As it appears in Posidonius, perhaps in Mnaseas and Molo, and certainly in Plutarch, the story is based upon a real Jewish tradition and actual custom. In Damocritus and Apion, on the other hand, it is a malicious slander, needing no basis in observed fact. It is one of the many developments of the mutual hatred of Jew and Egyptian, of which there is such a wealth of other evidence. This story has been dealt with in some detail because it illustrates in very many ways the character, sources, and methods of the literary anti-Semitism of ancient times. Wholly without basis from the beginning, it becomes almost an accepted dogma, as well grounded as many another facile generalization in those days and ours. Further, it will be observed that it does not everywhere necessitate the inference of hostility on the part of the writer. The historians of those days were _ex professo_ rhetoricians. Every form of literary composition had as its prime object a finished artistic product. Since the subject of literature, or artistic verbal expression, was human life, history, which is the record of human life, was eminently the province of the word-fancier, the rhetorician. The trained historian has no words of sufficient contempt for the mere logographer whose object is the recording of facts. That “pretty lies” do not in the least disfigure history, is the opinion of the Stoic Panaetius and his pupil and admirer Cicero. And that was particularly the case when the history was, as it often became, an expanded plea or invective, in which case the tricks of trade of the advocate were not only commendable but demanded.[183] Most of the accounts of the Jews or the fragments of such accounts come to us from just these rhetorical historians. If the whole book were extant in any case, we should be in a position to determine the occasion for the account and the source of its color. As it is, we are on slippery ground when we endeavor to interpret the fragments in such a way as to discover the facts of which they present so distorted an image. Not all historians, however, were of this type. Even among the rhetors, many had, or at any rate professed to have, a passion for truth. And among the others there is manifested from time to time a distinct historical conscience, a qualm as to the accuracy of the assertion so trippingly written.