It is in the pages of Juvenal that we find evidence of that fact, and here again we are confronted with a sharply outlined personality. Decimus Junius Juvenalis was born near Aquinum in Southern Italy, where the Italic stock had probably suffered less admixture with foreign elements than was the case at Rome. What his intellectual training was we can only conjecture from its results, the turgid but sonorous and often brilliant eloquence of his Satires. Whether they are true pictures of Roman life and society or not may be doubted. But they indubitably reflect his own soul. We see there a soured _raté_, a man embittered by his failure to receive the rewards due to his merits. In the capital of the world, the city where he, the man of undoubted Roman stock, should have found a career open before him, he discovered himself to be a stranger. He was no match for the nimble-witted Greeks that thronged every profession and crawled into entrances too low to admit the scion of Cincinnatus and Fabricius. How much of this was the venom of defeated ambition, and how much was honest indignation at the indescribable meanness of the lives he depicted, we cannot now determine. Throughout all his work one note may be heard, the note of rage at a Rome where everything characteristically Roman was pushed into the background, a Rome in the hands of Greeks, Egyptians, and Jews. And in the case of the last it is particularly the danger noted by Strabo and Seneca,[351] of an actual conquest of Rome by the Jewish faith, that rouses his savage indignation. The lines in which he states his feeling are well-known (Juvenal, Sat. xiv. 96 seq.): Some whose lot it is to have a father that reveres the Sabbath, worship nothing but the clouds and the sky and think that the flesh of swine from which their father abstained is closely related to that of man. Soon they become circumcised. Trained to despise the laws of Rome they learn, maintain, and revere the Law of the Jews, which Moyses has transmitted in a mystic volume;—laws that forbid them to show the way to any but members of their cult, and bid them guide to a spring none but their circumcised brethren. We need be at no pains to correct Juvenal’s estimate of Jewish beliefs or Jewish theology. As in the case of Persius, the interest of the passage lies in the fact that it gives additional testimony to the success with which the Jewish synagogues, despite official frowns and even repressive measures, despite the severe conditions they imposed upon initiates, were constantly gaining in membership.