DEDICATION.

marginal note: * Cicero, On Behalf of L. Flaccus, Chapter XXVIII. "For I do not believe that the religion of the Jews and of our enemies was an impediment to our most excellent commander, but rather his sense of shame." Idem, ibid. "With Jerusalem standing and the Jews pacified, the religion of those sacred rites nonetheless abhorred the splendor of this empire, the gravity of our name, and the institutions of our ancestors; now, however, it does so all the more, because that nation showed by arms what it felt about our empire; and it taught how dear it was to the immortal gods by the fact that it was conquered, that it was dispersed, that it serves." Thus, unless I am mistaken, it should be read, not as before, "preserved" Latin: servata—the text likely intended "enslaved" Latin: servit.

talent for argumentation, with what power of speech they were equipped, by which they could persuade those grave and steadfast Romans—having abandoned and repudiated their own gods, whom their ancestors proclaimed and testified in all monuments that they had never neglected with impunity nor invoked in vain during the most grave times of the Republic—to venerate the God of men, and of barbarians, and of those conquered by them, and of the Jews; and to venerate a man who was also a Jew, who had been killed a little before by his own countrymen by a servile punishment? Who could have so swayed and changed so many and such diverse nations—some savage in their inhumanity, others inflated by their own customs and discipline, others fierce with a certain horrible and rustic virtue, others wanton in luxury and license, others insolent in victories and power, others broken and weakened by long-standing slavery, others indocile through ignorance and slowness, or through the fame of their own doctrine and talent—that they exchanged the religion of their fathers for a new and external one? That they exchanged a life of every license and liberty (with which there was almost total peace and concord in previous religions) for a rigid and severe life, anxiously fleeing all that even bordered on pleasure? That they preferred virtues of which they had not even heard the names before; and, finally, that they preferred poverty to riches, hatred to favor, contempt to honor, exile to fatherland, and death to life? This, such a great change of things throughout the whole world,