the abolition of the Sabbath. He declared further in his edicts that these tolerated foreigners had possessed themselves unallowably of the best part of the town; they were restricted to a single one of the five wards, and all the other Jewish houses were abandoned to the rabble, while masses of the ejected inhabitants lay without shelter on the shore. No remonstrance was even listened to; eight and thirty members of the council of the elders, which then presided over the Jews instead of the Ethnarch,[173] were scourged in the open circus before all the people. Four hundred houses lay in ruins; trade and commerce were suspended; the factories stood still. There was no help left except with the emperor. Before him appeared the two Alexandrian deputations, that of the Jews led by the formerly (p. 170) mentioned Philo, a scholar of Neojudaic leanings, and of a heart more gentle than brave, but who withal faithfully took the part of his people in this distress; that of the enemies of the Jews, led by Apion, also an Alexandrian scholar and author, the “world’s clapper” [_cymbalum mundi_], as the emperor Tiberius called him, full of big words and still bigger lies, of the most assured omniscience[174] and unlimited faith in himself, conversant, if not with men, at any rate with their worthlessness, a celebrated master of discourse as of the art of misleading, ready for action, witty, unabashed, and unconditionally loyal. The result of the discussion was settled from the outset; the emperor received the deputies while he was inspecting the works designed in his gardens, but instead of giving a hearing to the suppliants, he put to them sarcastic questions, which the enemies of the Jews in defiance of all etiquette accompanied with loud laughter, and, as he was in good humour, he confined himself to expressing his regret that these otherwise good people should be so unhappily constituted as not to be able to understand his innate divine nature--as to which he was beyond doubt in earnest. Apion thus gained his case, and, wherever it pleased the adversaries of the Jews, the synagogues were changed into temples of Gaius. [Sidenote: The statue of the emperor in the temple of Jerusalem.]