The ancient state was based on community of sacra, of cult-observances. Anything that tended to destroy them or impair general belief in their necessity, went to the very roots of the state, was therefore a form of treason, and was punished as such. The state rarely was interested in the honor of the gods themselves. Roman law had a maxim, which was very seriously stated, but which makes upon us the impression of a cynical witticism: Deorum iniuriae dis curae, “Let the gods attend to their own wrongs.” Since the kinship of members of the state was generally known to be a legal fiction, the bond that took its place was common worship. The state could not look without concern upon anything that threatened to weaken its formal structure.

Most Greek states made ?s?e?a, “impiety,” a criminal offense. But just what acts or omissions constituted impiety was in each case a question of fact, to be determined specially in every instance. At Athens various persons of greater and less distinction were prosecuted under that indictment—Socrates, Theophrastus, Phryne. In every one of these cases, the gravamen of the charge was that the defendant did not regard as gods those whom the state so regarded (? ????e?? ?e??? ??? ? p???? ????e?, Plat. Apol. 24B and 26B), and taught so. In general, individual prosecutions such as these were deemed sufficient to repress the spread of dangerous doctrines. It was not believed necessary to consider membership in any sect or community as prima facie evidence of such impiety, punishable without further investigation. In later times, however, even this step was taken. Certain philosophic sects—which, we may remember, were corporately organized—were believed to be essentially impious. The city of Lyctos in Crete forbade any Epicurean to enter it under penalty of the most frightful tortures.^[164]

We shall have to distinguish these police measures, which, when aimed at religious bodies, constitute an undoubted religious persecution, from the mutual animosity with which hostile races in any community regarded each other and the bloody riots that resulted from it. In the new city of Seleucia in Babylonia, the Syrians, Jews, and Greeks that lived there were very far from realizing the purpose of the city’s founder and coalescing into a single community. Sanguinary conflicts, probably on very slight provocation, frequently took place. Sometimes the Jews and Syrians combined against the Greeks; sometimes the Greeks and Syrians against the Jews, as recounted by Josephus.^[165] The situation in Alexandria, where Egyptians hated Greeks, Jews, and doubtless all foreigners with a scarcely discriminating intensity, is peculiar only because we are well informed of conditions there by the papyri. When any one of these nationalities gained the upper hand, there was likely to be a bloody suppression of its foes, often followed by equally bloody reprisals. Salamis, in Cyprus, is a grim witness of the frenzy with which neighbors could attack each other, when years of hostility culminated in a violent outbreak.^[166]

The attitude of Greek states toward the Jewish congregations in their midst was certainly not uniformly hostile. But in many cases there could not help being a certain resentment, owing to the fact that these congregations were by special grant generally immune from prosecution for impiety, although as a matter of fact they very emphatically “did not regard as gods those whom the state so regarded.” Of itself this circumstance might have been neglected, but the active and successful propaganda they undertook made them a source of real danger to the state. We therefore hear of attempts made sporadically to abrogate the immunity, to compel the Jewish corporations to conform to the local law of ?s?e?a. Nearly always, however, the immunity was a royal grant, and therefore unreachable by local legislation, a fact that did not tend to alleviate friction where it existed.^[167]

At Rome police measures to suppress irreligion were long in existence. However, the Roman attitude toward any form of communion with gods or daemonia was so uniformly an attitude of dread, that prohibition of religious rites and punishment of participants in them were not a task lightly assumed by a Roman magistrate. The suppression of the Bacchanalia in 186 B.C.E. was nothing short of a religious persecution, but the utmost care was taken to make it appear to be directed against certain licentious practices alleged against the Bacchae, and the senate’s decree expressly authorizes the Bacchic rites, under certain restrictions deemed necessary to insure their harmlessness.^[168] Very early the Isiac mysteries and other Eastern cults came within the animadversion of the urban police.^[169] Here too the theory was that the crimes and immorality of the communicants were the sole objects of punishment, especially that species of fraud which took the form of magic and unofficial fortune-telling. In reality, however, all these pretexts covered the fact that the Romans felt their state ritual endangered, not by the presence, but by the spread, of such rituals among Romans; and in this their alarm was very well grounded indeed. But to proceed openly and boldly against any manifestation of a divine numen, was more than the average Roman board of aediles ventured to do.

