And then again his friends and companions came and stirred up the miserable Flaccus, inviting, and exciting, and stimu- lating him to feel the same envy with themselves; saying, " The arrival of this man to take upon him his government is equivalent to a deposition of yourself. He is invested with a greater dignity of honour and glory than you. He attracts all eyes towards himself when they see the array of sentinels and body-guards around him adorned with silvered and gilded arms. For ought he to have come into the presence of another governor, when it was in his power to have sailed over the sea, and so to have arrived in safety at his own govern- ment? For, indeed, if Caius did advise or rather command him to do so, he ought rather with earnest solicitations to have deprecated any visit to this country, in order that the real governor of it might not be brought into disrepute and appear to have his authority lessened by being apparently disre- garded."
When he heard this he was more indignant than before, and in public indeed he pretended to be his companion and his friend, because of his fear of the man who directed his course, but secretly he bore him much ill-will, and told every one how he hated him, and abused him behind his back, and insulted him indirectly, since he did not dare to do so openly; for he encouraged the idle and lazy mob of the city (and the mob of Alexandria is one accustomed to great license of speech, and F 2 68 PHILO JUILEUS.
one which delights above measure in calumny and evil-speak- ing), to abuse the king, either beginning to revile him in his own person, or else exhorting and exciting others to do so by the agency of persons who were accustomed to serve him in business of this kind. And they, having had the cue given them, spent all their days reviling the king in the public schools, and stringing together all sorts of gibes to turn him into ridicule.
And at times they employed poets who compose farces, and managers of puppet shows, displaying their natural aptitude for every kind of disgraceful employment, though the)' were very slow at learning anything that was creditable, but very acute, and quick, and ready at learning anything of an opposite nature. For why did he not show his indignation, why did he not commit them to prison, why did he not chas- tise them for their insolent and disloyal evil speaking? And even if he had not been a king but only one of the household of Caesar, ought he not to have had some privileges and espe- cial honours? The fact is that all these circumstances are an undeniable evidence that Flaccus was a participator in all this abuse: for he who might have punished it with the most extreme severity, and entirely checked it, and who yet took no steps to restrain it, was clearly convicted of having permitted and encouraged it; but whenever an ungoverned multitude begins a course of evil doing it never desists, but proceeds from one wickedness to another, continually doing some monstrous thing.
VI. There was a certain madman named Carabbas, afflicted not with a wild, savage, and dangerous madness (for that comes on in fits without being expected either by the patient or by bystanders), but with an intermittent and more gentle kind; this man spent all his days and nights naked in the roads, minding neither cold nor heat, the sport of idle children and wanton youths; and they, driving the poor wretch as for as the public gymnasium, and setting him up there on high that he might be seen by everybody, flattened out a leaf of papyrus and put it on his head instead of a diadem, and clothed the rest of his body with a common door mat instead of a cloak, and instead of a sceptre they put in his hand a small stick of the native papyrus which they found lying by the wayside and gave to him; and when, like actors in theatrical spectacles, he AGAINST FLACCUS. 69 AGAINST FLACCUS. 69 had received all the insignia of royal authority, and had been dressed and adorned like a king, the young men bearing sticks on their shoulders stood on each side of him instead of spear- bearers, in imitation of the body-guards of the king, and then others came up, some as if to salute him, and others making as though they wished to plead their causes before him, and others pretending to wish to consult with him about the affairs of the state.
Then from the multitude of those who were standing around there arose a wonderful shout of men calling out Maris; and this is the name by which it is said that they call the kings among the Syrians; for they knew that Agrippa was by birth a Syrian, and also that he was possessed of a great district of Syria of which he was the sovereign; when Flaccus heard, or rather when he saw this, he would have done right if he had appre- hended the maniac and put him in prison, that he might not give to those who reviled him any opportunity or excuse for insulting their superiors, and if he had chastised those who dressed him up for having dared both openly and disguisedly, both with words and actions, to insult a king and a friend of Caesar, and one who had been honoured by the Roman senate with imperial authority; but he not only did not punish them, but he did not think fit even to check them, but gave complete license and impunity to all those who designed ill, and who were disposed to show their enmity and spite to the king, pretending not to see what he did see, and not to hear what he did hear.
And when the multitude perceived this, I do not mean the ordinary and well-regulated population of the city, but the mob which, out of its restlessness and love of an unquiet and disor- derly life, was always filling every place with tumult and con- fusion, and who, because of their habitual idleness and laziness, were full of treachery and revolutionary plans, they, flocking to the theatre the first thing in the morning, having already purchased Flaccus for a miserable price, which he with his mad desire for glory and with his slavish disposition, conde- scended to take to the injury not only of himself, but also of the safety of the commonwealth, all cried out, as if at a signal given, to erect images in the synagogues, proposing a most novel and unprecedented violation of the law.
