About the time of the building of Rome the ten tribes were carried away by the Assyrian monarchs, and 130 years after, this event was followed by the removal of their brethren of Judah and Benjamin to Babylon. The influential results of this earliest migration, it has been observed, “may be inferred from the fact, that about the time of the battles of Marathon (B.C. 490) and Salamis (B.C. 480), a Jew was the minister, another Jew the cupbearer, and a Jewess the consort, of a Persian monarch[137].” Once settled under the shadow of the Babylonian and Persian kings, the Jews were very loth to quit the country of their adoption, and comparatively few availed themselves of the permission of Cyrus to return to their native land. The important colony in Babylonia which afterwards exerted a very remarkable influence, threw off shoots which extended to the borders of the Caspian Sea and the confines of China. Important, however, as were the results of this earliest dispersion, they were exceeded by those which attended the policy of Alexander and his successors. That great conqueror, as we have seen, removed a great number of Jews to his new city of Alexandria[138], and there conferred upon them many and important privileges, setting an example, which Ptolemy Soter and Philadelphus were alike not slow to follow[139]. To such an extent did the Egyptian Jews increase, that Philo estimates them in his time at little less than 1,000,000, and declares that two of the five districts of Alexandria derived their names from them. From Egypt they quickly spread along the coast of Africa to Cyrene (Acts ii. 10), and the towns of the Pentapolis, and inland to the realms of Candace, queen of Ethiopia (Acts viii. 27). The Seleucidæ, in their turn, were equally anxious to locate colonies of Jews in the cities which they founded. Seleucus Nicator invited them to his new capital at Antioch[140]; Antiochus the Great removed 2000 Jewish families from Babylon to Lydia and Phrygia[141]. Led on by that love of trade which now began to distinguish them, they soon became numerous in the commercial cities of Western Asia, Ephesus and Pergamus, Miletus and Sardis. The Archipelago furnished a natural bridge whereby to cross over into the countries of Europe and to settle at Philippi (Acts xvi. 12), Berœa (Acts xvii. 10), and Thessalonica (Acts xvii. 1); Athens (Acts xvii. 17); and Corinth (Acts xviii. 4); and the decree of Lucius[142], the consul during the reign of Simon Maccabæus, gives us a vivid idea of the extent to which they spread themselves in every direction, and no less of the power of the Sanhedrin[143] at Jerusalem, to which all Jews, wherever located, were amenable.