As long as the Christians were merely a heretical Jewish sect, their fortunes affected the whole Jewish community. When their propaganda became, not a supplement to that of the Jews, but its rival, and soon its successful and triumphant rival, its history is wholly separated, and the measures that dealt with the Christians and those that concerned the Jews were no longer in danger of being confused. To the Jews the success of the propaganda of Paul seemed to depend on the fact that he had abolished the long and severe ritual of initiation; he had increased his numbers by decreasing the cost of admission. So we find, shortly after the destruction of the temple, R. Nehemiah ben ha-Kannah asserting (Ab. iii. 6) that to discard the yoke of the Law was to assume the yoke of the kingdom and of the world; _i.e._ so far from making the path to unworldliness easier, it laid insuperable obstacles in the way. The statement is applicable to Jews of lax observance, but it seems particularly applicable to the Pauline Christians, who had not merely lightened the load, but deliberately and _ex professo_ wholly discarded it. Outside of the references that give us certain data about the external history of the Roman Jewish community of the first century, we have other data of a wholly different sort, data that allow of a more intimate glimpse into its actual life. They are furnished us by the Roman satirists, whose literary labors have scarcely an analogue in our days. Satire itself was assumed to be a Roman genre.[347] Whether or not it was of Roman invention, the miscellanies that have given us so many and such vivid pictures of ancient life are known to us wholly in Latin. It is safe to say that if satirists such as Horace, Persius, Juvenal, and Martial had not come down to us, ancient history would be a vastly bleaker province than it is. Of Horace and his representation of Jewish life we have already spoken. It will be remembered that the one aspect which earned for the Jews his none too respectful raillery was their eager proselytism. And it is excellent evidence of how important this proselytism was in the Jewish life of the time, that in the two generations that stretched from Nero to Nerva the same aspect is present to men of such diverse types as Persius and Juvenal. With Persius we enter a wholly different stratum of society from that of Horace and, as we shall later see, of Juvenal. Persius was by birth and breeding an aristocrat. He was descended from an ancient Etruscan house, and could boast, accordingly, of a nobility of lineage compared with which the Roman Valerii and Caecilii were the veriest mushrooms.[348] But he was almost wholly devoid of the vices that often mark his class. An austere Stoic, his short life was dedicated to the severe discipline that his contemporary and fellow-Stoic Seneca found it easier to preach than to practise.