The violent animosity which inflamed the Judæans and heathens in Cæsarea also reached Alexandria. A massacre of the Judæans, partly due to the anger of an apostate, took place in the Egyptian capital. The Alexandrian Greeks, jealous of their Judæan fellow-citizens, resolved to solicit the Emperor Nero to deprive them of the rights which they had received from Claudius, putting them on a footing of equality with the Greeks. To select the deputies who were to convey their wishes to the emperor, a large concourse assembled in the amphitheater of the town. A few Judæans being discovered among the crowd, they were fiercely attacked and insulted as spies. Three of them were dragged through the streets to be committed alive to the flames. Enraged at the savage treatment of their brethren, the Judæans armed themselves, seized firebrands, and threatened to burn the amphitheater where the Greeks were still assembled. The governor Tiberius now attempted to interfere in order to stay the impending civil strife, but he only increased the angry ferment. The Judæans hated him for being a renegade to his faith, and reproached him with his apostasy. Infuriated by their taunts, Tiberius Alexander lost all control over himself; he ordered his legions to repair to the Judæan quarter, and gave free license to the exercise of that brutality which it had cost so much effort to restrain. The soldiers, greedy for blood and plunder, poured in upon the beautiful Delta quarter of the town, killed all whom they found in their way, burned the houses, and filled the streets with blood and corpses. Fifty thousand Judæans lost their lives, and the man who ordered that frightful butchery was the nephew of the Judæan philosopher Philo!