Caligula’s successor Claudius favoured the Jews of Palestine for the sake of their King Agrippa, to whose diplomacy he owed in part his crown. But their brethren in Rome suffered another expulsion for “continually disturbing the peace under the instigation of Christ.”[14] The confusion of the Christians with the Jews by the Roman writer is neither uncommon nor unintelligible. But, if the Christians were persecuted as a Jewish sect--secret and, therefore, suspected--the persecution of the Jews themselves was frequently due to their peculiar “superstition.” That, in common with other products of the East, had found its way to Rome, where it acquired great vogue and exercised a strange fascination, especially among women and persons of the lower orders. Many Gentiles visited the synagogues, and some of those who went to scoff remained to worship. Horace, writing in the time of Augustus, makes frequent mention of Judaism,[15] implying that it was spreading and that it formed the topic of conversation in fashionable circles; Josephus mentions a case of the conversion of a noble Roman lady in the reign of Tiberius;[16] Persius, under Caligula and Claudius, sneers at the muttered prayers and gloomy Sabbaths of the Jews and of Roman proselytes to Judaism;[17] while Seneca, under Nero, declares that “to such an extent has the cult of that most accursed of races prevailed that it is already accepted all over the world: the vanquished have given laws to the victors.”[18] Juvenal, writing in the time of Titus and Domitian, bears similar testimony to the prevalence of Judaism among the Romans, many of whom, especially the poor, observed the Jewish Sabbath and dietary laws, practised circumcision, and indulged in Hebrew rites generally.[19] To the Roman satirists these aberrations from good sense and good taste were a rich fountain of ridicule; but serious patriots regarded them with misgiving, as detrimental to public morality. Hence we usually find the expulsions of the Jews and the suppression of their cult accompanied by similar steps taken against Chaldean soothsayers, Egyptian sorcerers, Syrian priests, and other purveyors of rites pernicious to the virtue of Roman men and women.