As an appeal to common sense, the speech, in spite of its obvious exaggerations, ought to have been successful. But what the Romans and the Romanized Jews chose to overlook was that common sense was scarcely a factor in producing the “exalted opinions” which Agrippa sought to abase. The glowing assurance of direct divine interposition was of course lacking to the speaker, and the wilder and more exuberant fancies that made the present time big with great upheavals and opened vistas of strange and sweeping changes, could not be answered by a statistical enumeration of the forces at the disposal of Romans and Jews respectively. In the previous chapter one fact has been frequently mentioned which Josephus states quite casually as an ordinary incident of the events he is describing. That fact is the readiness with which the Romans took alarm, not only at the armed “brigands,” who were really at all times in open revolt, but at anyone who, posing as preacher or prophet, gathered a crowd about him for thoroughly unwarlike purposes. We do not find elsewhere in the empire this quickness of animadversion on the part of the authorities to such acts. The Armenian Peregrinus was quite unmolested by the Roman officials when he undertook to perform before the eyes of the assembled crowd the miracle of Hercules on Mount Oeta.[321] Nor is there any evidence, however large the multitude was that surrounded the itinerant magician elsewhere, that riot and subversion were apprehended from that fact. Yet when the Egyptian promised to divide the walls of Jerusalem (above, p. 285), or Theudas to pass dry shod over the Jordan, or another man to discover the hidden treasures on the Gerizim (above, p. 284), a troop was sent at once to crush with bloody effectiveness an incipient rebellion. Obviously, in Judea, and not elsewhere, the assertion of divine inspiration carried with it a claim to certain political rights, or was deemed to do so, which was incompatible with Roman sovereignty. It is easy enough to understand what that claim was, and easy enough to understand why it does not stand forth more clearly in Josephus’ narrative. The coming of the Messianic kingdom had been looked for by previous generations as well, but in the generation that preceded 68 C.E. it became more and more strongly believed to be immediately at hand and to demand from those who would share in it a more than passive reception.