Maximin, however, continued his anti-Christian propaganda with unabated zeal, and with greater cunning and better devised system than before. His court at Antioch was the gathering place of all the priests, magicians, and thaumaturgists of the East, who found in him a generous patron. We hear of a new deity being invented by Theotecnus, or rather of an old deity being invested with new attributes. Zeus Philios, or Jupiter the Friendly was the name of this god, to whom a splendid statue was erected in Antioch, and to whose shrine a new priesthood, with new rites, was solemnly dedicated. The god was provided with an attendant oracle to speak in his name; what more natural than that the first response should order the banishment of all Christians from the city? Very noteworthy, too, was the re-appearance of a vigorous anti-Christian literature. Maximin set on his pamphleteers to write libellous parodies of the Christian doctrines and encouraged the more serious controversialists on the pagan side to attack the Christian religion wherever it was most vulnerable. The most famous of these productions was one which bore the name of _The Acts of Pilate_ and purported to be a relation by Pilate himself of the life and conduct of Christ. It was really an old pamphlet rewritten and brought up to date, full, as Eusebius says, of all conceivable blasphemy against Christ and reducing Him to the level of a common malefactor. Maximin welcomed it with delight. He had thousands of copies written and distributed; extracts were cut on brass and stone and posted up in conspicuous places; the work was appointed to be read frequently in public, and—what shews most of all the fury and cunning of Maximin—it was appointed to be used as a text-book in schools throughout Asia and Egypt. There was no more subtle method of training bigots and poisoning the minds of the younger generation amongst Christianity. Some of the Emperor’s devices, however, were much more crude. For example, the military commandant of Damascus arrested half a dozen notorious women of the town and threatened them with torture if they did not confess that they were Christians, and that they had been present at ceremonies of the grossest impurity in the Christian assemblies. Maximin ordered the precious confession thus extorted to be set up in a prominent place in every township.