the various embellishments of the legend; in one version the river attains a width of 17 m. and throws stones as high as a house. But there are no stones on Saturday; it then resembles a lake of snow-white sand. Menasseh ben Israel (q.v.), who gave vogue to this latter story in his Hope of Israel, adds the detail that if sand from Sambatyon be kept in a bottle it agitates itself during six days but remains still on the Saturday.
The site of the Sambatyon varies considerably in the different narratives. Media, Ethiopia, Persia, India, the Caspian district, —all these are suggested. Reggio identified the river with the Euphrates, Fünn with the Zeb in Adiabene. But as Neubauer remarks: “ It would be lost time to trouble ourselves about the identification of this stream.”
See Neubauer, “ Where are the Ten Tribes? ” in Jewish Quarterly Review, vol. i. passim; M. Seligsohn in Jewish Encyclopedia x. 681. (I. A.)
SABBIONETA, a town of Lombardy, Italy, in the province
of Mantua, from which it is 20 m. S.W. by steam tramway, not
far from the N. bank of the Po, 59 ft. above sea-level. Pop.
(1901) 1835 (town); 7016 (commune). Its period of prosperity
was under Vespasiano Gonzaga (d. 1591), who was its duke;
by him it was transformed into a small “ Residenzstadt.” It
was well fortified and built, and from this period date the ducal
palace (now the Municipio), the theatre designed by Scomozzi,
&c. The church and the summer palace contain frescoes by
the Campi of Cremona. Here in 1567 a Hebrew printing-press
was set up.
SABELLIC,[1] the name originally given by Mommsen in his
Unteritalische Dialekte to the pre-Roman dialects of Central
Italy which was neither Oscan nor Umbrian. The progress
of study has, however, grouped them under more specific names,
such as the “ North Oscan” group (see Paeligni) and the
“ Latinian ” group (see Latin Language), and the only content
now left for the term Sabellic consists of a group of 8 or 9 inscriptions
to which it certainly cannot be applied with truth. They
are probably, if not certainly, the most ancient inscriptions in
existence on Italian soil. Since they were all found on a strip
of the eastern coast running from the mouth of the Aternus
on the south to Pesaro on the north, it is probably best to call
them simply “ East Italic ” or “ Adriatic.”
Not even the transcription of their alphabet has reached the stage of certainty, for even in this small number of inscriptions the alphabet seems to vary. The chief doubt is about the value of ⩛ and ⟇ (or ⟑ and ⩚) which appear beside the symbol Ά on the same inscriptions; and of the dots in the middle of the line which are certainly not interpuncts. They may conceivably have some connexion with the dots in Venetic inscriptions, which R. S. Conway has endeavoured to explain (see Veneti). The most striking characteristic of the group of inscriptions is that the direction of the writing in alternate lines is not merely reversed but inverted (“ serpentine boustrophedon ” as on the Etruscan stele of Capua of the 5th century B.C.) (see Etruria: Language). Thus if the first line consisted of the letters ABC. in that order, the next would be Ⅎ∃ᗡ, i.e. with each letter turned so as to face the left, and with its head downwards. This arrangement appears in some of the Venetic inscriptions also. The longest of the inscriptions is that from Grecchio, now preserved in the Naples Museum. The probability is that this and all the rest were epitaphs, but a translation is as yet out of the question. The stone from Castrignano gives us certain forms which seem to be recognizable as Indo-European, namely paterefo, materefo, though it is far from certain that the symbol ⨝, which is here represented by f, really has that value.
Pauli's conjecture that these inscriptions probably represented the language of some settlers from Illyria has little support except that of some coincidences in tribal and local names on the two sides of the Adriatic (e.g. “ Truentum, quod solum Liburnorum in Italia relicuum est ” (Plin. Nat. Hist. iii. 110), —enium being a frequent Illyrian ending, and Liburni an Illyrian tribe), though it is a priori likely enough.
