The attitude of the various Jewish synagogues and communes toward Judea was one that appeared to the men of the day as that which bound various colonies of a city to the mother-city. Indeed the Jewish communities outside of Palestine were styled explicitly colonies, ἀποικία. Such a tie, however, was conceived in the Greek fashion and not in the Roman. The Greek colony was bound to its mother-city by sentiment only, not, as in the case of the Romans, by law. That sentiment might be powerful enough at times, but it was not inconsistent with the bitterest warfare. Consequently such movements as appear in Palestine need not at all have been reflected in the synagogues of the East and West, and there is nothing to indicate that the active and successful proselytizing of the Asiatic and Roman synagogues was either directed or systematically encouraged by the Pharisaic majority in the Sanhedrin at Jerusalem. It will at all times create a wholly false impression to speak of the Jews of that period as of a single community bound by common interests and open to identical influences. The independence of the Jewish congregations of one another was quite real, and was even insisted upon. Neither the high priest nor the Nasi of the Sanhedrin pretended to any authority except over those legally resident in Judea; and often, when the reverence for the temple and the holy city was most strongly emphasized, intense contempt might be manifested for those who were at the moment the holders of the supreme authority in the mother-country. Another matter that is apt to be lost sight of in this connection is the fact that not all Jews of the time lived within the Roman empire. The Persian kingdom, which Alexander had conquered, and which the Seleucidae had with varying success attempted to maintain, had fallen to pieces long before the Roman occupation of Syria. Media, Babylonia, Bactria resumed a quasi-independence, which however was soon lost when the obscure province of Parthia—as Persis had done five centuries before—assumed a dominance that ended in direct supremacy. The Roman limits were set at the river Euphrates, leaving Armenia a bloody, debatable ground. The one great moment in the history of this new Parthian empire was the decisive defeat of Crassus at Carrhae in 58 B.C.E., a victory that gave the Parthians sufficient prestige to maintain themselves under conditions of domestic disorder that would ordinarily have been fatal. The Augustan poets and courtiers might magnify the return of the Roman standards by King Phraates to their hearts’ content. They might, as they did, exultantly proclaim that the Crassi were avenged, that the known world to the shadowy confines of the Indus bowed to the will of the living god Augustus. The fact remained that, after Carrhae, the conquest of the country beyond the Euphrates ceased to be a part of the Roman programme, and, except for the transient successes of Trajan, was never seriously attempted.