The rationalist Greek or Roman felt it a point of honor to hold in equal contempt the “old-wives’ tales” of his own countrymen as to the supramundane facts with which the myths were filled,[195] and the vain and foolish attempts by which barbarians, and Greeks and Romans too, sought to dominate the cosmic forces or tear the secret from fate. These attempts generally took the form of magic, not, however, like the primitive ceremonies, of which the real nature had long been forgotten, but in the elaborate thaumaturgic systems which had been fashioned in Egypt, Persia, and Babylon. In their lowest forms these were petty and mean swindling devices. In their more developed forms they contained a sincerely felt mysticism, but under all guises they aroused the contempt of the skeptic, to whom the most ancient and revered rites of his own cult were merely ancestral habits which it did no harm to follow. The tone such men adopted toward the complicated Oriental theologies and rituals was very much like that of modern cultivated men toward the various “Vedantic philosophies,” which at one time enjoyed a certain vogue. Those who seriously maintained that by the rattling of a sistrum, or the clash of cymbals, or by mortifications of the flesh, influences could be exerted upon the laws that governed the universe, so as to modify their course or divert them, were alike insensate fools, whose chatter no educated man could take seriously. The Jews, who observed, even when they were less rigorous, a number of restrictive rules that gravely hampered their freedom of action, who seriously maintained that they possessed a direct revelation of God, were fanatics and magicians, and exhibited a credulity that was the first sign of mental inferiority. “Senseless,” “nonsense,” ἀνοητός, ἄνοια, are terms that are principally in the mouths of the Philopator of III Maccabees and the Antiochus of IV Maccabees, in whose words we may fairly see epitomized all the current abuse as well as criticism which opponents to the Jews, from philosophers to malevolent chauvinists, heaped upon them. Hecataeus says of Moses that he instituted an “inhospitable and strange form of living.”[196] The two words μισόξενον and ἀπάνθρωπον form a _doublette_, or rhetorical doubling of a single idea. That idea is “inhospitality,” lack of the feeling of common humanity, a term which for Greeks and Romans embodied a number of conceptions not suggested by the word to modern ears.