This favor among the masses in the city would of itself indicate a hold on the Oriental part of his subjects, which Nero’s personal traits make especially likely. And of these Oriental or half-Oriental Romans a very considerable fraction were Jews. The all-powerful Poppaea Sabina, Nero’s mistress and afterwards his wife, is on good grounds believed to have been a semi-proselyte, a _metuens_.[325] Josephus ascribes Nero’s interference to her influence when Agrippa II attempted to make a display of the temple ceremonies. It is also not unlikely that the change of attitude on the part of Josephus toward Nero was due to the general feeling of the Roman Jewry toward his memory—a feeling of which Josephus had no cognizance in writing the Wars, but which had come to his attention when the Antiquities was composed. In the Wars (IV. ix. 2) we hear “how he abused his power and intrusted the control of affairs to unworthy freedmen, those wicked men, Nymphidius and Tigellinus.” In the Antiquities (XX. viii. 3) we find a temperate paragraph warning readers that the extant accounts of Nero are thoroughly unreliable, especially the accounts of those “who have impudently and senselessly lied about him.”[326] That among the Roman populace there were some who believed that Nero was not dead, but still alive, and would return to be avenged upon his foes, is not strange. But it is particularly strange that in the extreme East the hereditary rivals of Rome, the Parthians, cherished his memory, so that their king Vologaesus expressly asked for recognition of that fact when he strove to renew his alliance with Rome. It was among the Parthians that the man who claimed to be Nero found enthusiastic support about 88 C.E. (Suet. Nero, 57). The Parthians seem to have been ready to invade the Roman empire to re-establish this “Nero” (Tac. Hist. I. ii. 6). That, it is true, happened long afterward; but directly after Nero’s death, in the very throes of the Jewish war, a similar belief spread like wildfire over Greece and Asia Minor, and a slave, by calling himself Nero, secured temporary control of the island of Cythnus (Tac. Hist. I. ii. 8). One phrase of Suetonius is especially noteworthy. Long before Nero’s death it had been prophesied that he would be deposed, and would return as lord of the East: _Nonnulli_, Suetonius goes on to say, _nominatim regnum Hierosolymorum_ [_spoponderant_], “Some assured him specifically that he would be king of Jerusalem.”