hand in their attacks upon the “alien Jews."[76] The arrival of Agrippa, the grandson of Herod, who was on his way to his kingdom of Palestine, which the capricious emperor had just conferred upon him, excited the ill-will of the Alexandrian mob.  Flaccus looked on while the people attacked the Jewish quarters, sacked the houses, and assailed everyone that came within their reach.  The most distinguished Jews were not spared, and thirty members of the Council of Elders were dragged to the marketplace and scourged.  Philo’s account gives a picture strikingly similar to that of a modern pogrom.  The brutal indifference of Flaccus did not indeed avail to ingratiate him with the emperor, and he was recalled to Italy, exiled, and afterwards executed.

The recall of Flaccus did not, however, put an end to the troubles; the mob had got out of hand, the anti-Semitic demagogues were elated, and a fresh opportunity for outrage soon presented itself.  The mad emperor, having exhausted ordinary human follies, went on to imagine himself first a god and then the Supreme God, and finally ordered his image to be set up in every temple throughout his dominion.  The Jews could not obey the order, and the mob rushed into fresh excesses upon them, defiled the synagogues with images of the lunatic, and in the great synagogue itself set up a bronze statue of him, inscribed with the name of Jupiter.  With bitterness Philo points out that it was easy enough for the vile Egyptians, who worshipped reptiles and beasts, to erect a statue of the emperor in their temples; for the Jews, with their lofty idea of God, it was impossible.  Against the attack upon their liberty of conscience they appealed directly to Gaius.  An embassy was sent to lay their case before him, and Philo went to Italy at the head of the embassy.  “He who is learned, gentle, and modest, and who is beloved of men, he shall be leader in the city.”  So said one of the rabbis of old, and the maxim is especially appropriate to Philo, who in name and deed was “beloved of men.”  Philo has left us a very full account of his mission, so that this incident of his life is a patch of bright light, which stands out almost glaringly from the general shadow.  The account is not merely, nor, indeed, entirely history.  Looking always for a sermon or a subject for a philosophical lesson, Philo has tricked out the record of the facts with much moralizing observation on the general lot of mankind, and elaborated the part of Providence more in the spirit of religious romance than of scientific history.  Yet the main facts are clear.  Philo prepared a long philosophical “apologia” for the Jews and set out with five colleagues for Italy.  Nor were the enemies of the Jews remiss; and Apion, the Alexandrian anti-Semite, was sent at the head of a hostile deputation.  The emperor, Gaius, was in one of his most flippant moods and little inclined to listen to philosophical or literary disquisitions.  At first he received the Jewish deputation in a friendly