Such incidents as the riots provoked by individual soldiers cannot have been frequent. As has been said in one case, the Roman commander executed a soldier whose outrage had stirred up a revolt. But a garrison of foreign soldiers in a warlike country furnishes constant incentives to friction, which may at any time burst out into a general war. In Samaria and Galilee there were abundant pretexts for mutual attacks, the net result of which was that the land was full of brigandage, which indicates that the Roman police here were strikingly ineffective. And in all cases the suspicion that attached to every armed leader was that his motives were treasonable as well as criminal. So Dortus of Lydda was accused by the Samaritans of directly preaching rebellion. Under Nero, says Josephus, the country went from bad to worse, and was filled with brigands and impostors.[317] How little it was possible to distinguish between these two classes appears from the fact that Josephus continually mentions them in couples. Those whom he calls Assassins, or Sicarii, can be placed in neither category. One thing is evident. Their apparently wanton murders must have had other incentives than pillage, for even Josephus does not charge them with that; they were obviously animated by a purpose that may be called either patriotism or fanatic zeal, depending upon one’s bias. That is shown plainly enough in a casual statement of Josephus that these brigands were attempting to foment by force a war on Rome, τὸν δῆμον εἰς τὸν πρὸς Ῥωμαίοις πόλεμον ἠρέθιζον. The usual “prophet,” in this case an unnamed Egyptian, appears with his promise to make the walls of Jerusalem fall at his command, and the usual attack of armed soldiers on a helpless group of unarmed fanatics. In the Wars, Josephus speaks of a great number of these self-styled prophets (II. xiii. 4): “Cheats and vagabonds caused rebellion and total subversion of society, under the pretense of being divinely inspired. They infected the common people with madness, and led them into the desert with the promise that God would there show them how to gain freedom.” The procurator Felix took the customary measures of treating these expeditions as open sedition and crushing them with all the power at his command—acts which can only have inflamed the prevailing disorders.