into the depths below, whilst others lit their own funeral pyre. It is believed that twelve thousand Judæans met their death upon this day. Pompey then penetrated into the Sanctuary, in order to satisfy his curiosity as to the nature of the Judæan worship, about which the most contradictory reports prevailed. The Roman general was not a little astonished at finding within the sacred recesses of the Holy of Holies, neither an ass's head nor, indeed, images of any sort. Thus the malicious fictions busily circulated by Alexandrian writers, and of a character so prejudicial to the Judæans, were now shown to be false. The entrance of the Roman conqueror into the Temple, though deplorable enough, was in a way favorable to Judaism. Whether he was penetrated by awe at the sublime simplicity of the Holy of Holies, or whether he did not wish to be designated as the robber of sanctuaries, we know not; but, wonderful to relate, Pompey controlled his greed for gold and left the treasury, containing 2000 talents, untouched. But the independence of the nation ceased forever from that hour. Exactly a century after the Maccabees had freed their people from the tyranny of the Syrians, their descendants brought down the tyranny of the Romans upon Judæa. What did Hyrcanus gain by his supplication for aid from the Republic? Pompey deprived him of his royal title, only leaving him the dignity of the high priesthood, with the doubtful appellation of ethnarch, and made him the ward of Antipater, who was named governor of the country. The walls of Jerusalem were razed to the ground, Judæa put into the category of conquered provinces, and a tax was levied upon the capital. The territory was brought within narrower confines, and its extent became once more what it had been in pre-Hasmonæan times. Several seaports lying along the coast, and inhabited by Greeks, as well as those trans-Jordanic towns which Hyrcanus and Alexander had conquered after hard fighting, and had incorporated with Judæa, were declared to be free towns by Pompey, and were placed under the guardianship of the Roman governor of Syria. But these cities, particularly the trans-Jordanic ones, joined together in a defensive and offensive league, calling themselves the Decapolis. Pompey ordered the most determined of his prisoners of war, the zealots, to be executed, whilst the rest were taken to Rome. The Judæan prince, Aristobulus, his son Antigonus, his two daughters, and his uncle Absalom were forced to precede Pompey's triumphal car, in the train of the conquered Asiatic kings and kings' sons. Whilst Zion veiled her head in mourning, Rome was reveling in her victories; but the Judæan prisoners that had been dragged to Rome were to become the nucleus of a community destined to carry on a new kind of warfare against long-established Roman institutions, and ultimately to modify or partly destroy them.