As has been said, we have reason to believe that a Jewish community already existed at Rome, and we shall see that it must have been fairly numerous. As a city, Rome was probably the least homogeneous in the world. It may have contained at this time something less than a million people, perhaps much less; but this population was of the most diverse origin. Not only had the capital of the world attracted to it all manner of adventurers; not only was it teeming with slaves of every imaginable blood and speech; but the thronging of the city with the refuse of the world had been a conscious policy of the democratic and senatorial rings, to whom modern “colonization” was a familiar and simple process. When we recall that the accepted governmental theory was still that of the city-state, we shall see that mere residence made to a certain extent a Roman of everyone who lived within the walls. Various measures of expulsion, such as the Lex Junia Penni and the Lex Papia of 65 B.C.E., were wholly ineffective. As a matter of fact, the governmental apparatus of the city-state was quite unable to cope with the situation that presented itself. Until 200 B.C.E., the turning-point in Roman history, the city was small and mean; the population, though composite, was still almost wholly Italian in character. A rapid increase in wealth and a consequent increase in glaring inequalities of fortune began at this point. The governing council of ex-magistrates, whose office had in practice become almost hereditary, found itself confronted by a needy and exigent proletariat, which it could neither overawe nor purchase. The urban tendency of the population of Italy was due largely to the failure of the small farms to support their man. Free labor was subjected to the constant drain of military levies, and temporary suspension of cultivation was ruinous. The obvious remedy was a forced and unprofitable sale to the agrarian capitalists, whose leasehold interest in the great public lands had long been so nearly vested that it was almost sacrilege to attack it. To migrate to the city was then the only course open to the peasant, but in the city the demand for free labor was never great. The new arrivals joined the great mass of landless rabble, sinking soon into an idle and pauperized mob. But at the same time infusions of foreign blood came into the city. The rapid rise in wealth and power had poured into Rome a constant stream of the commonest of wares, viz. human chattels. These slaves, Greek, Thracian, but above all Syrian, were directly consequent upon the imperative demand for skilled labor, which they alone could satisfy. But the very number of these slaves, and the changes in personal fortunes, which were then even more frequent than now, made them often a liability rather than an asset to their master.