The tractate of the Mishnah which is called Aboda Zara, “Idolatry” or “Foreign Worship,” lays down the rules under which Jew and heathen may transact such business as common citizenship or residence made inevitable. The essential point throughout is that the Jew must not either directly or indirectly take part, or seem to take part, in the worship accorded the Abomination. Nor are the seemingly trivial regulations despicable for their anxious minuteness. In all probability they are decisions of actual cases, and derive their precision from that fact.[354] Certain passages in Aboda Zara (ii. 1) would unquestionably have made intercourse between Jew and pagan practically impossible except in public or semi-public places. But in the very same treatise it is implied that a pagan might be a guest at the Jew’s table (v. 5); and indeed much of the detail of the entire tractate would be unnecessary if the provision contained in ii. 1 were literally followed out. The Epigrams of Martial (above, p. 326), if we believe them, indicate that so far from fleeing the society of pagans for its sexual vices, some Jews at least sought it for the sake of these vices, as was the case with the rival of the Syrian Greek Meleager, more than two centuries before Martial. But it will be noticed that the subject of the last Epigram (xi. 94) is a renegade, who swears strange oaths, and is taunted by Martial with what he is obviously trying to conceal. Besides, as to the particular vice there mentioned, it rests on the malice of the satirist alone. The victim of his wit denies his guilt. Indeed it is just this particular vice, so widely prevalent in the Greek and Roman world, that the Jewish antagonists of the pagans seized upon at all times. It unquestionably characterized continental Greece and Italy much more than the eastern portions of the empire. For the Jews it seemed to justify the application of the words “Sodom and Gomorrah,” particularly to the general city life of the Greeks. Some Jew or Christian scratched those names on a house wall of Pompeii.[355]