SEXTUS JULIUS AFRICANUS. - It is very uncertain whether this figure had the praenomen of Sextus, which is attributed to him on the basis of a text of Suidas that is, moreover, corrupt. In several passages of his work he calls himself Ἰούλιος Ἀφρικανός.
It would likewise be prudent not to make him a native of Jerusalem at all costs, by stretching to excess the meaning of a papyrus from Oxyrhynchus. But, whether or not he was a native of Palestine, he declares himself 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 traveled, it seems, a great deal in the Middle East, and he stayed at the court of Alexander Severus, where he held the office of architect and supplied the plan of the imperial Library that the sovereign had built next to his Baths, not far from the Pantheon. But he was also interested in the sciences, letters, philosophy and theology.
His works are divided so sharply into two almost contradictory groups that the scholars of the Renaissance wondered whether there had not been two Africanus, the one Christian, the other pagan, despite the concordant testimonies and the evident reality. On the one hand, Africanus is the creator of the Chronographia (fragments in PG 10, 63-94), the correspondent of Origen in two important letters on points of theological exegesis. This aspect of his activity earns the author great honor for his erudition, the acuteness of his critical sense, the firmness of his Christian faith. On the other hand, and later, he wrote a work essentially pagan and most curious: The Cesti (Öi Keo-tui), whose title alludes to the magic girdle of Aphrodite, whose splendor and mysterious power Africanus wished to imitate. This work, composed around 230, represents a kind of encyclopedia in 24 books, of which fairly numerous and long fragments have survived, transmitted through the most varied traditions, among them the papyri. Written by a Jew and intended predominantly for Jews, the Cesti form part of the abundant production of the diaspora, inclined to 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 character; the whole is draped in the bombastic style that flourished in the times of the Second Sophistic.
Bibliography
Giovanni Renato Vieillefond