It is for this reason an especially painful gap in our sources to find that portion of Polybius missing in which he promised to treat at length of the Jews. Polybius of Megalopolis, a Greek who lived as an Achean hostage in Rome, in the second third of the second century B.C.E., was the nearest approach the ancient world had to an historian in the modern sense, one whose primary object was to ascertain the truth and state it simply. Polybius could, for example, feel and express high admiration for Roman institutions and at the same time do justice to the bitter hater of the Romans, Hannibal. And this too in the lifetime of men who may themselves have heard the dreadful news of Trasimene and Cannae. In his sixteenth book, Polybius briefly relates the conquest of Judea among other parts of Coele-Syria, first by Ptolemy Philometor’s general, then by Antiochus the Great. “A little while after this, he [Antiochus] received the submission of those of the Jews who lived around the temple known as Jerusalem. About this I have much more to tell, particularly because of the fame of the temple, and I shall reserve that narrative for later.” An evil chance has deprived us of that later narrative. If we possessed it, we should probably have a very sane and, as far as his sources permitted, an accurate account of the condition of the Jews during the generation between Antiochus the Great and the Maccabees. Polybius, however, wrote before the establishment of the Jewish state and the spread of its cult had focused attention upon the people, and roused opposition. And he wrote, too, at the very beginning of Roman interference in the East, which reduced Egypt to a protectorate before another generation. When he speaks therefore of the “great fame of the temple” (ἡ περὶ τὸ ἱερὸν ἐπιφάνεια), he is an especially important witness of what the name meant to the Romans and Greeks, for whom he wrote.[184] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XIII THE OPPOSITION IN ITS SOCIAL ASPECT If the rivals and opponents of the Jews had nothing more to say of them than that they worshiped the head of an ass, it is not likely that their opposition would have been recorded. But they would have put their training to meager use, if they could not devise better and stronger terms of abuse. The very first Greek historian who has more than a vague surmise of the character and history of the Jews is Hecataeus of Abdera (comp. above, p. 92). As has been seen, his tone is distinctly well-disposed. But he knows also of circumstances which to the Greek mind were real national vices. He mentions with strong disapproval their credulity, their inhospitality, and their aloofness.