ABSTRACT
IN his History of the Church (III, xvi), the Greek historian Socrates relates that following the edict of the Emperor Julian which forbade the Christians to explain the pagan classics, the two Apollinares, father and son, the former
a professor of grammar at Laodicea in Syria, and the latter Bishop of Laodicea, made an attempt to reconstitute en bloc for the benefit of educated Christians the profane works on which they were forbidden to comment in public. The father drew up a grammar "consonant with the Christian faith," which doubtless means that his examples were taken from Christian authors or counterfeited in conformity with the faith; he translated the books of Moses into heroic verse, paraphrased the historical books of the Old Testament, .and drew from them epopees and tragedies. He purposely made use of the greatest possible number of the traditional metrical forms of Hellenic literature in order to popularise them among the Christians. His son transposed "the Gospels and the doctrine of the Apostles" in the form of Platonic dialogues.