And though they knew this (for they are very shrewd in 70 PHILO JUD^EUS.
their wickedness), they adopted a deep design, putting forth the name of Cajsar as a screen, to whom it would be impiety to attribute the deeds of the guilty; what then did the cover- nor of the country do? Knowing that the city had two classes of inhabitants our own nation and the people of the country and that the whole of Egypt was inhabited in the same man- ner, and that Jews who inhabited Alexandria and the rest of the country from the Catabathmos on the side of Libya to the boundaries of Ethiopia were not less than a million of men; and that the attempts which were being made were directed against the whole nation, and that it was a most mischievous thing to distress the ancient hereditary customs oi the land; he, disregarding all these considerations, permitted the mob to proceed with the erection of the statues, though he might have given them a vast number of admonitory pre- cepts instead of any such permission, either commanding them as their governor, or advising them as their friend.
VII But he, for he was eagerly co-operating in all that was being done amiss, thought fit to use his superior power to face the seditious tumult with fresh additions of evil, and as far as it depended on him, one may almost say that he filled the whole of the inhabited world with civil wars; for it was suffi- ciently evident that the report about the destruction of the synagogues, which took its rise in Alexandria would be imme- diately spread over all the districts of Egypt, and would extend from that country to the east and to the oriental nations, and from the borders of the land in the other direc- tion, and from the Mareotic district which is the frontier of Libya, towards the setting of the sun and the western nations J? or no one country can contain the whole Jewish nation by reason of its populousness; on which account they frequent all the most prosperous and fertile countries of Europe and \$\a whether islands or continents, looking indeed upon the holy city as their metropolis in which is erected the sacred temple of the most high God, but accounting those regions which have been occupied by their fathers, and grandfathers, and great grandfathers, and still more remote ancestors, in which they have been born and brought up, as their country; and there are even some regions to which they came the very moment that they were originally settled, sending a colony of their people to do a pleasure to the founders of the colony AGAINST FLACCUS. 71 And there was reason to fear lest all the populace in every country, taking what was done in Egypt as a model and as an excuse, might insult those Jews who were their fellow citizens, by introducing new regulations with respect to their synagogues and their national customs; but the Jews, for they were not inclined to remain quiet under everything, although naturally entirely disposed towards peace, not only because contests for natural customs do among all men appear more important than those which are only for the sake of life, but also because they alone of all the people under the sun, if they were deprived of their houses of prayer, would at the same time be deprived of all means of showing their piety towards their benefactors, which they would have looked upon as worse than ten thousand deaths, inasmuch as if their synagogues were destroyed they would no longer have any sacred places in which they could declare their gratitude, might have reasonably said to those who opposed them: You, without being aware of it, are taking away honour from your lords instead of conferring any on them. Our houses of prayer are manifestly incitements to all the Jews in every part of the habitable world to display their piety and loyalty towards the house of Augustus; and if they are destroyed from among us, what other place, or what other manner of show- ing that honour, will be left to us? For if we were to neglect the opportunity of adhering to our national customs when it is afforded to us, we should deserve to meet with the severest punishment, as not giving any proper or adequate return for the benefits which we have received; but if, while it is in our power to do so, we, in conformity with our own laws which Augustus himself is in the habit of confirming, obey in every- thing, then I do not see what great, or even what small offence can be laid to our charge; unless any one were to impute to us that we do not transgress the laws of deliberate purpose, and that we do not intentionally take care to depart from our national customs, which practices, even if they at first attack others, do often in the end visit those who are guilty of them.
But Flaccus, saying nothing that he ought to have said, and everything which he ought not to have said, has sinned against us in this manner; but those men whom he has studied to gratify, what has been their design? Have they had the feel- ings of men wishing to do honour to CaBsar? Was there then a scarcity of temples in the city, the greatest and most import- <aJ PHILO JUDjEUS.
ant parts of which are all allotted to one or other of the gods, in which they might have erected any statues they pleased ': We have been describing the evidence of hostile and unfriendh men, who seek to injure us with such artifice, that even whei injuring us they may not appear to have been acting iniqui tously, and yet that we who are injured by them cannot resist with safety to ourselves; for, my good men, it does not con- tribute to the honour of the emperor to abrogate the laws, to disturb the national customs of a people, to insult those who live in the same country, and to teach those who dwell in other cities to disregard unanimity and tranquillity.
VIII. Since, therefore, the attempt which was being made to violate the law appeared to him to be prospering, while he was destroying the synagogues, and not. leaving even their name, he proceeded onwards to another exploit, namely, the utter destruction of our constitution, that when all those things to svhich alone our life was anchored were cut away, namely, our national customs and our lawful political rights and social privileges, we might be exposed to the very extremity ol calamity, without having any stay left to which we could cling for safety, for a few days afterwards he issued a notice in which he called us all foreigners and aliens, without giving us an oppor- tunity of being heard in our own defence, but condemning us without a trial; and what command can be more full of tyranny than this?
