Philo’s language points rather to duties which he was compelled to undertake less congenial than those of a member of the Sanhedrin would have been; and probably must refer to the polemical activity which he was called upon to exert in defending his people against misrepresentation and persecution.  During the reign of Augustus and the early years of Tiberius (30 B.C.E.-20 C.E.) the Roman provinces were firmly ruled, and the governors were as firmly controlled by the emperor.  To Rectus, who was the prefect of Egypt till 14 C.E., and who was removed for attempted extortion, Tiberius addressed the rebuke, “I want my sheep to be shorn, not strangled.”  But when Tiberius fell under the influence of Sejanus, and left to his hated minister the active control of the empire, harder times began for the provincials, and especially for the Jews.  Sejanus was an upstart, and like most upstarts a tyrant; and for some reason—­it may be jealousy of the power of the Jews at Rome—­he hated the Jewish race and persecuted it.  The great opponent of Sejanus was Antonia, the ward of Philo’s brother, and a loyal friend to his people; and this, too, may have incited Sejanus’ ill-feeling.  Whatever the reason, the Alexandrian Jews felt the heavy hand, and when Philo came to write the story of his people in his own times, he devoted one book to the persecution by Sejanus.  Unfortunately it has not survived, but veiled hints of the period of stress through which the people passed are not wanting in the commentary on the law.

There were always anti-Semites spoiling for a fight at Alexandria, and there was always inflammable material which they could stir up.  The Egyptian populace were by nature, says Philo, “jealous and envious, and were filled moreover with an ancient and inveterate enmity towards the Jews,"[72] and of the degenerate Greek population, many were anxious from motives of private gain as well as from religious enmity to incite an outbreak; since the Jews were wealthy and the booty would be great.  Among the cultured, too, there was one philosophical school powerful at Alexandria, which maintained a persistent attitude of hostility towards the Jews.  The chief literary anti-Semites of whom we have record at this period were Stoics, and it is probably their “envy” to which Philo refers when he complains of being drawn into the sea of politics.  In writings and in speeches the Stoic leaders Apion and Chaeremon carried on a campaign of misrepresentation, and sought to give their attacks a fine humanitarian justification by drawing fancy pictures of the Jewish religion and Jewish laws.  The Jews worshipped the head of an ass,[73] they hated the Gentiles, and would have no communication with them, they killed Gentile children at the Passover, and their law allowed them to commit any offences against all but their own people, and inculcated a low morality.  When it was not morally bad, it was degraded and superstitious.  Whereas the modern anti-Semite usually complains about Jewish