SESTO GIULIO AFRICANO. — It is very uncertain that this person bore the praenomen of Sextus, which is attributed to him on the basis of a text by Suidas that is, moreover, corrupt. In several passages of his work, he calls himself Ἰούλιος Ἀφρικανός.
It would likewise be prudent not to insist at all costs that he was born in Jerusalem, by stretching the meaning of an Oxyrhynchus papyrus beyond measure. Whether or not he was originally from Palestine, he declares himself to be a Jew. The date of his birth and that of his death are unknown. He must have been somewhat older than Origen (285–254). He apparently travelled extensively in the Near East and stayed at the court of Alexander Severus, where he held the office of architect and supplied the plan for the imperial Library that the sovereign had built beside his Baths, not far from the Pantheon. But he was also interested in the sciences, literature, philosophy, and theology.
His works fall so sharply into two almost contradictory groups that the scholars of the Renaissance wondered whether there might not have been two Africanus,
one Christian, the other pagan, despite the unanimous testimony and the evident facts. On the one hand, Africanus is the creator of the Chronographia (fragments in PG 10, 63–94), and the correspondent of Origen in two important letters on matters of theological exegesis. This aspect of his activity brings the author great honour for his learning, the acuity of his critical sense, and the steadfastness of his Christian faith. On the other hand, and at a later date, he wrote an essentially pagan and most curious work: I Cesti (Öi Keo-tui), whose title alludes to the magic girdle of Aphrodite, whose splendour and mysterious power Africanus sought to imitate. This work, composed around 230, represents a kind of encyclopaedia in 24 books, of which fairly numerous and lengthy fragments have survived, transmitted through the most varied channels, including papyri. Written by a Jew and intended chiefly for Jews, the Cesti form part of the abundant production of the diaspora, which was inclined towards syncretism. They constitute, as Suidas says, “a kind of treatise on the sciences, containing various recipes.” Magic is intermingled in them with anecdotes, but also with observations of a practical nature; the whole is draped in the bombastic, luxuriant style that flourished in the age of the Second Sophistic.
Giovanni Renato Vieillefond