And Horace makes still another reference to the proselytizing activities of the Jews. “You must allow me my scribbling,” he writes to Maecenas in another Satire. “If you don’t, a great crowd of poets will come to help me. We far outnumber you, and, like the Jews, will compel you to join our rout.”[[266]]
This is explicit enough in all conscience, and gives a very vivid picture of the public preaching that must have brought the Jews to the unwelcome notice of every saunterer in the Roman streets. Horace, despite his slave grandfather, is a gentleman, the associate of Rome’s aristocracy, a member of the most select circle of the city’s society. The Jewish proselytes, whether fully converted or “righteous strangers,” must have been very numerous indeed, if he was forced to take such relatively frequent notice of them. Horace has no pictures, like those of Juvenal, of presumptuous Syrians, Egyptians, or Greeks swaggering about the city. It is only these Syrian Iudaei whom he finds irritating, and wholly because of their successful hunt for souls.
It is true that all this may be due to personal circumstances in his own surroundings. Some of his acquaintances, or men whom he occasionally encountered, may have been proselytes; others may have been impressed by certain Jewish forms or ideas. Horace is taking his fling at them in his usual light manner. There is something ludicrous to a detached philosopher in the eager striving to save one’s soul, and still more absurd in the earnest attempt to gain adherents for an association that promises salvation.
Once he takes a more serious tone. In the famous journey he made with Maecenas to Brundisium Horace is told of an altar-miracle at Egnatia. The incense melts of itself, it seems, in the local temple. “Tell it to the Jew Apella,” says Horace, “not to me. I have always been taught that the gods live free from every care, and if anything wonderful occurs in nature, it is not because it has been sent down from heaven by meddlesome divinities.”[[267]]
This Jew Apella—a dialect-form of Apollas or Apollonius[[268]]—is no doubt a real person, who may perhaps have recounted to Horace some of the miracles of the Bible. Horace’s raillery is directed plainly enough at the credulity that will accept these stories, and equally at the troublesome theology which makes the god a factor in daily life. Life was much simpler if no such incalculable quantity were injected into it. And to keep life free from harassing and unnecessary complications was the essence of his philosophy.[[269]]
At about the same time another writer, the geographer Strabo, of Amasea in Cappadocia, makes a statement of special interest. As quoted by Josephus (Ant. XIV. vii. 2) he says: “These people have already reached every city, and it would be difficult to find a place in the whole world that has not received this tribe and succumbed to it.”
Obviously the statement is a gross exaggeration, and at most applicable to the cities of Egypt and Cyrene, in connection with which it is made. But that such a statement could be made at all is excellent evidence that it was at least partially true, and that there were Jewish communities practically everywhere, although it can hardly be the case that they were everywhere dominant. However, the sketches by Horace are an eloquent commentary upon the statement of Strabo. Not merely the East or Africa, but the capital itself, was overrun with Jews, and their number was constantly increasing.
Horace, it has been said, wrote of and for a cultured aristocracy. So did the other poets of the age, Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid. But all of them were more than ordinarily familiar with the bas-lieux where disreputable passions might be gratified. The voluptuary Ovid was especially prone to go down into the sewer for new sensations, and just as Horace met Jews in the boulevards, so Ovid knew them in the slums.
In his salad-days Ovid had written a manual of debauchery, which he called the “Art of Love.” He was destined to regret bitterly the facility of verse and of conscience that gave birth to this bold composition. But written it was, and in his advice to the dissolute young Romans he enumerates the time and place for their amours.
Rome [he says in Ars Amatoria, i. 55 seq.] is the place for beauties. Venus has her fixed abode in the city of her Aeneas. Whatever you desire you may find. All you have to do is to take a walk in the Porticus of Pompey or of Livia,... Do not pass by the place where Venus mourns Adonis, or where the Syrian Jew performs his rites each seventh day. Nor overlook the temples of the linen-clad heifer from Memphis. She makes many what Jove made her. Even the fora favor Love, ... those where the Appian aqueduct gushes forth near the marble temple of Venus.... But above all stalk your game in the theaters.