If the official attitude of various communities toward outside cults and toward the Jews in particular can be brought under no general rule, we may be sure that the personal attitude of individual Greeks toward them varied from enthusiastic veneration to indifference and determined antagonism. In certain cities the Jews as foreigners could not hope to escape odium nor the jealousy of competing individuals and organizations. In Egypt particularly, the feud between Egyptians and Jews existed before the coming of the Greeks there, and grew in intensity as time went on. As far as definite attacks upon the Jews and their institutions went, many of them had an Egyptian origin, and many others were wholly confined to that country.

These attacks are not essentially different from the methods that generally obtained when one group of men found itself in frequent opposition to another group on the field of battle or otherwise. The populace needs no rhetorical stimulation to represent its enemies as wicked, cowardly, and foolish. That is a human weakness which exists to-day quite as it has existed for many centuries. However, even for the populace, such phrases were accepted conventions. They were not quite seriously meant, and could be conveniently forgotten whenever the former foe became an ally.

Among professional rhetoricians this particular method of argumentation formed a set rhetorical device, one of the forms of vituperatio^[170] as classified in the text-books. Certain t?p??, “commonplaces,” were developed concerning all nations, and used as occasion required. Historical facts, popular gossip, freely imagined qualities, were all equally used to support the statements made or to illustrate them. Now it is in the works of professional rhetoricians that most of the attacks on the Jews are to be found. Further, we have their works wholly in the form of citations taken from the context. We cannot even be sure to what extent the authors themselves were convinced of what they said. Wherever we meet what is plainly a rhetorical t?p??, we have little ground for assuming that it corresponds to any feeling whatever on the writer’s part. Often it was mechanically inserted, and has all the effect of an exercise in composition.

With a laughter-loving people one of the first resources in controversy is to render the opponent ridiculous. It was especially on the side of religion that the Jews maintained their difference from their neighbors, and claimed a great superiority to them. A Greek enemy would be much inclined to heap ridicule, first on the pretensions to superiority, and then on the religious form itself. That may be the basis of a story, which soon became widely current, to the effect that the Jews worshiped their god in the form of an ass.

The story is of Egyptian origin. Just where and when it began, cannot be discovered. Josephus in combating Apion refers to a writer whose name the copyists have hopelessly jumbled. It is not unlikely that he was a certain Mnaseas, perhaps of Patara in Lycia, or Patras in the Peloponnesus, a highly rhetorical historian of the second century B.C.E.^[171] He wrote therefore before the establishment of the Maccabean state. Wherever he was born, he was a pupil of Eratosthenes, and therefore a resident of Alexandria.^[172]

We have his words only at third hand, in Josephus’ account of Apion’s reference. Each citation is of substance, not the ipsissima verba; and, besides, of this part of Josephus we have only a Latin translation, not the original. The story, whether it is Mnaseas’ or Apion’s, is to the effect that a certain Idumean, named Zabidus, duped the Jews into believing that he intended to deliver his god, Apollo,^[173] into their hands, and contrived to get into the temple and remove “the golden head of the pack-ass.”

The uncertainty and indirectness of the citation makes it dubious whether Mnaseas understood this ass to be the actual divine symbol or, as others said, merely one of the figures of a group. The absurdity of the story seems so patent that its existence is almost incredible. It indicates the extreme strictness with which gentiles were excluded from even the approach to the temple at Jerusalem that the baselessness of the ass-legend was not immediately discovered.^[174]

Josephus’ indignation and his frequent reference to the “pretended wit” of Apion or of Mnaseas make the tone and intention of the story quite plain. It can have had no other purpose than that of holding the Jews up to ridicule. But just what the point of the jest is, is by no means quite so easy to discover. We cannot reconstruct even approximately the words of Mnaseas. It is, however, at least likely that if he had attributed the adoration of an ass to the Jews, a somewhat less equivocal statement to that effect would appear. Other writers do make that statement plainly enough. The point of Mnaseas’ raillery seems rather to be the easy credulity of the people, a characteristic that was at all times attributed to them in the ancient world, from the earliest references, as they are found in Hecataeus, to the latest. It is curious that this quality, which to Greeks and Romans seemed the most striking trait of the Jews, is the very last that modern observers would ascribe to them.

