Parts of Graves's anecdote have a Lawrentian feel. The following is from a quite famous passage of Seven Pillars of Wisdom that muses upon (per Lawrence) the essentially Galilean origin that (ditto) bestowed on it a Jewish-adjacent rather than Jewish character:
The people of this stranger-colony were not Greek — at least not in the majority — but Levantines of sorts, aping a Greek culture; and in revenge producing, not the correct banal Hellenism of the exhausted homeland, but a tropical rankness of idea, in which the rhythmical balance of Greek art and Greek ideality blossomed into novel shapes tawdry with the larded passionate colours of the East.
Gadarene poets, stuttering their verses in the prevailing excitement, held a mirror to the sensuality and disillusioned fatalism, passing into disordered lust, of their age and place; from whose earthiness the ascetic Semite religiosity perhaps caught the tang of humanity and real love that made the distinction of Christ’s music, and fitted it to sweep across the hearts of Europe in a fashion which Judaism and Islam could not achieve.
There is plenty here that does not work; most relevantly to epigram, that the 'Gadarene poets' whose work we know, Meleager and Philodemus, left Gadara far behind them. Meleager by his own account was educated at Tyre and retired to Cos; Philodemus ended up on the Bay of Naples. 'Sensuality and...disordered lust' is an odd characterisation of their charmingly witty erotic poems, but perhaps we should be deferring to Lawrence's first-hand knowledge of their imaginary poems in Syrian...
