It is not perhaps wholly fanciful to imagine that the Jewish leaders, after the fall of their city and Temple and the great dispersion of their people, deliberately invented new means for maintaining their cherished nationality. Their conquerors, as they might observe, were scattered like themselves over the face of the globe and abode wherever they conquered; but the laws, the manners, and the traditions of Rome were preserved almost intact amid alien races by the consciousness that there existed a visible centre of their nation, the source, as it were, to which they might repair to draw the waters of political life. But the dispersions of the Jews seemed the more irremediable as the destruction of their central home was complete. To preserve the existence of their nation one other way presented itself. In their sacred books they retained a common bond of law and doctrine, such as no other people could boast. In these venerated records they possessed, whether on the Tiber or the Euphrates, an elixir of unrivalled virtue. With a sudden revulsion of feeling the popular orators and captains betook themselves to the study of law, its history and antiquities, its actual text and its inner meaning. The schools of Tiberias resounded with debate on the rival principles of interpretation, the ancient and the modern, the stricter and the laxer, known respectively by the names of their teachers, Schammai and Hillel. The doctors decided in favor of the more accommodating system, by which the stern exclusiveness of the original letter was extenuated, and the law of the rude tribes of Palestine moulded to the varied taste and temper of a cosmopolitan society, while the text itself was embalmed in the _Masora_, an elaborate system of punctuation and notation, to every particle of which, to insure its uncorrupted preservation, a mystical significance was attached. By this curious contrivance the letter of the Law, the charter of Judaism, was sanctified forever, while its spirit was remodelled to the exigencies of the present or the future, till it would have been no longer recognized by its authors, or even by very recent disciples. To this new learning of traditions and glosses the ardent youth of the nation devoted itself with a fanaticism not less vehement than that which had fought and bled half a century before. The name of the rabbi Akiba is preserved as a type of the hierophant of restored Judaism. The stories depicting him are best expounded as myths and figures. He reached, it was said, the age of a hundred and twenty years, the period assigned in the sacred records to his prototype, the law-giver Moses.