This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
View text chunked by:
[31]
"It is of necessity incumbent on such as
are in distress to have recourse to those that have it in their power to
free them from those injuries they lie under; and for those that now are
complainants, they approach you with great assurance; for as they have
formerly often obtained your favor, so far as they have even wished to
have it, they now only entreat that you, who have been the donors, will
take care that those favors you have already granted them may not be taken
away from them. We have received these favors from you, who alone have
power to grant them, but have them taken from us by such as are no greater
than ourselves, and by such as we know are as much subjects as we are;
and certainly, if we have been vouchsafed great favors, it is to our commendation
who have obtained them, as having been found deserving of such great favors;
and if those favors be but small ones, it would be barbarous for the donors
not to confirm them to us. And for those that are the hinderance of the
Jews, and use them reproachfully, it is evident that they affront both
the receivers, while they will not allow those to be worthy men to whom
their excellent rulers themselves have borne their testimony, and the donors,
while they desire those favors already granted may be abrogated. Now if
any one should ask these Gentiles themselves, which of the two things they
would choose to part with, their lives, or the customs of their forefathers,
their solemnities, their sacrifices, their festivals, which they celebrated
in honor of those they suppose to be gods? I know very well that they would
choose to suffer any thing whatsoever rather than a dissolution of any
of the customs of their forefathers; for a great many of them have rather
chosen to go to war on that account, as very solicitous not to transgress
in those matters. And indeed we take an estimate of that happiness which
all mankind do now enjoy by your means from this very thing, that we are
allowed every one to worship as our own institutions require, and yet to
live [in peace]; and although they would not be thus treated themselves,
yet do they endeavor to compel others to comply with them, as if it were
not as great an instance of impiety profanely to dissolve the religious
solemnities of any others, as to be negligent in the observation of their
own towards their gods. And let us now consider the one of these practices.
Is there any people, or city, or community of men, to whom your government
and the Roman power does not appear to be the greatest blessing '. Is there
any one that can desire to make void the favors they have granted? No one
is certainly so mad; for there are no men but such as have been partakers
of their favors, both public and private; and indeed those that take away
what you have granted, can have no assurance but every one of their own
grants made them by you may be taken from them also; which grants of yours
can yet never be sufficiently valued; for if they consider the old governments
under kings, together with your present government, besides the great number
of benefits which this government hath bestowed on them, in order to their
happiness, this is instead of all the rest, that they appear to be no longer
in a state of slavery, but of freedom. Now the privileges we desire, even
when we are in the best circumstances, are not such as deserve to be envied,
for we are indeed in a prosperous state by your means, but this is only
in common with others; and it is no more than this which we desire, to
preserve our religion without any prohibition; which as it appears not
in itself a privilege to be envied us, so it is for the advantage of those
that grant it to us; for if the Divinity delights in being honored, it
must delight in those that permit them to be honored. And there are none
of our customs which are inhuman, but all tending to piety, and devoted
to the preservation of justice; nor do we conceal those injunctions of
ours by which we govern our lives, they being memorials of piety, and of
a friendly conversation among men. And the seventh day we set apart from
labor; it is dedicated to the learning of our customs and laws, 1
we thinking it proper to reflect on them, as well as on any [good] thing
else, in order to our avoiding of sin. If any one therefore examine into
our observances, he will find they are good in themselves, and that they
are ancient also, though some think otherwise, insomuch that those who
have received them cannot easily be brought to depart from them, out of
that honor they pay to the length of time they have religiously enjoyed
them and observed them. Now our adversaries take these our privileges away
in the way of injustice; they violently seize upon that money of ours which
is owed to God, and called sacred money, and this openly, after a sacrilegious
manner; and they impose tributes upon us, and bring us before tribunals
on holy days, and then require other like debts of us, not because the
contracts require it, and for their own advantage, but because they would
put an affront on our religion, of which they are conscious as well as
we, and have indulged themselves in an unjust, and to them involuntary,
hatred; for your government over all is one, tending to the establishing
of benevolence, and abolishing of ill-will among such as are disposed to
it. This is therefore what we implore from thee, most excellent Agrippa,
that we may not be ill-treated; that we may not be abused; that we may
not be hindered from making use of our own customs, nor be despoiled of
our goods, nor be forced by these men to do what we ourselves force nobody
to do; for these privileges of ours are not only according to justice,
but have formerly been granted us by you. And we are able to read to you
many decrees of the senate, and the tables that contain them, which are
still extant in the capitol, concerning these things, which it is evident
were granted after you had experience of our fidelity towards you, which
ought to be valued, though no such fidelity had been; for you have hitherto
preserved what people were in possession of, not to us only, but almost
to all men, and have added greater advantages than they could have hoped
for, and thereby your government is become a great advantage to them. And
if any one were able to enumerate the prosperity you have conferred on
every nation, which they possess by your means, he could never put an end
to his discourse; but that we may demonstrate that we are not unworthy
of all those advantages we have obtained, it will be sufficient for us,
to say nothing of other things, but to speak freely of this king who now
governs us, and is now one of thy assessors; and indeed in what instance
of good-will, as to your house, hath he been deficient? What mark of fidelity
to it hath he omitted? What token of honor hath he not devised? What occasion
for his assistance of you hath he not regarded at the very first? What
hindereth; therefore, but that your kindnesses may be as numerous as his
so great benefits to you have been? It may also perhaps be fit not here
to pass over in silence the valor of his father Antipater, who, when Caesar
made an expedition into Egypt, assisted him with two thousand armed men,
and proved inferior to none, neither in the battles on land, nor in the
management of the navy; and what need I say any thing of how great weight
those soldiers were at that juncture? or how many and how great presents
they were vouchsafed by Caesar? And truly I ought before now to have mentioned
the epistles which Caesar wrote to the senate; and how Antipater had honors,
and the freedom of the city of Rome, bestowed upon him; for these are demonstrations
both that we have received these favors by our own deserts, and do on that
account petition thee for thy confirmation of them, from whom we had reason
to hope for them, though they had not been given us before, both out of
regard to our king's disposition towards you, and your disposition towards
him. And further, we have been informed by those Jews that were there with
what kindness thou camest into our country, and how thou offeredst the
most perfect sacrifices to God, and honoredst him with remarkable vows,
and how thou gavest the people a feast, and acceptedst of their own hospitable
presents to thee. We ought to esteem all these kind entertainments made
both by our nation and to our city, to a man who is the ruler and manager
of so much of the public affairs, as indications of that friendship which
thou hast returned to the Jewish nation, and which hath been procured them
by the family of Herod. So we put thee in mind of these things in the presence
of the king, now sitting by thee, and make our request for no more but
this, that what you have given us yourselves you will not see taken away
by others from us."
1 We may here observe the ancient practice of the Jews, of dedicating the sabbath day, not to idleness, but to the learning their sacred rites and religious customs, and to the meditation on the law of Moses; the like to which we meet with elsewhere in Josephus also against Apion, B. I. sect. 22.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.