Credulity is not a vice with which the Jews were charged in later times. That may be due to Christian tradition, in which of course the sin of the Jews is that they did not believe enough, as stated in Christian controversial writings. But Greeks and Romans were quite in accord, that the Jews were duped with extraordinary facility; especially that they were the victims of the deception of their priests, so that they attached importance to thousands of matters heartily without importance. We may remember Horace’s jibe, _Credat_ _Iudaeus Apella_, “Tell it to the Jew Apella”;[185] and nearly two hundred years later Apuleius mentions the _Iudaei superstitiosi_, “the superstitious Jews.”[186] Among the Greeks particularly the quality of εὐήθεια, “simplicity,” had rapidly made the same progress as the words “silly” and “simpleton” have in English. Sharpness and duplicity were the qualities with which non-Greek nations credited the Greeks, and whether the accusation was true or not, “naïveté,” εὐήθεια, excited Greek risibilities more quickly than anything else. The εὐήθεια of the Jews lay of course not in their beliefs about the Deity. On that point all educated men were in accord. But it lay in believing in the sanctity of the priests, and in the observance of the innumerable regulations, particularly of abstention, which had already assumed such proportions among the Jews. The line of Meleager of Gadara, about his Jewish rival, ἕστι καὶ ἐν ψυχροῖς σάββασι θερμὸς Ἔρως,[187] Even on the cold Sabbaths Love makes his warmth felt, contains in its ψυχρὰ σάββατα “cold Sabbaths,” an epitome of the Greek point of view, ψυχρός, “cold,” was almost a synonym for “dull.” That a holiday should be celebrated by abstention from ordinary activities and amusements seemed to a Greek the essence of unreason. Their own religious customs were, like those of all other nations, full of tabus, but they were the less conscious of them because they were wholly apart from their daily life. Jews avoided certain foods, not merely as an occasional fast, but always. Their myths were not irrelevant and beautiful stories, but were firmly believed to be the records of what actually happened. The precepts of their code were sanctioned, not merely by expediency, but by the fear of an offended God. An excellent example of how the rhetorical τόπος of “naïveté” was handled is presented by Agatharchidas of Cnidus, who wrote somewhere near 150 B.C.E.[188]