For some time past, the Jews, taking advantage of the weakness of Egypt and Syria, had been struggling to make themselves free; and, at the beginning of this reign Simon Maccabaeus, the high priest, sent an embassy to Rome, with a shield of gold weighing one thousand _minae_, as a present, to get their independence acknowledged by the Romans. On this the senate made a treaty of alliance with the family of the Maccabees, and, using the high tone of command to which they had for some time past been accustomed, they wrote to Euergetes and the King of Syria, ordering them not to make war upon their friends, the Jews. But in an after decree the Romans recognise the close friendship and the trading intercourse between Egypt and Judaea; and when they declared that they would protect the Jews in their right to levy custom-house duties, they made an exception in favour of the Egyptian trade. The people of Judaea in these struggles were glad to forget the jealousy which had separated them from their brethren in Egypt, and the old quarrel between the Hebrews and the Hellenists; the Sanhedrim of Jerusalem wrote to the Sanhedrim of Alexandria, telling them that they were going to keep the Feast of the Tabernacles in solemn thanksgiving to the Almighty for their deliverance, and begging for the benefit of their prayers. The Jews, however, of Judaea, on their gaining their former place as a nation, did not, as before, carry forward the chain of history in their sacred books. While they had been under the yoke of the Babylonians, the Persians, and the Syrians, their language had undergone some changes; and when the Hebrew of the Old Testament was no longer the spoken language, they perhaps thought it unworthy of them to write in any other. At any rate, it is to their Greek brethren in Egypt that we are indebted for the history of the bravery of the Maccabees. Jason of Cyrene wrote the history of the Maccabees, and of the Jewish wars against Antiochus Epiphanes and his son, Antiochus Eupator. This work, which was in five books, is lost, and we now read only the short history which was drawn from it by some unknown Greek writer, which, with the letter from the Jews of Judaaa to their brethren of Egypt, forms the second book of Maccabees.