success and dangerous cleverness, Apion accused them of having produced no original ideas and no great men, and no citizen as worthy of Alexandria as himself!  Against these charges Philo, the most philosophical Jew of the time and the most distinguished member of the Alexandrian community, was called upon to defend his people, and that part of his works which Eusebius calls [Greek:  Hypotheticha]; i.e. apologetics, was probably written in reply to the Stoic attacks.  The hatred of the Stoics was a religious hatred, which is the bitterest of all; the Stoics were the propagators of a rival religious system, which had originally been founded by Hellenized Semites and borrowed much from Semitic sources.  They had their missionaries everywhere and aspired to found a universal philosophical religion.  In their proselytizing activity they tried to assimilate to their pantheism the mythological religion of the masses, and thus they became the philosophical supporters of idolatry.  Their greatest religious opponents were the Jews, who not only refused to accept their teachings, but preached to the nations a transcendental monotheism against their impersonal and accommodating pantheism, and a divinely-revealed law of conduct against their vague natural reason.  In the Stoic pantheism the first stand of the pagan national deities was made against the God of Israel, and at Alexandria during the first century the fight waxed fierce.  It was a fight of ideas in which persons only were victims, but at the back of the intermittent persecutions of which we have record we may always surmise the influence of the Stoic anti-Semites.  The war of words translated itself from time to time into the breaking of heads.

Philo, indeed, never mentions Apion by name, but he refers covertly in many places to his insolence and unscrupulousness.[74] Josephus wrote a famous reply to his attacks, refuting “his vulgar abuse, gross ignorance and demagogic claptrap,"[75] and the fact that a Palestinian Jew thought this apology necessary, proves the wide dissemination of the poison.  The disgrace and death of Sejanus seem to have brought a relief from actual persecution to the Alexandrian Jews; but the ill-will between the two races in the city smouldered on, and it only required a weakening of the controlling hand at Rome to set the passions aflame again.  Right through Philo’s treatise “On the Confusion of Tongues,” we can trace the tension.  As soon as Gaius, surnamed Caligula, came to the imperial chair, the opportunity of the anti-Semites returned.  Gaius, after reigning well a few months, fell ill, was seized with madness, and proved how much evil can be done in a short space by an imbecile autocrat.  Flaccus, the governor of Egypt, who had hitherto ruled fairly, hoping to ingratiate himself by misrule, allowed himself to be led by worthless minions, who, from motives of private greed, desired a riot at Alexandria; he was won over by the anti-Semites and gave the mob a free