But there may have been a more precise sense in which the Jews might by an incensed Greek be properly stigmatized as ἄθεοι. To the thoroughgoing monotheists, the gods of the heathen are non-existent. They are not evil spirits, but have no being whatever. The prophets and the intellectual leaders of the Jews held that view with passionate intensity. But even they used language which readily lends color to the view that these gods did exist as malignant and inferior daemonia. The “devils” of Leviticus xvii. 7 are undoubtedly the gods of other nations.[[215]] The name “Abomination,” which for the Jew was a cacophemism for “god,” equally implies by its very strength a common feeling of the reality of the being so referred to. Likewise the other terms of abuse which the Jews showered upon the gods of the heathen indicate a real and fiercely personal animosity.
Hatred and bitterness formed almost a religious duty. An implacable war was to be waged with the abominable thing, and it is not likely that dictates of courtesy would stand in the way. The retort of ἄθεοι would mean no more than a summary of the fact that the Jew was the declared enemy of the constituted deity, whose anger he provoked and whose power he despised.[[216]]
Something of this appears in the statement of the Alexandrian Lysimachus, that the Jews were enjoined to overturn the altars and temples which they met (Josephus, Contra Ap. i. 34), and in the phrase of the elder Pliny (Hist. Nat. XIII. iv. 46), gens contumelia numinum insignis, “a race famous for its insults to the gods.”
Most of the phrases that have been quoted have been taken from works where they were little more than casual asides imbedded in matter of different purport. Rhetoricians, in attempting to establish a point, use some phrase, either current through popular usage or a commonplace in their schools. In this respect the Jews fare no better and no worse than practically all nationalities of that time. Individual writers disliked or despised various peoples, and said so in any manner that suited them. Slurs against Romans, Athenians, Boeotians, Egyptians, Cappadocians are met with often enough. The Cretans were liars, the Boeotians guzzlers, the Egyptians knaves, the Abderitans fools; antiquity has furnished us with more than one entertaining example of national hate and jealousy.[[217]] The epithets which the Acheans showered on their Aetolian rivals certainly leave nothing to be desired as far as intensity is concerned.[[218]] The various panders of Roman comedy often are represented as particularly choice specimens of Agrigentine character.[[219]] Cicero particularly knew from his rhetorical masters how to use national prejudices in the conduct of his business. If Celts are the accusers of his client, as they were in the case of Fonteius, they are perjurers, murderers, enemies of the human race. “Tribes,” he says, “so far removed from other races in character and customs that they fight, not for their religion, but against the religion of all men.”[[220]] If they are Sardinians, these are a “tribe whose worthlessness is such that the only distinction they recognize between freedom and slavery is that the former gives them unlimited license to lie.”[[221]]
To take this seriously is to misconceive strangely both the functions of an advocate and the license of rhetoric. Now the abusive paragraphs directed against the Jews are quite of this type. And it is in the highest degree extraordinary that these phrases, which, in the instances just cited, are given no weight in determining national attitude, should be considered of the highest importance in the case of the Jews. Whether it was Syrian, Greek, or Celt that was attacked, the stock epithet means no more than the corresponding terms of our own day mean.
But besides these occasional flings there were whole books directed against the Jews, and to that fact a little attention may be given.
It is a relatively rare thing that a writer should nurse his bile against a particular people to the extent of expanding it into a whole book. We must of course remember that a “book” was sometimes, and especially in this polemical literature, a single roll, and we are not to understand it in the sense of a voluminous treatise. However, there were such books and these we must now consider.
What such a book was like, recent anti-Semitism has made it very easy to imagine. There is no reason to suppose that this type of pamphlet was appreciably different in those days. It consisted of a series of bitter invectives interspersed with stories as pièces justificatives. Now and then an effort is made to throw it into the form of a dispassionate examination. But even in very skilful hands that attitude is not long maintained.
Of several men we know such treatises. All have already been mentioned—Apollonius Molo, Damocritus, and probably Apion.
Apollonius, either son of Molo, or himself so named, was one of the most considerable figures of his day. He taught principally, but not exclusively, at Rhodes, and numbered among his pupils both Cicero and Caesar. As a rhetorician he enjoyed an extensive and well-merited influence. It was during his time that the reaction against the florid literary style of Asia culminated in the equally artificial simplicity of the Atticists—a controversy of the utmost importance in the history of Latin literature no less than Greek. The doctrine of mediocritas, “the golden mean,” set forth by Molo, moulded the style of Cicero and through him of most modern prose writers. The refined taste and good sense which could avoid both extremes justify his repute and power.