Think of life in Rome with money--money, wine, women, games--poets at the banquet, intrigues in the court, dice all the year round.

Such a rounding of life may be--a fat prefecture, and it is mine.

O my Judah, here is Syria! Judea is rich; Antioch a capital for the gods.

I will succeed Cyrenius, and you--shall share my fortune." The sophists and rhetoricians who thronged the public resorts of Rome, almost monopolizing the business of teaching her patrician youth, might have approved these sayings of Messala, for they were all in the popular vein; to the young Jew, however, they were new, and unlike the solemn style of discourse and conversation to which he was accustomed.

He belonged, moreover, to a race whose laws, modes, and habits of thought forbade satire and humor; very naturally, therefore, he listened to his friend with varying feelings; one moment indignant, then uncertain how to take him.