At Rome police measures to suppress irreligion were long in existence. However, the Roman attitude toward any form of communion with gods or _daemonia_ was so uniformly an attitude of dread, that prohibition of religious rites and punishment of participants in them were not a task lightly assumed by a Roman magistrate. The suppression of the Bacchanalia in 186 B.C.E. was nothing short of a religious persecution, but the utmost care was taken to make it appear to be directed against certain licentious practices alleged against the Bacchae, and the senate’s decree expressly authorizes the Bacchic rites, under certain restrictions deemed necessary to insure their harmlessness.[168] Very early the Isiac mysteries and other Eastern cults came within the animadversion of the urban police.[169] Here too the theory was that the crimes and immorality of the communicants were the sole objects of punishment, especially that species of fraud which took the form of magic and unofficial fortune-telling. In reality, however, all these pretexts covered the fact that the Romans felt their state ritual endangered, not by the presence, but by the spread, of such rituals among Romans; and in this their alarm was very well grounded indeed. But to proceed openly and boldly against any manifestation of a divine numen, was more than the average Roman board of aediles ventured to do. If the official attitude of various communities toward outside cults and toward the Jews in particular can be brought under no general rule, we may be sure that the personal attitude of individual Greeks toward them varied from enthusiastic veneration to indifference and determined antagonism. In certain cities the Jews as foreigners could not hope to escape odium nor the jealousy of competing individuals and organizations. In Egypt particularly, the feud between Egyptians and Jews existed before the coming of the Greeks there, and grew in intensity as time went on. As far as definite attacks upon the Jews and their institutions went, many of them had an Egyptian origin, and many others were wholly confined to that country. These attacks are not essentially different from the methods that generally obtained when one group of men found itself in frequent opposition to another group on the field of battle or otherwise. The populace needs no rhetorical stimulation to represent its enemies as wicked, cowardly, and foolish. That is a human weakness which exists to-day quite as it has existed for many centuries. However, even for the populace, such phrases were accepted conventions. They were not quite seriously meant, and could be conveniently forgotten whenever the former foe became an ally.