He himself being everything— accuser, enemy, witness, judge, and executioner, added then to the two former appel- lations a third also, allowing any one who was inclined to proceed to exterminate the Jews as prisoners of war. So when the people had received this license, what did they do? There are five districts in the city, named after the first five letters of the written alphabet, of these two are called the quarters of the Jews, because the chief portion of the Jews lives in them. There are also a few scattered Jews, but only a very few, living in some of the other districts. What then did they do? They drove the Jews entirely out of four quarters, and crammed them all into a very small portion of one; and by reason of their numbers they were dispersed over the sea-shore, and desert places, and among the tombs, being deprived of all their property; while the populace, overrunning their desolate houses, turned to plunder, and divided the booty among them- AGAINST FLACCUS. 73 AGAINST FLACCUS. 73 selves as if they had obtained it in war. And as no one hindered them, they broke open even the workshops of the Jews, which were all shut up because of their mourning for Drusilla,* and carried off all that they found there, and bore it openly through the middle of the market-place as if they had only been making use of their own property.
And the cessation of business to which they were compelled to submit was even a worse evil than the plunder to which tiiay were exposed, as the consequence was that those who had lent money lost what they had lent, and as no one was per- mitted, neither farmer, nor captain of a ship, nor merchant, nor artisan, to employ himself in his usual manner, so that poverty was brought on them from two sides at once, both from rapine, as when license was thus given to plunder them they were stripped of everything in one day, and also from the circumstance of their no longer being able to earn money by their customary occupations.
IX. And though these were evils sufficiently intolerable, yet nevertheless they appear actually trifling when compared with those which were subsequently inflicted on them, for poverty indeed is a bitter evil, especially when it is caused by the machinations of one's enemies, still it is less than insult and personal ill treatment even of the slightest character. But now the evils which were heaped upon our people were so excessive and inordinate, that if a person were desirous to use appropriate language, he would never call them insults or assaults, but, as it appears to me, he would actually be wholly at a loss for suitable expressions, on account of the enormity of the cruelties now newly invented against them, so that if the treatment which men experience from enemies who have sub- dued them in war, however implacable they may be by nature, were to be compared with that to which the Jews were sub- jected, it would appear most merciful. Enemies, indeed, plunder their conquered foes of their money, and lead away multitudes in captivity, having incurred the same risk of losing all that they had if they themselves had been defeated. Not but that in all such cases there are very many persons for whom their relations and friends put down a ransom, and who are thus emancipated from captivity, inasmuch as though their * She was the sister of the emperor, and at her death her brother ordered that divine honours should be paid to her.
74 PHILO JUD^US.
enemies could not be worked upon by compassion, they could by love of money.
But what is the use of going on in this way, some one will say, for as long as men escape from danger it signifies but little in what way their preservation is brought to pass? Moreover it has often happened that enemies have granted to those who have fallen in battle the honour of funeral rites, those who were gentle and humane burying them at their own expense, and those who have carried on their enmity even against the dead giving up their bodies to their friends under a truce, in order that they might not be deprived of the last honour of 'all, the customary ceremonies of sepulture.
This, then, is the conduct of enemies in time of war; let us now see what was done by those who a little while before had been friends in time of peace.
For after plundering them of everything, and driving them from their homes, and expelling them by main force from most of the quarters of" the city, our people, as if they were block- aded and hemmed in by a circle of besieging enemies, beincr oppressed by a terrible scarcity and want of necessary tiring and seeing their wives and their children dying before their eyes by an unnatural famine (for every other place was full of pros- perity and abundance, as the river had irrigated the corn lands plentifully with its inundations, and as all the champaign country, which is devoted to the purposes of bearing wheat, was this year supplying a most abundant over-crop of corn with very unusual.fertility), being no longer able to support their want, some, though they had never been used to do so before, came to the houses of their friends and relations to beg them to contribute such food as was absolutely necessary as a charity; others, who from their high and free-born spirit could not endure the condition of beggars, as being a slavish state unbecoming the dignity of a freeman, came down into the market with no other object than, miserable men that they were, to buy food for their families and for themselves.
And then, being immediately seized by those who had excited the seditious multitude against them, they were treacherously put to death, and then were dragged along and trampled under foot by the whole city, and completely destroyed, without the least portion of them being left which could" possibly receive burial; and in this way their enemies, who in their savage AGAINST FLACCUS. 75 madness had become transformed into the nature of wild beasts, slew them and thousands of others with all kinds of agony and tortures, and 'newly invented cruelties, for wherever they met with or caught sight of a Jew, they stoned him, or beat him with sticks, not at once delivering their blows upon mortal parts, lest they should die speedily, and so speedily escape from the sufferings which it was their design to inflict upon them.
