In the meantime Alexandria witnessed another explosion of the Graeco-Jewish feud. The Greeks determined to petition Nero for the withdrawal of the rights of citizenship restored to the Jews by Claudius. A public meeting was held in order to select the ambassadors who were to carry the petition to Rome. Some Jews were discovered in the amphitheatre where the meeting was held, and three of them were dragged by the mob through the streets. Their co-religionists, fired with indignation, rushed to the amphitheatre, threatening to commit it and the assembled Greeks to the flames. The Governor attempted to pacify the crowd; but, being himself a renegade Jew, he had little influence over his former brethren, who cast his apostasy in his teeth. Enraged thereat, he let his legions loose upon the Jewish quarter. This was soon converted into an inferno of multiform brutality, wherein fifty thousand Jews are said to have miserably perished. To return to Palestine. The revolt against the Roman rule, begun in 66 A.D., ended in the famous fall of Jerusalem four years later. ♦70 A.D. Sept. 7.♦ The desperate obstinacy of the defence, and the terrible barbarity which had disgraced the rising, provoked the conquerors to pitiless retaliation. The holy city, which had once been “the joy of the whole earth” and God’s own habitation, was no more. Zion lay deserted. Her sons were slain, and her daughters sold into slavery and shame. And the Prophet’s words seemed to have come true: “Her gates shall lament and mourn; and she, being desolate, shall sit upon the ground.”[20] Those Jews who had not been put to death or driven forth to seek a refuge among their brethren, already scattered over the East and West, were preserved to accompany Titus to Rome as prisoners of war, to supply food for the wild beasts of the arena, victims for the gladiators’ sword in the amphitheatre, and amusement for the sporting public of the capital of the world. Most awful calamity of all, the Temple of Zion--the sanctuary in which the pride and the hope of the whole race centred--was doomed to the flames, and its contents were carried off to grace the pagan victor’s triumph. Among these treasures, hallowed by the veneration of fifteen centuries, were the shittim wood table and the seven-branched candlestick of pure gold, both wrought out of the liberal offerings which the children of Israel had brought to Moses for the service of the tabernacle, at the bidding of God in the desert. They were the works of wise-hearted men of old, selected for the task by the Lord Himself, and instructed thereto by His spirit. For nearly four centuries these spoils of Zion served to adorn the Roman Temple of Peace, until an avenger arose and, having dealt with Rome as Rome had dealt with Jerusalem, transferred them to Carthage.