He was a voluminous writer on historical and rhetorical subjects. Only the smallest fragments remain, not enough to permit us to form an independent estimate of his style or habits of thought. Just what was the incentive for the pamphlet he wrote against the Jews it is impossible to conjecture. But it is not likely that it contained many of the specially malignant charges. To judge from Josephus’ defense, it seems to have concerned itself chiefly with their unsociability, and may have been no more than a sermon on that text. Josephus’ charge against him is that of unfairness. There is none of the abuse in Josephus’ account of Molo which he heaps upon Apion. We may accordingly infer that Molo’s pamphlet was considerably less offensive. It may have been, in effect, a mere declamatio, a speech in a fictitious cause, or the substance of an oration delivered in an actual case. Or perhaps a single instance of personal friction produced it as an act of retaliation. The rhetoricians of those days were essentially a genus irritabile, and their wrath or praise was easily stirred.
Of Damocritus we know almost nothing. Suidas, a late Byzantine grammarian, mentions a short work of his on Tactics, and one as short, or shorter, on the Jews. The reference to human sacrifice (above, p. [189]), might be supposed to indicate a strong bias. While it is likely enough that it was hostile in character, that single fact would not quite prove it, since we do not know whether Damocritus represented these human sacrifices as an ancient or a still-existing custom.
The third name, Apion, has become especially familiar from the apology of Josephus. The latter refers to him throughout as an Egyptian, and in spite of certain very warm and modern defenders, he very likely was of Egyptian stock. From the Oasis where he was born, he came to Alexandria, where he established a great reputation. Undoubtedly possessed of fluency and charm as a speaker, he was a most thoroughgoing charlatan, a noisy pedant wholly devoid of real critical skill. He boasted of magical power, through which he was enabled to converse with the shade of Homer. His vanity prompted the most ludicrous displays of arrogance. Tiberius Caesar dubbed him the cymbalum mundi, “the tom-tom of the world,” a characterization that seems to have been generally accepted.[[222]]
In the appeal of the Jewish residents of Alexandria against the maladministration of the prefect Flaccus, argued before the emperor, he represented the Alexandrian community, whose acts were the basis of the charge made by the Jews. As such he no doubt delivered an anti-Jewish invective, and it is at least likely that this speech formed the substance of his book on the subject, just as the defense of the Jews and the attack upon Flaccus are contained in the two extensive fragments of Philo, the Legatio ad Gaium, and the In Flaccum.
It has been doubted whether he really wrote such a book, although there are express statements that he did. It is true enough that those who assert it may easily have been misled by the fact that certain books of his History of Egypt may have contained these anti-Jewish passages or most of them. None the less, the fact that he must have prepared a set speech in the case mentioned, coupled with the statements of Clemens of Alexandria and Julius Africanus, renders the older view the more probable.[[223]] There would of course be nothing strange if the books of the History of Egypt and a special monograph contained essentially the same material.
As to other similar pamphlets, we hear of a περὶ Ἰουδαίων by a certain Nicarchus, son of Ammonius, which may have had an “Egyptian” bias, in that Moses is said to have been afflicted with white scales upon his body—an assertion that seems to be a revamping of Manetho’s “leprous outcasts.” But the title of the book does not point to a wholly hostile attitude, nor does the passage referred to necessarily imply such an attitude.[[224]]
Taking all these passages together, from Manetho to Apion, one thing must be evident: Manetho himself, Mnaseas, Agatharchidas, Chaeremo, Lysimachus, Apion, are either Egyptians or are trained in Alexandria, and represent the Egyptian side of a bitter racial strife, as intense and lasting as was generally the case when the same community contained several compact groups of different political rights and privileges.
The conditions of the population of Alexandria have been previously discussed. It was the great market center of the East, and as such of the Mediterranean world, since the commercial and intellectual hegemony was always east of the Aegean Sea. The population had been a mixed one since its foundation. The warped notions that have often been held of the position of the Jews there are due to a failure to realize concretely how such a city would be likely to grow. The Greeks and Macedonians that were originally settled there undoubtedly constituted a real aristocracy, and made that attitude very thoroughly felt. One thing further is clear, that the native Egyptians, who probably formed the mass of the populace, looked upon these Greeks as they did upon all foreigners, with intense dislike. We have a document in which a Greek suitor in court impugns the credibility of Egyptian testimony against him because of the well-known hatred Egyptians bear toward Greeks.[[225]]
Egyptian animosity toward Jews had been of longer standing simply because intercourse in close proximity was much older. Further, the Jewish colonies from early Persian times had always represented the foreign master. It was as natural, therefore, for this animosity to express itself in street-conflicts in Alexandria as for anti-Greek feeling to be manifested there. Those modern investigators who have confidently asserted that Alexandrian “anti-Semitism” was of Greek origin and leadership have permitted the rattle of the cymbalum mundi to confuse their minds. For it is Apion and Apion alone that makes the claim that the Jews are especially embittered against Greeks, and seeks to create a general Greek feeling against them. His motives are too apparent to need comment, and there is no evidence whatever that he was successful.
Further, it is the Egyptians Manetho and Apion whose tirades have a fiercely personal coloring. The Greek Alexandrians make their anti-Jewish polemics on the basis of general theories, and particularly lay stress on what was to them the perfectly irrational separatism which the Jews had made a part of their religion. As has been frequently shown, the relatively small fragments of these writers do not enable us to say how far this Jewish characteristic is used to point a moral, much as the modern clergy takes chauvinistic commonplaces to illustrate the evil results of doctrines they are attacking.