He checked the spread of foreign rites, particularly the Egyptian and Jewish. He compelled those who followed the former superstition to burn their ritual vestments and all their religious utensils. The younger Jews he transferred to provinces of rigorous climate under the pretense of assigning them to military service. All the rest of that nation, and all who observed its rites, he ordered out of the city under the penalty of being permanently enslaved if they disobeyed. Undoubtedly the same incident is mentioned by Tacitus in the Annals (ii. 85), where we hear that “action was taken about the eradication of Egyptian and Jewish rites. A senatusconsultum was passed, which transferred four thousand freedmen of military age who were affected by this superstition to Sardinia in order to crush brigandage there.... The rest were to leave Italy unless they abandoned their impious rites before a certain day.” Between these two accounts there are discrepancies that cannot be cured by the simple process of amalgamating the two, as has generally been done. These divergences will be treated in detail later. For the present it will be well to compare an independent account, that of Josephus, with the two. Josephus (Ant. XVIII. iii. 5) tells us of a Jew, “a thoroughly wicked man,” who was forced to flee from Judea for some crime, and with three worthy associates supported himself by swindling in Rome. This man persuaded Fulvia, a proselyte of high rank, the wife of a certain Saturninus, to send rich gifts to the temple. The presents so received were used by the four men for themselves. Upon the complaint of Saturninus, “Tiberius ordered all the Jews [πᾶν τὸ Ἰουδαϊκόν] to be driven from Rome. The consuls enrolled four thousand of them, and sent them to the island of Sardinia. He punished very many who claimed that their ancestral customs prevented them from serving.” Apart from the incident which, Josephus says, occasioned the expulsion, we have a version here which is not quite in accord with the one either of Tacitus or of Suetonius. Of these men Josephus is probably the nearest in time to the events he is describing, but also the most remote in comprehension. Besides the story just told, Josephus tells another, in which it is a votary of Isis who is deceived, with the connivance of the priests of the Egyptian goddess. The two incidents which he relates are placed in juxtaposition rather than connection by him, but the mere fact that they are told in this way indicates that a connection did exist in the source, written or oral, from which he derived them. Josephus does not mention that the Egyptian worship was attacked as well as the Jewish, and indeed he takes pains to suggest that the two incidents were not really connected at all.