He had been in Judea only a few years, but long enough to draw upon himself the bitterest hate of those over whom he ruled. It is true that all our information about him comes from Jews and Christians, who were, of course, his declared enemies; but it appears that he finally lost favor even with his masters, since in A. D. 36 the Governor of Syria, Lucius Vitellius, sent him to Rome to justify himself before Tiberius. The Emperor died before Pilate arrived in the metropolis, but according to tradition, he was exiled by Caligula, exiled into Gaul, where he killed himself. In the first place the hatred of the Jews came from the profound scorn which he showed from the start for this stiff-necked, indocile people, who must have seemed to him, brought up in Roman ideas, like a snake pit of venomous serpents—a low, dirty crowd, scarcely worthy to be tamed by the cudgels of the mercenaries. To have an idea of Pilate’s personality, make a mental picture of an English Viceroy of India, a subscriber to the _Times_, a reader of John Stuart Mill and Shaw—with Byron and Swinburne on his bookshelves—destined to administer the government over a ragged, captious, hungry and turbulent people, wrangling among themselves over a confusion of castes and mythologies and superstitions for which their ruler feels in his heart the profoundest aversion, looking down on them from the height of his dignity as a white man, a European, a Briton and a Liberal. Pilate, as shown by his questions put to Jesus, was one of those skeptics of the Roman decadence corrupted with Pyrrhonism, a devotee of Epicurus, an encyclopedist of Hellenism without any belief in the gods of his country, nor any belief that any real God existed at all. The idea certainly can never have occurred to Pilate that the true God could be found in this vermin-ridden, superstitious mob, in the midst of this factious and jealous clergy, in this religion which must have seemed to him like a barbarous mixture of Syrian and Chaldean oracles. The only faith remaining to him, or which he needed to pretend to hold because of his office, was the new Roman religion, civic and political, concentrated on the cult of the Emperor. The first conflict with the Jews arose in fact from this religion. When he had changed the guard of Jerusalem, he ordered the soldiers to enter the city by night, without taking off from their ensigns the silver images of Cæsar. In the morning, as soon as the Jews were aware of this, great was the horror and the uproar. It was the first time that the Romans had lacked in external respect for the religion of their subjects in Palestine. These figures of the deified Cæsar planted near the Temple were for them an idolatrous provocation, the beginning of the abomination of desolation. All the country was in an uproar; a deputation was sent to Cæsarea to have Pilate take them away. Pilate refused; for five days and nights they stormed about him day and night.