The Roman nobility, it is true, often made pretensions to a purity of descent that felt every foreign admixture as a stain.[57] But such claims were absurdly groundless, and cannot really have deceived even those who maintained them. The great majority of Romans had no quarrel with any who desired and tried to be Roman. Even Juvenal’s venom is vented only on the avowed foreigners, who as Greeks, Egyptians, and Syrians lolled at their ease, while the ragged Cethegi and Cornucanii munched, standing, the bread of affliction and charity. The leveling tendencies of the autocracy removed a great many of the reasons of this friction, and in part succeeded in giving even the Greek-speaking East and the Latin-speaking West a common culture to maintain. But by that time new movements of population made such race-concepts as were based on blood-kinship too plainly out of accord with the facts to be seriously asserted. At the close of the period we are discussing, every man was either a Roman citizen, with a pressingly heavy share of the burden of maintaining the Roman system, or he was not. Who his ancestors were was wholly forgotten. It had even ceased to be of moment whether he spoke Greek or Latin or Syriac, Punic, or even Gallic,[58] which had never completely died out in their ancient homes. At no time did a feeling of racial kinship make a strong sentimental appeal. That the whole human race was an extended family was taken as axiomatic. Striking physical differences did not prevent similarity of names from proving kinship between Egyptian and Greek and Persian and Ethiopian. All through Greek history factions in Greek cities called upon outsiders against their countrymen. The Phoenicians of Utica preferred the foreign Romans to their Carthaginian kinsmen. Similarly the Campanians of Capua chose to fraternize with the Libyans and Phoenicians of Hannibal’s army rather than the closely related Latins.[59] In these circumstances nothing will lend itself more easily to distorting our view of the times than the importation into them of the modern view of race—of that view, at least, in which the historians of the nineteenth century found so easy and adequate an explanation of everything they desired to debase or extol. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER IV SKETCH OF JEWISH HISTORY BETWEEN NEBUCHADNEZZAR AND CONSTANTINE