Against Flaccus (21-25)

All these men, having devised a most grievous design against the Jews, proceeded to put it in execution, and coming privately to Flaccus said to him,

"All your hope from the child of Tiberius Nero has now perished, and that which was your second best prospect, your companion Macro, is gone too, and you have no chance of favour with the emperor, therefore we must find another advocate, by whom Caius may be made propitious to us,

and that advocate is the city of Alexandria, which all the family of Augustus has honoured from the very beginning, and our present master above all the rest; and it will be a sufficient mediator in our behalf, if it can obtain one

Now though upon this he ought to have rejected and driven away the speakers as workers of revolution and common enemies, he agrees on the contrary to what they say, and at first he made his designs against the Jews less evident, only abstaining from listening to causes brought before his tribunal with impartiality and equity, and inclining more to one side than to the other, and not allowing to both sides an equal freedom of speech; but whenever any Jew came before him he showed his aversion to him, and departed from his habitual affability in their case; but afterwards he exhibited his hostility to them in a more conspicuous manner.

Moreover, some occurrences of the following description increased that folly and insolence of his which was derived from instruction rather than from nature. Caius Caesar gave Agrippa, the grandson of Herod the king, the third part of his paternal inheritance as a sovereignty, which Philip the tetrarch, who was his uncle on his father’s side, had previously enjoyed.