Jason
Ἰάσων
(Ἰάσων), literary.
1. Of Cyrene, an Hellenist Jew, wrote the history of the Maccabees, and of the wars of the Jews against Antiochus Epiphanes and his son Eupator, in five books. He must therefore have written after B. C. 162. The second book of Maccabees, in the Apocrypha, with the exception of the two spurious epistles at the beginning, is an abridgement of the work of Jason. (2 Maccab. 2.21-24; Prideaux, Connection, vol. iii. pp. 264, 265, ed. 1729.)
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.