The short season of suffering left behind it no outward consequences; with the god his altars fell. But yet the traces of it remained on both sides. The history, which is here being told, is that of an increasing hatred between Jews and non-Jews, and in it the three years’ persecution of the Jews under Gaius marks a section and an advance. The hatred of Jews and the Jew-hunts were as old as the Diaspora itself; these privileged and autonomous Oriental communities within the Hellenic could not but develop them as necessarily as the marsh generates the malaria. But such a Jew-hunt as the Alexandrian of the year 38, instigated by defective Hellenism and directed at once by the supreme authority and by the low rabble, the older Greek and Roman history has not to show. The far way from the evil desire of the individual to the evil deed of the collective body was thus traversed, and it was shown what those so disposed had to will and to do, and were under circumstances also able to do. That this revelation was felt also on the Jewish side, is not to be doubted, although we are not in a position to adduce documentary evidence in support of it.[175] But a far deeper impression than that of the Jew-hunt at Alexandria was graven on the minds of the Jews by the statue of the god Gaius in the Holy of Holies. The thing had been done once already; a like proceeding of the king of Syria, Antiochus Epiphanes, had been followed by the rising of the Maccabees and the victorious restoration of the free national state (iii. 64) {iii. 61.}. That Epiphanes--the Anti-Messiah who ushers in the Messiah, as the prophet Daniel had, certainly after the event, delineated him--was thenceforth to every Jew the prototype of abomination; it was no matter of indifference, that the same conception came to be with equal warrant attached to a Roman emperor, or rather to the image of the Roman ruler in general. Since that fateful edict the Jews never ceased to dread that another emperor might issue a like command; and so far certainly with reason, as according to the organisation of the Roman polity such an enactment depended solely on the momentary pleasure of the ruler for the time. This Jewish hatred of the worship of the emperor and of imperialism itself, is depicted with glowing colours in the Apocalypse of John, for which, chiefly on that account, Rome is the harlot of Babylon and the common enemy of mankind.[176] Still less matter of indifference was the parallel, which naturally suggested itself, of the consequences. Mattathias of Modein had not been more than Judas the Galilean; the insurrection of the patriots against the Syrian king was almost as hopeless as the insurrection against the monster beyond the sea. Historical parallels in practical application are dangerous elements of opposition; only too rapidly does the structure of long years of wise government come to be shaken. [Sidenote: Claudius and the Jews.] [Sidenote: Agrippa.]