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” (ἡ περὶ τὸ ἱερὸν ἐπιφάνεια), he is an especially important witness of what the name meant to the Romans and Greeks, for whom he wrote.[[184]]

CHAPTER XIII
THE OPPOSITION IN ITS SOCIAL ASPECT

If the rivals and opponents of the Jews had nothing more to say of them than that they worshiped the head of an ass, it is not likely that their opposition would have been recorded. But they would have put their training to meager use, if they could not devise better and stronger terms of abuse.

The very first Greek historian who has more than a vague surmise of the character and history of the Jews is Hecataeus of Abdera (comp. above, p. 92). As has been seen, his tone is distinctly well-disposed. But he knows also of circumstances which to the Greek mind were real national vices. He mentions with strong disapproval their credulity, their inhospitality, and their aloofness.