נגד פלאקוס ו׳Against Flaccus 6
א׳
1[36] There was a certain lunatic named Carabas, whose madness was not of the fierce and savage kind, which is dangerous both to the madmen themselves and those who approach them, but of the easy-going, gentler style. He spent day and night in the streets naked, shunning neither heat nor cold, made game of by the children and the lads who were idling about.
ב׳
2[37] The rioters drove the poor fellow into the gymnasium and set him up on high to be seen of all and put on his head a sheet of byblus spread out wide for a diadem, clothed the rest of his body with a rug for a royal robe, while someone who had noticed a piece of the native papyrus thrown away in the road gave it to him for his sceptre.
ג׳
3[38] And when as in some theatrical farce he had received the insignia of kingship and had been tricked out as a king, young men carrying rods on their shoulders as spearmen stood on either side of him in imitation of a bodyguard. Then others approached him, some pretending to salute him, others to sue for justice, others to consult him on state affairs.
ד׳
4[39] Then from the multitudes standing round him there rang out a tremendous shout hailing him as Marin, which is said to be the name for “lord” in Syria. For they knew that Agrippa was both a Syrian by birth and had a great piece of Syria over which he was king.
ה׳
5[40] When Flaccus heard, or rather saw all this, it was his duty to take and keep the madman in charge, to prevent him from providing an occasion to the railers for insulting their betters and then to punish those who had arrayed him thus, because they had dared both in word and deed both openly and indirectly to insult a king, a friend of Caesar’s, a person who had received Praetorian honours from the Roman Senate. Instead of this not merely did he refrain from chastising them but even shrank from restraining them, thereby giving immunity and free-play to those who displayed evil intentions and hostile feeling by pretending not to see what he saw nor hear what he heard.
ו׳
6[41] When the crowd perceived this, not the peaceful, public-spirited crowd, but the crowd which regularly fills everything with confusion and turmoil, which by its love of meddling, its eager pursuit of the worthless life, its habitual laziness and idling, is a thing that means mischief, they streamed into the theatre at early dawn, and having Flaccus purchased by the miserable price which he crazy for fame and ever-ready to be sold took to the destruction not only of himself but of the public safety, called out with one accord for installing images in the meeting-houses.
ז׳
7[42] What they proposed was a breach of the law entirely novel and unprecedented and knowing this, quick-witted as they are for villainy, they cunningly glozed it by using the name of Caesar as a screen, that name with which no guilty action can lawfully be associated.
ח׳
8[43] What then did the governor of the country do? He knew that both Alexandria and the whole of Egypt had two kinds of inhabitants, us and them, and that there were no less than a million Jews resident in Alexandria and the country from the slope into Libya to the boundaries of Ethiopia; also that this was an attack against them all, and that ancestral customs cannot be disturbed without harm, yet he disregarded all these facts and permitted the installation of the images though there were a host of considerations all tending to caution which he might have set before them either as orders from a ruler or advice from a friend.