That the preaching of the Jews was vigorous and aggressive is almost a necessary inference. We know no less than three of their synagogues by name, Augustenses, Volumnienses, Agrippenses,[271] and we have no reason to assume that these three exhausted the list. To many Romans the ardor of their proselytizing was offensive. It seemed a systematic attempt to transform the ancestral faith of the state. A casual reference in Valerius Maximus, a contemporary of Tiberius, charges the Jews with having attempted “to contaminate Roman beliefs by foisting upon them the worship of Jupiter Sabazios.”[272] Valerius goes on to say that the praetor Hispalus expelled the Jews for that reason as early as 139 B.C.E. If such a thing took place, it was undoubtedly an act similar to an expulsion under Tiberius (below, p. 306), and was based on definite infractions of law, perhaps the law against unlicensed fortune-telling. The Jews in both cases were associated with the Chaldeans, a fact that makes the supposition more likely. But Valerius has in mind the conditions of his own day, when the success of the Jewish propaganda was bitterly resented, as we have seen, by Horace and Fuscus, and, as we shall later see, by Seneca and his associates generally. If we try to imagine what the Jewish Roman communities of that day were like, we shall have to think of them as a proletariat. Freedmen in the second or third generation must have constituted a large part of them, and later references make it likely that many earned their livelihood by the proscribed arts of divination and fortune-telling. As in Alexandria, the bulk were probably artisans. Some were physicians, a profession then ranking in social degree with the manual trades, and usually exercised by slaves or freedmen.[273] The Roman encyclopedist Celsus mentions two Jewish medical authorities (De Med. V. xix. 11; xxii. 4). But the majority must have formed part of the pauperized city mob, turbulent and ignorant, and no doubt only moderately acquainted with their own laws and literature, so that we cannot be surprised to find indications of many things among them that were regarded as sacrilege in Jerusalem, such as carved animal figures on tombstones.[274] However, there must at least have been some of a different type, whose command of their controversial literature enabled them to meet the competing philosophies upon their own ground and impress themselves upon some of the men of Augustus’ own circle. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XVII THE JEWS OF THE EMPIRE TILL THE REVOLT