In my judgment, this statement is devoid of foundation.  In my paper on “The Keepers of the Herd of Swine” I point out, at some length, that, “in accordance with the ancient Hellenic practice,” each city of the Decapolis must have been “surrounded by a certain amount of territory amenable to its jurisdiction”:  and, to enforce this conclusion, I quote what Josephus says about the “villages that belonged to Gadara and Hippos.”  As I understand the term pomerium or pomoerium,[113] it means the space which, according to Roman custom, was kept free from buildings, immediately within and without the walls of a city; and which defined the range of the auspicia urbana.  The conception of a pomoerium as a “vicinage attached to” a city, appears to be something quite novel and original.  But then, to be sure, I do not know how many senses Mr. Gladstone may attach to the word “vicinage.”

Whether Gadara had a pomoerium, in the proper technical sense, or not, is a point on which I offer no opinion.  But that the city had a very considerable “rural district” attached to it and notwithstanding its distinctness, amenable to the jurisdiction of the Gentile municipal authorities, is one of the main points of my case.

PROP. 2. He more fatally confounds the local civil government and its following, including, perhaps, the whole wealthy class and those attached to it, with the ethnical character of a general population.

Having survived confusion No. 1, which turns out not to be on my side, I am now confronted in No. 2 with a “more fatal” error—­and so it is, if there be degrees of fatality; but, again, it is Mr. Gladstone’s and not mine.  It would appear, from this proposition (about the grammatical interpretation of which, however, I admit there are difficulties), that Mr. Gladstone holds that the “local civil government and its following among the wealthy,” were ethnically different from the “general population.”  On p. 348, he further admits that the “wealthy and the local governing power” were friendly to the Romans.  Are we then to suppose that it was the persons of Jewish “ethnical character” who favoured the Romans, while those of Gentile “ethnical character” were opposed to them?  But, if that supposition is absurd, the only alternative is that the local civil government was ethnically Gentile.  This is exactly my contention.

At pp. 379 to 391 of the essay on “The Keepers of the Herd of Swine” I have fully discussed the question of the ethnical character of the general population.  I have shown that, according to Josephus, who surely ought to have known, Gadara was as much a Gentile city as Ptolemais; I have proved that he includes Gadara amongst the cities “that rose up against the Jews that were amongst them,” which is a pretty definite expression of his belief that the “ethnical character of the general population” was Gentile.  There is no question here of Jews of the Roman party fighting with Jews of the Zealot party, as Mr. Gladstone suggests.  It is the non-Jewish and anti-Jewish general population which rises up against the Jews who had settled “among them.”