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 τόποι, “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 τόπος, 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 (λίθινον ἄγαλμα ἀνδρὸς βαθυπώγωνος καθήμενον [sic] ἐπ’ ὄνου.[[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.