Legatio Ad Gaium

As they then were no longer able to endure the misery of the place within which they were enclosed, they poured forth into desolate parts of the wilderness, and to the shore, and among the tombs, in their eagerness to find any pure and untainted air. And if any of them had previously been left in the other parts of the city, or if any had come in thither from the fields out of ignorance of the evils which had visited their companions, they fell into every variety of misfortune, being stoned, or else wounded with sharp tiles, or beaten on the most mortal parts of the body, and especially on the head, with branches of maple and of oak, in such a way as to cause death.

And some of those persons who are accustomed to pass their time in idleness and inaction, sitting around, occupied themselves in watching those who, as I have said before, were thus driven together and crammed into a very small space, as if they were a force which they were blockading; lest any one should secretly escape without their perceiving it. And a great many were designing to effect their escape from want of necessaries, disregarding their own safety from a fear that, if they remained, the whole body might perish with famine. So those men, expecting that they would endeavour to escape, kept a continual watch, and the moment that they caught any one, they immediately put him to death with every circumstance of insult and cruelty.

And there was another company lying in wait for them on the quays of the river, to catch any Jews who arrived at those spots, and to plunder them of every thing which they brought for the purposes of traffic; for, forcing their way into their ships they took out the cargo before the eyes of its lawful owners, and then, binding the hands of the merchants behind them, they burnt them alive, taking the rudders, and helms, and punt-poles, and the benches for the rowers to sit upon, for fuel.

And thus these men perished by a most miserable death being burnt alive in the middle

And many who were still alive they took and bound, and fastened their ankles together with thongs and ropes, and then dragged them through the middle of the market-place, leaping on them, and not sparing their corpses even after they were dead; for, tearing them to pieces limb from limb, and trampling on them, behaving with greater brutality and ferocity than even the most savage beasts, they destroyed every semblance of humanity about them, so that not even a fragment of them was left to which the rites of burial could be afforded.

But as the governor of the country, who by himself could, if he had chosen to do so, have put down the violence of the multitude in a single hour, pretended not to see what he did see, and not to hear what he did hear, but allowed the mob to carry on the war against our people without any restraint, and threw our former state of tranquillity into confusion, the populace being excited still more, proceeded onwards to still more shameless and more audacious designs and treachery, and, arraying very numerous companies, cut down some of the synagogues (and there are a great many in every section of the city), and some they razed to the very foundations, and into some they threw fire and burnt them, in their insane madness and frenzy, without caring for the neighbouring houses; for there is nothing more rapid than fire, when it lays hold of fuel.

I omit to mention the ornaments in honour of the emperor, which were destroyed and burnt with these synagogues, such as gilded shields, and gilded crowns, and pillars, and inscriptions, for the sake of which they ought even to have abstained from and spared the other things; but they were full of confidence, inasmuch as they did not fear any chastisement at the hand of Caius, as they well knew that he cherished an indescribable hatred against the

and, as they wished to curry favour with him by a novel kind of flattery, so as to allow, and for the future to give the rein to, every sort of ill treatment of us without ever being called to account, what did they proceed to do? All the synagogues that they were unable to destroy by burning and razing them to the ground, because a great number of Jews lived in a dense mass in the neighbourhood, they injured and defaced in another manner, simultaneously with a total overthrow of their laws and customs; for they set up in every one of them images of Caius, and in the greatest, and most conspicuous, and most celebrated of them they erected a brazen statue of him borne on a four-horse chariot.

And so excessive and impetuous was the rapidity of their zeal, that, as they had not a new chariot for four horses ready, they got a very old one out of the gymnasium, full of poison, mutilated in its ears, and in the hinder part, and in its pedestal, and in many other points, and as some say, one which had already been dedicated in honour of a woman, the eminent Cleopatra, who was the great grandmother of the last.

Now what amount of accusation he brought against those who had dedicated this chariot on this very account is notorious to every one; for what did it signify if it was a new one and belonging to a woman? Or what if it was an old one and belonging to a man? And what, in short, if it was wholly dedicated to the name of some one else? Was it not natural that those who were offering up a chariot of this sort on behalf of the emperor should be full of cautious fear, lest some one might lay an information against them before our emperor, who took such especial care that every thing which at all affected or related to himself should be done in the most dignified manner possible?

But these men expected to be most extravagantly praised, and to receive greater and more conspicuous advantages as rewards for their conduct, in thus dedicating the synagogues to Caius as new pieces of consecrated ground, not because of the honour which was done to him by this proceeding, but because in this way they exhausted every possible means

And one may find undeniable and notorious proofs of this having been the case. For, in the first place, one may derive them from about ten kings or more who reigned in order, one after another, for three hundred years, and who never once had any images or statues of themselves erected in our synagogues, though there were many of their relations and kinsmen whom they considered, and registered as, and spoke of as gods.

And what would they not have done in the case of those whom they looked upon as men? a people who look upon dogs, and wolves, and lions, and crocodiles, and numerous other beasts, both terrestrial and aquatic, and numerous birds, as gods, and erect in their honour altars, and temples, and shrines, and consecrated precincts, throughout the whole of Egypt?