If we follow the story as it appears in later writers, we shall meet it next in the history of the Syrian Posidonius, who lived about 100 B.C.E. Again, we have his statement only in quotation, this time in a fragment of the work of Diodorus, a Sicilian contemporary of Augustus. Posidonius does no more than make the assertion that the innermost shrine of the temple contained the statue of a long-bearded man, assumed to be Moses, riding on an ass (??????? ??a?a ??d??? a??p?????? ?a??e??? [sic] ?p’ ????.^[175] This is very far from accusing the Jews of worshiping an ass. Indeed it is likely enough that nothing was further from the mind of the writer. Perhaps Mnaseas too told the same or a very similar story, since his anecdote would fit in just as well with the account of Posidonius as with the later version.

The story appears again in the writings of Molo, the tutor of Caesar and Cicero; but Molo’s statement is wholly lost. In the next generation we find it in the writings of the Egyptian Apion, and in Damocritus, of whom we know nothing, but who, it is likely enough, was a resident of Alexandria.^[176]

Here the statements are unmistakable. According to Damocritus, if he is accurately cited by the late Byzantine lexicographer Suidas, the Jews adored the gilded head of an ass (???s ? ? ???? ?efa??? p??se??????). Apion, in the Latin translation of Josephus, asserts that the Jews “adored this ass’ head, and worshiped it with much ceremony” (id [i.e. asini caput] colere ac dignum facere tanta religione).^[177]

Probably from Apion it got to Tacitus, 120 C.E., who in his Histories (v. 4) uses the words, effigiem [asini] penetrali sacravere, “they consecrated the figure of an ass in their inner shrine.” Tacitus expressly avoids the allegation of worshiping this statue. He probably intentionally modified the words of Apion to fit the statement into the then abundantly proven fact that the Jews worshiped an imageless and abstract deity (Hist. v. 5).

The Greek essayist Plutarch, almost a generation before Tacitus, makes a similar reference, though in his case without the least hostile or satiric intention. The ass is according to him the animal most honored among the Jews (t? t??e??? ?p a?t?? ???sta ??????), a statement which, it may be said incidentally, is by no means without foundation.^[178]

It is generally assumed that the use of an ass as an object of adoration necessarily aroused derision. That would probably be true of our own times in Europe or in America, but it would not obtain in the ancient world. Veneration of an ass was no more extraordinary to a Greek than veneration of any other animal symbol. Nor was the ass associated in men’s minds only with contemptuous and derisive images. He played a large part in the economy of the people, and was in many places correspondingly esteemed. The very first reference to him in Greek literature is in the Iliad (xi. 558), where Ajax’s slow retreat is compared to the stubborn and effectual resistance of an ass in the fields—surely no dishonoring simile. The ass was a part of the sacred train of Dionysus,^[179] long before the latter was identified with the Phrygian Sabazios. Again, the ass was transferred to heaven, where he still shines as a constellation. At Lampsacus and Tarentum he was a sacrificial animal.^[180] At Rome he was associated with Vesta, and crowned at the Consualia.

Among the Jews, as among all the people of that portion of Asia, his importance is such as to justify in a large measure the words of Plutarch. Generally in the Bible he is preferred to the horse (Prov. xxvi. 3; Psalm xxxii. 9). In the ancient song of Deborah (Judges v. 10) those who sit on white asses are the princes of the people. The Anointed of God would ride into the city upon an ass. It is not without meaning that asses, but not horses, appear on Assyrian sculpture.

