Augustus, who everywhere showed special favor to their Jewish
subjects, confirmed the privileges of full citizenship and limited
self-government which the early Ptolemies had bestowed.[13] Josephus
records a letter of Augustus to the Jewish community at Cyrene, in
which he ordains: "Since the nation of the Jews hath been found
grateful to the Roman people, it seemed good to me and my counsellors
that the Jews have liberty to make use of their own customs, and that
their sacred money be not touched, but sent to Jerusalem, and that
they be not obliged to go before the judge on the Sabbath day nor on
the day of preparation for it after the ninth hour," _i.e._, after the
early evening.[14] This decree is typical of the emperor's attitude to
his Jewish subjects; and Egypt became more and more a favored home of
the race, so that the Jewish population in the land, from the Libyan
desert to the border of Ethiopia, was estimated in Philo's time at not
less than one million.[15]

The prosperity and privileges of the Jews, combined with their
peculiar customs and their religious separateness, did not fail at
Alexandria, as they have not failed in any country of the Diaspora, to
arouse the mixed envy and dislike of the rude populace, and give a
handle to the agitations of self-seeking demagogues. The third book of
the Maccabees tells of a Ptolemaic persecution during which Jewish
victims were turned into the arena at Alexandria, to be trodden down
by elephants made fierce with the blood of grapes, and of their
deliverance by Divine Providence. Some fiction is certainly mixed with
this recital, but it may well be that during the rule of the stupid
and cruel usurper Ptolemy Physcon (_c._ 120 B.C.E.) the protection of
the royal house was for political reasons removed for a time from the
Jews. Josephus[16] relates that the anniversary of the deliverance was
celebrated as a festival in Egypt. The popular feeling against the