The phrase rebus minus apta gerendis, “unsuitable for transacting business,” is best taken as given in the translation (above, p. [251]). Ovid knows that undertakings are rare on that day, and that causes its insertion. If it were merely that cessation of ordinary business made it easier for idlers to pursue their amours, it must be remembered that the jeunesse dorée had no other ordinary business than falling in love.
The reference in the “Cure for Love” (above, p. [251]) is of quite a different character. It will be noted that pluviae, “the rainy season,” which in the first case is particularly contrasted with the Sabbath and the Allia day, is here associated with them. “Let nothing hinder you,” says Ovid, “neither a good excuse nor a bad one; neither the weather nor superstition.” The point of the reference in the two cases is accordingly not at all the same. In the first instance the accidental fact that the Allia day and a certain Jewish festival occur during pleasant weather singles them out for mention. In the second it is the religious association of the day that Ovid has in mind.
As far as Ovid is personally concerned, there is no more than in Horace a trace of sympathy for the Jewish cult. We have seen that in every instance this cult is only one of several illustrations. The adjective peregrina, “foreign,” applied to the Sabbath, gives the tone of all the passages. Ovid is a collector of light emotions. Of serious beliefs he has no vestige. But the presence of these Syrians in the city interests him as anything else picturesque would. He takes cognizance of the part they play in the life of the city, and is a valuable witness on that point.
The same inference may be drawn from the letter of Augustus to Tiberius (Suet. Aug. 76): “There is no Jew, my dear Tiberius, who keeps his fast on the Sabbath as I kept it to-day.” If the considerations advanced in [Note 269] are valid, the Sabbath here is the Day of Atonement. But the significant fact is the use of the illustration at all. It confirms Strabo’s statement of the extent and success of the propaganda of the Jews that all these writers in some way mention their presence.
That the preaching of the Jews was vigorous and aggressive is almost a necessary inference. We know no less than three of their synagogues by name, Augustenses, Volumnienses, Agrippenses,[[271]] and we have no reason to assume that these three exhausted the list. To many Romans the ardor of their proselytizing was offensive. It seemed a systematic attempt to transform the ancestral faith of the state. A casual reference in Valerius Maximus, a contemporary of Tiberius, charges the Jews with having attempted “to contaminate Roman beliefs by foisting upon them the worship of Jupiter Sabazios.”[[272]] Valerius goes on to say that the praetor Hispalus expelled the Jews for that reason as early as 139 B.C.E. If such a thing took place, it was undoubtedly an act similar to an expulsion under Tiberius (below, p. 306), and was based on definite infractions of law, perhaps the law against unlicensed fortune-telling. The Jews in both cases were associated with the Chaldeans, a fact that makes the supposition more likely. But Valerius has in mind the conditions of his own day, when the success of the Jewish propaganda was bitterly resented, as we have seen, by Horace and Fuscus, and, as we shall later see, by Seneca and his associates generally.
If we try to imagine what the Jewish Roman communities of that day were like, we shall have to think of them as a proletariat. Freedmen in the second or third generation must have constituted a large part of them, and later references make it likely that many earned their livelihood by the proscribed arts of divination and fortune-telling. As in Alexandria, the bulk were probably artisans. Some were physicians, a profession then ranking in social degree with the manual trades, and usually exercised by slaves or freedmen.[[273]] The Roman encyclopedist Celsus mentions two Jewish medical authorities (De Med. V. xix. 11; xxii. 4). But the majority must have formed part of the pauperized city mob, turbulent and ignorant, and no doubt only moderately acquainted with their own laws and literature, so that we cannot be surprised to find indications of many things among them that were regarded as sacrilege in Jerusalem, such as carved animal figures on tombstones.[[274]]
However, there must at least have been some of a different type, whose command of their controversial literature enabled them to meet the competing philosophies upon their own ground and impress themselves upon some of the men of Augustus’ own circle.
CHAPTER XVII
THE JEWS OF THE EMPIRE TILL THE REVOLT
One of the great determining events in ancient and modern history took place on January 1, 27 B.C.E., when Gaius Caesar Octavianus, returned from his successful campaigns in the East, was solemnly invested with the civil and military primacy of the Roman world. The importance of that particular historic moment is due of course not to anything in itself, but to the fact that it was the external and overt stamp put upon the development of centuries. The basic governmental scheme of ancient society—the city-state—was bankrupt. Its affairs were being wound up, and the receiver was in possession.