In Egypt, however, the ass was a symbol of evil. He was associated with the demoniac Typhon, and was an object of superstitious fear and hatred.^[181]

For most of the Mediterranean nations the worship of an ass was only in so far contemptible as the worship of any animal was so considered. Romans and Greeks take very lofty ground indeed when they speak of Egyptian theriolatry, although innumerable religious practices of their own were associated in some way or other with animals.^[182] It is not likely accordingly that the allegation of this form of fetichism against the Jews arose among Greeks or Romans or Syrians or Palestinians. For Egyptians, on the contrary, this particular story would charge the Jews with “devil-worship,” or, at least, the veneration of a deity hostile to them. In Egypt, and in Egypt alone, the story would have a special point.

It may further be noted that in Manetho’s account the Jews are brought to Avaris, a site consecrated to Typhon.

As it appears in Posidonius, perhaps in Mnaseas and Molo, and certainly in Plutarch, the story is based upon a real Jewish tradition and actual custom. In Damocritus and Apion, on the other hand, it is a malicious slander, needing no basis in observed fact. It is one of the many developments of the mutual hatred of Jew and Egyptian, of which there is such a wealth of other evidence.

This story has been dealt with in some detail because it illustrates in very many ways the character, sources, and methods of the literary anti-Semitism of ancient times. Wholly without basis from the beginning, it becomes almost an accepted dogma, as well grounded as many another facile generalization in those days and ours. Further, it will be observed that it does not everywhere necessitate the inference of hostility on the part of the writer. The historians of those days were ex professo rhetoricians. Every form of literary composition had as its prime object a finished artistic product. Since the subject of literature, or artistic verbal expression, was human life, history, which is the record of human life, was eminently the province of the word-fancier, the rhetorician. The trained historian has no words of sufficient contempt for the mere logographer whose object is the recording of facts. That “pretty lies” do not in the least disfigure history, is the opinion of the Stoic Panaetius and his pupil and admirer Cicero. And that was particularly the case when the history was, as it often became, an expanded plea or invective, in which case the tricks of trade of the advocate were not only commendable but demanded.^[183]

Most of the accounts of the Jews or the fragments of such accounts come to us from just these rhetorical historians. If the whole book were extant in any case, we should be in a position to determine the occasion for the account and the source of its color. As it is, we are on slippery ground when we endeavor to interpret the fragments in such a way as to discover the facts of which they present so distorted an image.

Not all historians, however, were of this type. Even among the rhetors, many had, or at any rate professed to have, a passion for truth. And among the others there is manifested from time to time a distinct historical conscience, a qualm as to the accuracy of the assertion so trippingly written.

It is for this reason an especially painful gap in our sources to find that portion of Polybius missing in which he promised to treat at length of the Jews. Polybius of Megalopolis, a Greek who lived as an Achean hostage in Rome, in the second third of the second century B.C.E., was the nearest approach the ancient world had to an historian in the modern sense, one whose primary object was to ascertain the truth and state it simply. Polybius could, for example, feel and express high admiration for Roman institutions and at the same time do justice to the bitter hater of the Romans, Hannibal. And this too in the lifetime of men who may themselves have heard the dreadful news of Trasimene and Cannae.

In his sixteenth book, Polybius briefly relates the conquest of Judea among other parts of Coele-Syria, first by Ptolemy Philometor’s general, then by Antiochus the Great. “A little while after this, he [Antiochus] received the submission of those of the Jews who lived around the temple known as Jerusalem. About this I have much more to tell, particularly because of the fame of the temple, and I shall reserve that narrative for later.”

An evil chance has deprived us of that later narrative. If we possessed it, we should probably have a very sane and, as far as his sources permitted, an accurate account of the condition of the Jews during the generation between Antiochus the Great and the Maccabees. Polybius, however, wrote before the establishment of the Jewish state and the spread of its cult had focused attention upon the people, and roused opposition. And he wrote, too, at the very beginning of Roman interference in the East, which reduced Egypt to a protectorate before another generation. When he speaks therefore of the “great fame of the temple” (? pe?? t? ?e??? ?p?f??e?a), he is an especially important witness of what the name meant to the Romans and Greeks, for whom he wrote.^[184]