Some persons even, going still greater and greater lengths in the iniquity and license of their barbarity, disdained all blunter weapons, and took up the most efficacious arms of all, fire and iron, and slew many with the sword, and destroyed not a few with flames. And the most merciless of all their persecutors in some instances burnt whole families, husbands with their wives, and infant children with their parents, in the middle of the city, sparing neither age nor youth, nor the innocent helplessness of infants. And when they had a scarcity of fuel, they collected faggots of green wood, and slew them by the smoke rather than by fire, contriving a still more miserable and protracted death for those unhappy people, so that their bodies lay about promiscuously in every direction half burnt, a grievous and most miserable sight.
And if some of those who were employed in the collection of sticks were too slow, they took their own furniture, of which they had plundered them, to burn their persons, robbing them of their most costly articles, and burning with them things of the greatest use and value, which they used as fuel instead of ordinary timber. Many men too, who were alive, they bound by one foot, fastening them round the ankle, and thus they dragged them along and bruised them, leaping on them, designing to inflict the most barbarous of deaths upon them, and then when they were dead they raged no less against them with interminable hostility, and inflicted still heavier insults on their persons, dragging them, I had almost said, through all the alleys and lanes of the city, until the corpse, being lacerated in all its skin, and flesh, and muscles from the inequality and roughness of the ground, all the previously united portions of his composition being torn asunder and separated from one another, was actually torn to pieces.
And those who did these things, mimicked the sufferers, like people employed in the representation of theatrical farces; 70 PHILO JUD^EUS.
but the relations and friends of those who were the real victims, merely because they sympathized with the misery of their relations, were led away to prison, were scourged, were tortured, and after all the ill treatment which their living bodies could endure, found the cross the end of all, and the punishment from which they could not escape.
X. But after Flaccus had broken through every right, and trampled upon every principle of justice, and had left no portion of the Jews free from the extreme severity of his designing malice, in the boundlessness of his wickedness he contrived a monstrous and unprecedented attack upon them, being ever an inventor of new acts of iniquity, for he arrested thirty-eight members of our council of elders, which our saviour and benefactor, Augustus, elected to manage the affairs of the Jewish nation after the death of the king of our own nation, having sent written commands to that effect to Manius Maximus when he was about to take upon himself for the second time the government of Egypt and of the country, he arrested them, I say, in their own houses, and commanded them to be thrown into prison, and arranged a splendid pro- cession to send through the middle of the market-place a body of old men prisoners, with their hands bound, some with thongs and others with iron chains, whom he led in this plight into the theatre, a most miserable spectacle, and one wholly unsuited to the times. And then he commanded them all to stand in front of their enemies, who were sitting down, to make their disgrace the more conspicuous, and ordered them all to be stripped of their clothes and scourged with stripes, in a way that only the most wicked of malefactors are usually treated, and they were flogged with such severity that some of them the moment they were carried out died of their wounds, while others were rendered so ill for a long time that their recovery was despaired of.
And the enormity of this cruelty is proved by many other circumstances, and it will be further proved most evidently and undeniably by the circumstance which I am about to mention. Three of the members of this council of elders, Euodius, and Trypho, and Audro, had been stripped of all their property, being plundered of everything that was in their houses at one onset, and he was well aware that they had been exposed to this treatment, for it had been related to him when AGAINST FLACCUS. 77 he had in the first instance sent for our rulers, under pretence of wishing to promote a reconciliation between them and the rest of the city; but nevertheless, though he well knew that they had been deprived of all their property, he scourged them in the very sight of those who had plundered them, that thus they might endure the twofold misery of poverty and personal ill treatment, and that their persecutors might reap the double pleasure of enjoying riches which did in no respect belong to them, and also of feasting their eyes to satiety on the disgrace of those whom they had plundered.
Now, though I desire to mention a circumstance which took place at that time, I am in doubt whether to do so or not, lest if it should be looked upon as unimportant, it may appear to take off from the enormity of these great iniquities; but even if it is unimportant in itself, it is nevertheless an indication of no trifling wickedness of disposition. There are different kinds of scourges used in the city, distinguished with reference to the deserts or crimes of those who are about to be scourged. Accordingly, it is usual for the Egyptians of the country them- selves to be scourged with a different kind of scourge, and by a different class of executioners, but for the Alexandrians in the city to be scourged with rods by the Alexandrian lictors, and this custom had been preserved, in the case also of our own people, by all the predecessors of Flaccus, and by Flaccus himself in the earlier periods of his government; for it is pos- sible, it really is possible, even in ignominy, to find some slight circumstance of honour, and even in ill treatment to find something which is, to some extent, a relaxation, when any one allows the nature of things to be examined into by itself, and to be confined to its own indispensable requirements, without adding from his own ingenuity any additional cruelty or treachery, to separate and take from it all that is mingled with it of a milder character.