Titus Flavius Josephus, whose birth name was Yosef ben Matityahu, was a Jewish-Roman historian from Jerusalem who fought against Rome as head of the Galilee forces until its surrender in 67 AD. Vespasian gave him Roman citizenship and used him as a translator and advisor.
In his work Jewish Antiquities , a kind of history of the world addressed to the Roman public, a curious letter supposedly sent by Areo I (who was king of Sparta between 309 and 265 BC) to the high priest of Jerusalem Onias I in the third century BC is transcribed.
In it Areo affirms that the Spartans had found a writing in which it was said that they were descendants of Abraham.
Josephus does not record Onias' response, nor does he give any further information about it. But Book I of the Maccabees, one of those that make up the Bible, includes a response sent a century later, around 144 BC. by another high priest:
It seems quite unlikely as those missives seem to indicate that the Spartans descended from Abraham, the Jewish and Arab patriarch, but also from Midianites and Edomites. Surprisingly, the Book of Maccabees records a new Spartan response, renewing their friendship in much the same terms.
The authenticity of all these letters has been questioned by many scholars, it is not in vain that they are only reproduced by Jewish sources. But an equal number of experts are inclined to consider them genuine. Among those who defend authenticity, the hypothesis gains strength that a growing Jewish community had settled in Spartan territory (or perhaps they were hired as mercenaries), and therefore King Areo decided to establish diplomatic relations with Judea.
In any case, it seems equally surprising that the Jews wanted to establish relations with the Spartans, with whom they do not seem to have much to do. One possibility may be that they thought they pleased Rome that way, given her alliance with Sparta.
Those who believe that the letters are fake and a Jewish invention rely on the language used in King Areus' letter. No Spartan would ever have used a phrase like we will regard your affairs as our own, and we will regard our affairs as common to yours .
Those who believe that they are authentic point out that the document to which the Spartans referred may be the account of Hecataeus of Abdera, according to which a small part of the Israelites that Moses brought out of Egypt left him and came to Greek lands. Hecataeus was a Greek historian and philosopher from the 4th century BC. who visited Egypt in the time of Ptolemy I and wrote a work entitled Aegyptiaca . Six fragments are preserved from it relating to Egyptian philosophy, priests, gods, sanctuaries, Moses and wine, in which the gymnosophists are also mentioned.
His digression on the Jews in that work would be the first known mention of them in Greek literature, and would later be picked up by Diodorus Siculus:
Thus, some associate this story with the legend of the Danaids, the mythical founders of Argos, settled in the Peloponnese in time immemorial, who would actually be the simeonites missing, members of Simeon's tribe mysteriously missing of the biblical story.
The entire history of epistolary exchange, whether true or false, would have been forged before the writing of the Book of Maccabees, probably at the end of the second century BC, and from then on it would have circulated among the elites, perhaps as a way of integrating the Jews in the Hellenic world and, at the same time, assimilate the Greeks into their own traditions.