virtues.  Some made only three meals in the week, that their meditations might be more free; while others even attempted to prolong their fast to the sixth day.  During six days of the week they saw nobody, not even one another.  On the seventh day they met together in the synagogue.  Here they sat, each according to his age; the women separated from the men.  Each wore a plain, modest robe, which covered the arms and hands, and they sat in silence while one of the elders preached.  As they studied the mystic powers of numbers, they thought the number seven was a holy number, and that seven times seven made a great week, and hence they kept the fiftieth day as a solemn festival.  On that day they dined together, the men on one side and the women on the other.  The rushy papyrus formed the couches; bread was their only meat, water their drink, salt the seasoning, and cresses the delicacy.  They would keep no slaves, saying that all men were born equal.  Nobody spoke, unless it was to propose a question out of the Old Testament, or to answer the question of another.  The feast ended with a hymn of praise.

[Illustration:  029.jpg bedouin tent in the desert]

The ascetic Jews of Palestine, the Essenes on the banks of the Dead Sea, by no means, according to Philo, thus quitted the active duties of life; and it would seem that the Therapeutas rather borrowed their customs from the country in which they had settled, than from any sects of the Jewish nation.  Some classes of the Egyptian priesthood had always held the same views of their religious duties.  These Egyptian monks slept on a hard bed of palm branches, with a still harder wooden pillow for the head; they were plain in their dress, slow in walking, spare in diet, and scarcely allowed themselves to smile.  They washed thrice a day, and prayed as often; at sunrise, at noon, and at sunset.  They often fasted from animal food, and at all times refused many meats as unclean.  They passed their lives alone, either in study or wrapped in religious thought.  They never met one another but at set times, and were seldom seen by strangers.  Thus, leaving to others the pleasures, wealth, and lesser prizes of this life, they received from them in return what most men value higher, namely, honour, fame, and power.

The Romans, like the Greeks, feeling but little partiality in favour of their own gods, were rarely guilty of intolerance against those of others; and would hardly have checked the introduction of a new religion unless it made its followers worse citizens.  But in Rome, where every act of its civil or military authorities was accompanied with a religious rite, any slight towards the gods was a slight towards the magistrate; many devout Romans had begun to keep holy the seventh day; and Egypt was now so closely joined to Italy that the Roman senate made a new law against the Egyptian and Jewish superstitions, and, in A.D. 19, banished to Sardinia four thousand men who were found guilty of being Jews.