However, kindness had as little effect upon the Jews as cruelty. Their religious and national antipathy to the alien ruler blinded them to the benefits of Roman administration. The memory of their defeat rankled, and the desire for emancipation was intensified by hunger for revenge. The prosperity of the present was valued only inasmuch as it enabled them to avenge their sufferings in the past. Their subjection was regarded merely as a trial and as a sign of the approaching advent of the Deliverer destined to rebuild the Temple and to raise the children of Israel to the sovereignty of the world--the Messiah whom the Lord had promised to His people through the prophets of old. The forty years that had elapsed since the capture of Jerusalem by Titus were for the Jews of the Empire at large years of comparative rest and recovery. All the strength gathered during that period was now put forth in a last desperate dash for freedom. The Babylonian Jews gave the signal for the holy war by opposing the Emperor Trajan’s plans of conquest in Mesopotamia. ♦115 A.D.♦ Thence the insurrection rapidly spread to Palestine, Egypt, Cyrene, and Cyprus. In every one of these countries the infuriated rabble fell upon their neighbours, whom the suddenness and unexpectedness of the attack rendered an easy prey to the rage of the assailants. If one tenth of the tales of horror related by Dion Cassius be true, it is sufficient to explain the hatred inspired by the Jews in after times, and to extenuate, if not to justify, the terrible retribution which followed. Two hundred and twenty thousand Greeks and Romans were, according to Dion, butchered in Cyrene. Lybia was utterly devastated. Two hundred and forty thousand Greeks were slaughtered in Cyprus. Great numbers of Greek and Roman heathens and Christians perished in Egypt, and many of the victims were sawed asunder after the fashion set by David, and afterwards imitated by the Mohammedan conqueror of the Balkan Peninsula. It is even added that the butchers, not satiated by the mere sight of the mangled bodies, devoured the flesh, licked up the blood, girded themselves with the entrails, and wrapped themselves in the skins of their victims--abominations which are only credible to one familiar with the treatment mutually meted out by the inhabitants of the Near East at the present day.[30] ♦117 A.D.♦ The insurrection was quelled, and temporary calm restored, by Trajan’s successor, Hadrian, who appears to have yielded to the Jews’ demand for the rebuilding of the Temple. The Emperor’s assent was received with wild enthusiasm. The Jews believed that the day of national rehabilitation had come: “No more the death sound of the trumpet’s cry-- No more they perish at the foe’s rash hands; But trophies shall float in the world o’er evil. Dear Jewish land! fair town, inspirer of songs, No more shall unclean foot of Greeks within thy bounds Go forth.”[31]