A Letter to Apollonius from Toubias
Toubias to Apollonios greeting. On the tenth of Xandikos I sent Aineias our servant, bringing the gifts for the king which you wrote and asked me to send in the month of Xandikos: two horses, six dogs, one wild mule out of an ass, two white Arab donkeys, two wild mules’ foals, one wild ass’s foal. They are all tame. I have also sent you the letter…
While Josephus wrote long after the events he describes occurred, contemporaneous evidence appears in a letter from Toubias to Apollonios preserved among the Zenon papyri, a trove of documents belonging to the Ptolemaic official Zenon, who traveled through Judaea on behalf of Apollonios, the dioiketes (chief administrator of the Ptolemaic kingdom). While serving as a financial officer in the Ptolemaic administration in 257 BCE, Toubias sent animals as gifts to Ptolemy. If there is any truth to Josephus’ tale about Toubias’ putative descendants, his family achieved additional political influence by cultivating relations with the king and marrying into the high priestly family of Jerusalem.
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