32. A very good sketch of Apion is given by Hausrath, Neutest. Zeitg. vol. ii. pp. 187-195.
33. Jos. Ag. Ap. ii. 4, 5, 6.
34. Leg. ad Caj. ed. Frcf.
We have already seen, that the ideas entertained in Rome about the Jews were chiefly derived
from Alexandrian sources. But it is not easy to understand, how a Tacitus, Cicero, or Pliny
could have credited such absurdities as that the Jews had come from Crete (Mount Ida - Idæi =
Judæi), been expelled on account of leprosy from Egypt, and emigrated under an apostate
priest, Moses; or that the Sabbath-rest originated in sores, which had obliged the wanderers to
stop short on the seventh day; or that the Jews worshipped the head of an ass, or else Bacchus;
that their abstinence from swine's flesh was due to remembrance and fear of leprosy, or else to
the worship of that animal - and other puerilities of the like kind.35 The educated Roman
regarded the Jew with a mixture of contempt and anger, all the more keen that, according to his
notions, the Jew had, since his subjection to Rome, no longer a right to his religion; and all the
more bitter that, do what he might, that despised race confronted him everywhere, with a
religion so uncompromising as to form a wall of separation, and with rites so exclusive as to
make them not only strangers, but enemies. Such a phenomenon was nowhere else to be
encountered. The Romans were intensely practical. In their view, political life and religion were
not only intertwined, but the one formed part of the other. A religion apart from a political
organisation, or which offered not, as a quid pro quo, some direct return from the Deity to his
votaries, seemed utterly inconceivable. Every country has its own religion, argued Cicero, in his
appeal for Flaccus. So long as Jerusalem was unvanquished, Judaism might claim toleration; but
had not the immortal gods shown what they thought of it, when the Jewish race was conquered?
This was a kind of logic that appealed to the humblest in the crowd, which thronged to hear the
great orator defending his client, among others, against the charge of preventing the transport
from Asia to Jerusalem of the annual Temple-tribute. This was not a popular accusation to bring
against a man in such an assembly. And as the Jews - who, to create a disturbance, had (we are
told) distributed themselves among the audience in such numbers, that Cicero somewhat
rhetorically declared, he would fain have spoken with bated breath, so as to be only audible to
the judges - listened to the great orator, they must have felt a keen pang shoot to their hearts
while he held them up to the scorn of the heathen, and touched, with rough finger, their open
sore, as he urged the ruin of their nation as the one unanswerable argument, which Materialism
could bring against the religion of the Unseen.
35. Comp. Tacitus, Hist. v. 2-4; Plut. Sympos. iv. 5
And that religion - was it not, in the words of Cicero, a `barbarous superstition,' and were not
its adherents, as Pliny had it,36 `a race distinguished for its contempt of the gods?' To begin with
their theology. The Roman philosopher would sympathise with disbelief of all spiritual realities,
as, on the other hand, he could understand the popular modes of worship and superstition. But
what was to be said for a worship of something quite unseen, an adoration, as it seemed to him,
of the clouds and of the sky, without any visible symbol, conjoined with an utter rejection of
every other form of religion - Asiatic, Egyptian, Greek, Roman - and the refusal even to pay the