When we inquire which nation has been successful in impressing their particular form of sabbath on the nations around the case is clear. We have no evidence of the Babylonians securing the adoption of their sabbatic arrangements by the Persians, Greeks and Parthians who successively overcame them. It was entirely different with the Jews. The Jewish kingdom before the Captivity was a very small one compared with its enemies on either side--Assyria, Babylon and Egypt; it was but a shadow even of its former self after the Return. And imperial Rome was a mightier power than Assyria or Babylon at their greatest. If ever one state was secure from influence by another on the score of its greater magnitude and power, Rome was safe from any Jewish impress. Yet it is perfectly well known that the impression made upon the Romans by the Jews in this very matter of sabbath-keeping was widespread and deep. Jewish influence was felt and acknowledged almost from the time that Syria, of which Judæa was but a petty division, became a Roman province, and a generation had not passed away before we find Horace making jocular allusion to the spread of the recognition of the Jewish sabbath. In his ninth satire he describes himself as being buttonholed by a bore, and, seeing a friend pass by, as begging the latter to pretend business with him and so relieve him of his trouble. His friend mischievously excuses himself from talking about business:-- "To-day's the thirtieth sabbath. Can you mean Thus to insult the circumcised Jews?" Persius, in his fifth satire, speaks of those who-- "Move their lips with silence, and with fear The sabbath of the circumcised revere." Juvenal, in his fourteenth satire, describes how many Romans reverence the sabbath; and their sons, bettering the example, turn Jews themselves:-- "Others there are, whose sire the sabbath heeds, And so they worship naught but clouds and sky. They deem swine's flesh, from which their father kept, No different from a man's. And soon indeed Are circumcised; affecting to despise The laws of Rome, they study, keep and fear The Jewish law, whate'er in mystic book Moses has handed down,--to show the way To none but he who the same rites observes, And those athirst to lead unto the spring Only if circumcised. Whereof the cause Was he, their sire, to whom each seventh day Was one of sloth, whereon he took in hand No part in life." Ovid, Tibullus, and others also speak of the Jewish sabbath, not merely as universally known, but as largely observed amongst the Romans, so that it obtained almost a public recognition, whilst the success of Judaism in making proselytes, until Christianity came into rivalry with it, is known to every one. As to the general influence of Judaism in securing the recognition of the week with its seventh day of rest, the testimony of Josephus is emphatic.