1.
Lucian probably means tattooing, although actual brandng was practised on occasion. “Some are afflicted with such an extravagancy of madness that, leaving themselves no room for a change of mind, they embrace slavery to the works of human hands, admitting it in writing, not upon sheets of papyrus as the custom is in the case of human chattels, but by branding it upon their bodies with a heated iron with a view to its indelible permanency; for even time does not fade these letters” (Philo Judaeus, de Monarchia 1, 8 fin.). The view that this was the “mark of Cain” is forever being advanced anew, only to be anew denied. The practice was forbidden to the Jews (Levit. 19, 28, where the Septuagint reads: kal ypdupara orixta ob worhoere ev éyiv), Among the Moslem population it still survives, but apparently without any religious significance. “A Syrian custom: the workers in tattoo are generally Syrian, and the decoration is seen mainly in Syria and North Palestine” (H. Rix, Tent and Testament, p. 103). In du Soul’s time all Christians who visited the Holy Land came back tattooed, he tells us (Lucian, ed. Hemsterhuys-Reitz, iii, p. 489).
