Once he takes a more serious tone. In the famous journey he made with Maecenas to Brundisium Horace is told of an altar-miracle at Egnatia. The incense melts of itself, it seems, in the local temple. “Tell it to the Jew Apella,” says Horace, “not to me. I have always been taught that the gods live free from every care, and if anything wonderful occurs in nature, it is not because it has been sent down from heaven by meddlesome divinities.”[267] This Jew Apella—a dialect-form of Apollas or Apollonius[268]—is no doubt a real person, who may perhaps have recounted to Horace some of the miracles of the Bible. Horace’s raillery is directed plainly enough at the credulity that will accept these stories, and equally at the troublesome theology which makes the god a factor in daily life. Life was much simpler if no such incalculable quantity were injected into it. And to keep life free from harassing and unnecessary complications was the essence of his philosophy.[269] At about the same time another writer, the geographer Strabo, of Amasea in Cappadocia, makes a statement of special interest. As quoted by Josephus (Ant. XIV. vii. 2) he says: “These people have already reached every city, and it would be difficult to find a place in the whole world that has not received this tribe and succumbed to it.” Obviously the statement is a gross exaggeration, and at most applicable to the cities of Egypt and Cyrene, in connection with which it is made. But that such a statement could be made at all is excellent evidence that it was at least partially true, and that there were Jewish communities practically everywhere, although it can hardly be the case that they were everywhere dominant. However, the sketches by Horace are an eloquent commentary upon the statement of Strabo. Not merely the East or Africa, but the capital itself, was overrun with Jews, and their number was constantly increasing. Horace, it has been said, wrote of and for a cultured aristocracy. So did the other poets of the age, Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid. But all of them were more than ordinarily familiar with the _bas-lieux_ where disreputable passions might be gratified. The voluptuary Ovid was especially prone to go down into the sewer for new sensations, and just as Horace met Jews in the boulevards, so Ovid knew them in the slums. In his salad-days Ovid had written a manual of debauchery, which he called the “Art of Love.” He was destined to regret bitterly the facility of verse and of conscience that gave birth to this bold composition. But written it was, and in his advice to the dissolute young Romans he enumerates the time and place for their amours.