Legatio Ad Gaium

and, as they wished to curry favour with him by a novel kind of flattery, so as to allow, and for the future to give the rein to, every sort of ill treatment of us without ever being called to account, what did they proceed to do? All the synagogues that they were unable to destroy by burning and razing them to the ground, because a great number of Jews lived in a dense mass in the neighbourhood, they injured and defaced in another manner, simultaneously with a total overthrow of their laws and customs; for they set up in every one of them images of Caius, and in the greatest, and most conspicuous, and most celebrated of them they erected a brazen statue of him borne on a four-horse chariot.

And so excessive and impetuous was the rapidity of their zeal, that, as they had not a new chariot for four horses ready, they got a very old one out of the gymnasium, full of poison, mutilated in its ears, and in the hinder part, and in its pedestal, and in many other points, and as some say, one which had already been dedicated in honour of a woman, the eminent Cleopatra, who was the great grandmother of the last.

Now what amount of accusation he brought against those who had dedicated this chariot on this very account is notorious to every one; for what did it signify if it was a new one and belonging to a woman? Or what if it was an old one and belonging to a man? And what, in short, if it was wholly dedicated to the name of some one else? Was it not natural that those who were offering up a chariot of this sort on behalf of the emperor should be full of cautious fear, lest some one might lay an information against them before our emperor, who took such especial care that every thing which at all affected or related to himself should be done in the most dignified manner possible?

But these men expected to be most extravagantly praised, and to receive greater and more conspicuous advantages as rewards for their conduct, in thus dedicating the synagogues to Caius as new pieces of consecrated ground, not because of the honour which was done to him by this proceeding, but because in this way they exhausted every possible means