For the authorities for the alphabets and the text of the inscriptions as known down to 1897, see R. S. Conway's Italic Dialects (Cambridge, 1897), ii. 1528; and nothing has yet (1908) been added to what was written about the alphabets by Karl Pauli (Altilal. Stud. iii., “ Die Veneter,” Leipzig, 1891, pp. 220 seq. and p. 423). Some plausible (but wholly uncertain) conjectures by W. Deecke as to the meaning of some of the inscriptions may be sought in the appendix to Zvetaieff's Inscrr. Italiae inferioris dialecticae; and since 1897 a further inscription of this class has been found at Belmonte Piceno, which is preserved in the museum at Bologna and reported by Brizio in Notiz. degli scavi, 1903, p. 104.
It is to be noticed that a much longer and far more legible inscription from Novilara (now in the museum at Pesaro— a cast of it is at Bologna) sometimes spoken of as Sabellic, whose first two words are mimnis erut, is perhaps more probably to be regarded as containing some variety of Etruscan, though its character is far from certain. Its alphabet closely resembles Etruscan of the 4th century B.C. It is a very interesting monument both for its own sake, since it is sculptured as well as inscribed (there is one—or more—hunting or pastoral scene on the back), and because the archaeological stratum (late Bronze period) of the cemetery from which it is believed to have come is clearly marked.
With a companion fragment it is fully described by Brizio in Monumenti antichi, v. (1895), and it has a so been discussed by Elia Lattes in Hermes (xxxi. 465 and xliii. 32). (R. S. C.)
SABELLIUS (fl. 230), early Christian presbyter and theologian,
was of Libyan origin, and came from the Pentapolis to Rome
early in the 3rd century. ' To understand his position a brief
review of the Christian thought of the time is necessary. Even
after the elimination of Gnosticism the church remained without
any uniform Christology; the Trinitarians and the Unitarians
continued to confront each other, the latter at the beginning of
the 3rd century still forming the large majority. These in turn
split into two principal groups—the Adoptianists and the
Modalists—the former holding Christ to be the man chosen of
God, on whom the Holy Spirit rested in a quite unique sense,
and who after toil and suffering, through His oneness of will with
God, became divine, the latter maintaining Christ to be a
manifestation of God Himself. Both groups had their scientific
theologians who sought to vindicate their characteristic doctrines,
the Adoptianist, divines holding by the Aristotelian philosophy,
and the Modalists by that of the Stoics; while the Trinitarians
(Tertullian, Hippolytus, Origen, Novatian), on the other hand,
appealed to Plato.
In Rome Modalism was the doctrine which prevailed from Victor to Calixtus or Callistus (c. 190-220). The bishops just named protected within the city the schools of Epigonus and Cleomenes, where it was taught that the Son is identical with the Father. But the presbyter Hippolytus was successful in convincing the leaders of that church that the Modalistic doctrine taken in its strictness was contrary to Scripture. Calixtus saw himself under the necessity of abandoning his friends and setting up a mediating formula designed to harmonize the Trinitarian and the Modalistic positions. But, while excommunicating the strict Unitarians (Monarchians), he also took the same course with Hippolytus and his followers, declaring their teaching to be ditheism. The mediation formula, however, proposed by Calixtus became the bridge by which, in the course of the decades immediately following, the doctrine of the Trinity made its way into the Roman Church. In the year 250, when the Roman presbyter Novatian wrote his book De Trinilate, the doctrine of Hippolytus, once discredited as ditheism, had already become official there. At the same time Rome and most of the other churches of the West still retained a certain leaning towards Modalistic monarchianism. This appears, on the one hand, in the use of expressions having a Modalistic ring about them—see especially the poems of Commodian, written about the time of Valerian—and, on the other hand, in the rejection of the doctrine that the Son is subordinate to the Father and is a creature (witness the controversy between Dionysius of Alexandria and Dionysius of Rome), as well as in the readiness of the West to accept the formula of Athanasius, that the Father and the Son are one and the same in substance (ὁμοούσιοι).
The strict 'Modalists, whom Calixtus had excommunicated along with their most zealous opponent Hippolytus, were led
