of Moses; on the contrary, the Sadducees rejected all doctrines and ceremonies not contained in the Scripture. We read in the same passage of Josephus, that the high priest Hircanus, who had been a disciple of the Pharisees, forsook and abused them, having declared for the sect of the Sadducees at the suggestion of his favourite Jonathan, who was one of them. We are told in another place by the same historian, that the Sadducees did not believe the immortality of the soul, nor that God concerned himself with evil, either to do it or to take notice of it. Josephus farther observes that the number of the Sadducees was not considerable, but that they were generally invested with the highest dignities, notwithstanding which they had no great interest, for few things were done according to their advice; and those among them who exercised the magistracy were obliged to comply, though against their will, with the decisions of the Pharisees, otherwise they would not have been tolerated by the populace. Josephus makes two observations, which I think will give a great light in the matter; one of them is, that the Sadducees were not severe in inflicting punishments; the other is, that the Sadducees showed great severity in the functions of judicature; lastly, he says that there was no good understanding among them, that they lived like wild beasts, and that friends were not better used in their conversation than if they had been strangers. It is not easy to reconcile this with what he says in another place, that this sect was not beloved by the meaner sort of the people but by the rich; for the latter do not much agree with morose and peevish humours, but are for introducing the sweets and conveniences of life in all places where they have any intercourse. We ought perhaps to suppose that what he says concerning the discord of the Sadducees and their clownish conversation, signifies nothing more than that they accounted it a virtue to take the liberty of disputing with their masters. It was almost an unavoidable consequence from their principles, since they boldly rejected the authority of tradition, and did not care whether the several texts of the Scripture had been explained by the ancients in such a manner or not; this being laid down, a disciple had as much right to contradict his master, as the latter had to contradict his predecessor, and so on. The Sadducees are often mentioned in the Holy Scripture, but though it inform us* that they denied * Willemer in Dissertat. Philologica de Sadduceis. the resurrection of the dead and the existence of angels and spirits, and that the Pharisees believed both, yet it gives us a worse character of the Pharisees than of the Sadducees. I shall examine what has been said of the immortality of the latter, and will make it appear that no good proofs can be given of it. Mr Willemer charges them with cruelty, and to prove it he says that they induced king John Hircanus to persecute the Pharisees violently. He refers us to the eighteenth chapter of the thirteenth book of the Jewish Antiquities. I have consulted that passage, wherein I find only that Hircanus, a disciple of the Pharisees and very well beloved by them, entirely lost their friendship. They conceived a great hatred against him, and because upon a certain occasion they gave him great reason to be angry with them, he forsook their sect and embraced that of the Sadducees, at the instigation of Jonathan his favourite. He abolished the ordinances of the Pharisees, and severely punished those who observed them; at last he put an end to the sedition which those two sects had raised, and spent the remaining part of his life in peace and felicity. Mr Willemer adds that Alexander Janneus being flattered and instigated by the Sadducees, was more cruel than his father Hircanus, and that having extricated himself out of a thousand difficulties in which he had been entangled by the Jews, he caused eight hundred of the chief men among the Pharisees to be crucified, and that before they expired, he ordered their wives and children to be murdered in their sight. During those executions he gave a grand entertainment to his concubines and to the chief men among the Sadducees. This author refers us to the twenty-second chapter of the thirteenth book of the Jewish Antiquities, where I do not find that the Sadducees are mentioned in the least. As for the author of the Cabbala Historica quoted by him, I have not been able to consult him; but though |