Most of the phrases that have been quoted have been taken from works where they were little more than casual asides imbedded in matter of different purport. Rhetoricians, in attempting to establish a point, use some phrase, either current through popular usage or a commonplace in their schools. In this respect the Jews fare no better and no worse than practically all nationalities of that time. Individual writers disliked or despised various peoples, and said so in any manner that suited them. Slurs against Romans, Athenians, Boeotians, Egyptians, Cappadocians are met with often enough. The Cretans were liars, the Boeotians guzzlers, the Egyptians knaves, the Abderitans fools; antiquity has furnished us with more than one entertaining example of national hate and jealousy.[217] The epithets which the Acheans showered on their Aetolian rivals certainly leave nothing to be desired as far as intensity is concerned.[218] The various panders of Roman comedy often are represented as particularly choice specimens of Agrigentine character.[219] Cicero particularly knew from his rhetorical masters how to use national prejudices in the conduct of his business. If Celts are the accusers of his client, as they were in the case of Fonteius, they are perjurers, murderers, enemies of the human race. “Tribes,” he says, “so far removed from other races in character and customs that they fight, not for their religion, but against the religion of all men.”[220] If they are Sardinians, these are a “tribe whose worthlessness is such that the only distinction they recognize between freedom and slavery is that the former gives them unlimited license to lie.”[221] To take this seriously is to misconceive strangely both the functions of an advocate and the license of rhetoric. Now the abusive paragraphs directed against the Jews are quite of this type. And it is in the highest degree extraordinary that these phrases, which, in the instances just cited, are given no weight in determining national attitude, should be considered of the highest importance in the case of the Jews. Whether it was Syrian, Greek, or Celt that was attacked, the stock epithet means no more than the corresponding terms of our own day mean. But besides these occasional flings there were whole books directed against the Jews, and to that fact a little attention may be given. It is a relatively rare thing that a writer should nurse his bile against a particular people to the extent of expanding it into a whole book. We must of course remember that a “book” was sometimes, and especially in this polemical literature, a single roll, and we are not to understand it in the sense of a voluminous treatise. However, there were such books and these we must now consider.