seen, cost its object many sorrows. But worse things were yet to come. CHAPTER IV THE DISPERSION THE struggle for freedom already narrated and its ruthless suppression were not calculated to diminish the Jew’s unpopularity at Rome. Under the successors of Titus we have fresh persecutions to chronicle. The Jews were heavily taxed, and heathen proselytes to Judaism were punished with loss of property, with exile, or with death--penalties from which not even kinship with the Emperor could save the culprit. ♦94 A.D.♦ At last the Jews, driven from the city by an edict of Domitian, were forced to live in the valley of Egeria which was grudgingly let out to them. This valley, once green with a sacred grove famed in legend as the place where “King Numa kept nightly tryst with his divine mistress,” was now notorious as a desolation of malarious mud deposited by the overflow of the Tiber. In this miserable locality the Jews were allowed to build their _Proseucha_, or house for prayer--a rallying-point for a congregation of poor wretches “whose basket and wisp of hay are all their furniture.”[28] Thus Juvenal in one luminous line draws a picture as vivid as it is repulsive of the condition of Israel at Rome towards the end of the first century of our era. It may be added that the same edict which drove the Jews from Rome also expelled the philosophers, among them Epictetus. A streak of light amid general gloom is shed by the reign of Domitian’s successor. Nerva was one of the few Emperors who knew how to reconcile absolute power with personal freedom, and the Jews shared with the rest of his subjects those blessings of justice and liberty that induced Tacitus to celebrate his short reign as the beginning of an era in which “one was permitted to think what he chose and to say what he thought.”[29] ♦Sept. 96–Jan. 98.♦ The Jews were allowed to worship their God in peace, and the fiscal tyranny under which they laboured was lightened. Nerva’s toleration is commemorated by a coin bearing on the reverse the Jewish symbol of a palm-tree and the inscription _Fisci Judaici calumnia sublata_.