It was not an Italian populace, but was composed of the dregs of all nations, which had been flowing for several generations into the common sewer of Rome. It congregated in all the humbler and narrower streets; in the Velabrum it bawled mussels and salt fish for sale; it thronged the cook-shops of the Esquiline; it crowded densely into the cheaper baths; it swarmed in the haunts of vice which gave so bad a name to the Subura. Long ago the Syrian Orontes had flowed into the Tiber, and brought with it its flute-players, and dancers, and immoralities.[28] Long ago, when the Forum loungers dared to howl at him, the great Scipio had stormed at them as step-sons of Italy--as people who had no father and no mother--and bidden them to be silent. The city was almost as much a Greek as it was a Roman city. But, besides this, it abounded in Orientals. Here would be heard the shaken sistra of the Egyptian Serapis, whose little temple in the Campus Martius was crowded by credulous women. Here you would be met by the drunken Galli of the Phrygian Cybele, whose withered, beardless faces, cracked voices, orgiastic dances, and gashings of themselves with knives, made their mendicancy more offensive than the importunities of the beggars who lounged all day about the Sublician and Fabrician bridges, or half-stormed the carriages of the nobles as they slowly drove up the steep hill of Aricia. Of this promiscuous throng--to say nothing of Asiatics, Gauls, Germans, Spaniards, and Scythians--some were ‘From farthest south, Syene, and where the shadow both way falls, Meroe, Nilotic isle; and more to west The realm of Bocchus to the Blackmoor sea; From India and the Golden Chersonese, And utmost Indian isle, Taprobane, Dusk faces with white silken turbans wreathed.’ One quarter of the city--that across the Tiber--was largely given up to Jews. They had flocked to Rome in extraordinary numbers after the visit of Pompey to Jerusalem. Sober Roman burghers long remembered with astonishment, and something of alarm, the wild wail which they raised at the funeral of Julius Cæsar, who had always been their generous patron. They were numerous enough, and organised enough, to make it a formidable matter to offend them, though the majority of them--conspicuous everywhere by the basket and hay which they carried to keep their food clean from Gentile profanation--pursued the humblest crafts, and sold sulphur-matches or mended broken pottery, while the lowest of all told fortunes, or begged, or cheated, with cringing mien. The persistence and ability of many of their race had, however, gained them a footing in the houses of the great. Aliturus, the actor, was at this moment a favourite of Nero, and of Rome. The authors of that age--Martial, Juvenal, Persius, Tacitus--abound with wondering and stinging allusions to the votaries of Mosaism.