pay honors to worthy men, provided they be of another kind,
and inferior to those we pay to God; with which honors we
willingly testify our respect to our emperors, and to the
people of Rome; we also offer perpetual sacrifices for them;
nor do we only offer them every day at the common expenses
of all the Jews, but although we offer no other such sacrifices
out of our common expenses, no, not for our own children,
yet do we this as a peculiar honor to the emperors, and to
them alone, while we do the same to no other person
whomsoever. And let this suffice for an answer in general to
Apion, as to what he says with relation to the Alexandrian
Jews.

7. However, I cannot but admire those other authors who
furnished this man with such his materials; I mean
Possidonius and Apollonius [the son of] Molo, (8) who, while
they accuse us for not worshipping the same gods whom
others worship, they think themselves not guilty of impiety
when they tell lies of us, and frame absurd and reproachful
stories about our temple; whereas it is a most shameful thing
for freemen to forge lies on any occasion, and much more so
to forge them about our temple, which was so famous over
all the world, and was preserved so sacred by us; for Apion
hath the impudence to pretend that" the Jews placed an ass's
head in their holy place;" and he affirms that this was
discovered when Antiochus Epiphanes spoiled our temple,
and found that ass's head there made of gold, and worth a
great deal of money. To this my first answer shall be this,
that had there been any such thing among us, an Egyptian
ought by no means to have thrown it in our teeth, since an