There were always anti-Semites spoiling for a fight at Alexandria, and there was always inflammable material which they could stir up. The Egyptian populace were by nature, says Philo, "jealous and envious, and were filled moreover with an ancient and inveterate enmity towards the Jews,"[72] and of the degenerate Greek population, many were anxious from motives of private gain as well as from religious enmity to incite an outbreak; since the Jews were wealthy and the booty would be great. Among the cultured, too, there was one philosophical school powerful at Alexandria, which maintained a persistent attitude of hostility towards the Jews. The chief literary anti-Semites of whom we have record at this period were Stoics, and it is probably their "envy" to which Philo refers when he complains of being drawn into the sea of politics. In writings and in speeches the Stoic leaders Apion and Chæremon carried on a campaign of misrepresentation, and sought to give their attacks a fine humanitarian justification by drawing fancy pictures of the Jewish religion and Jewish laws. The Jews worshipped the head of an ass,[73] they hated the Gentiles, and would have no communication with them, they killed Gentile children at the Passover, and their law allowed them to commit any offences against all but their own people, and inculcated a low morality. When it was not morally bad, it was degraded and superstitious. Whereas the modern anti-Semite usually complains about Jewish success and dangerous cleverness, Apion accused them of having produced no original ideas and no great men, and no citizen as worthy of Alexandria as himself! Against these charges Philo, the most philosophical Jew of the time and the most distinguished member of the Alexandrian community, was called upon to defend his people, and that part of his works which Eusebius calls [Greek: Hypotheticha]; _i.e._ apologetics, was probably written in reply to the Stoic attacks. The hatred of the Stoics was a religious hatred, which is the bitterest of all; the Stoics were the propagators of a rival religious system, which had originally been founded by Hellenized Semites and borrowed much from Semitic sources. They had their missionaries everywhere and aspired to found a universal philosophical religion. In their proselytizing activity they tried to assimilate to their pantheism the mythological religion of the masses, and thus they became the philosophical supporters of idolatry. Their greatest religious opponents were the Jews, who not only refused to accept their teachings, but preached to the nations a transcendental monotheism against their impersonal and accommodating pantheism, and a divinely-revealed law of conduct against their vague natural reason. In the Stoic pantheism the first stand of the pagan national deities was made against the God of Israel, and at Alexandria during the first century the fight waxed fierce. It was a fight of