Roman Emperors Preserve the Rights of Antioch’s Jews

The Jews also obtained honor from the kings of Asia when they campaigned with them in war. For Seleucus Nicator made them citizens in the cities he built in Asia, and in lower Syria, and in the mother-city itself, Antioch, and gave them privileges equal to those of the Macedonians and Greeks who were the inhabitants, so that this citizenship persists to this very day. A proof of this is that, whereas the Jews do not make use of oil prepared by foreigners, they receive a certain sum of money from the gymnasiarchs as the value of that oil, and when the people of Antioch would have deprived them of this sum during the last war, Mucianus, who was then governor of Syria, preserved that right. And after these events, when the people of Alexandria and of Antioch, at the time that Vespasian and Titus his son governed the habitable earth, asked that these privileges of citizenship be taken away, their request was not fulfilled. In such behavior anyone may discern the equity and generosity of the Romans, especially of Vespasian and Titus, who, although they had suffered greatly in the war against the Jews and were exasperated with them because they did not surrender their weapons to them but continued the war to the very last, still did not take away any of their aforementioned privileges as citizens, but restrained their anger and denied the requests of the Alexandrians and Antiochians, who were a very powerful people. They did not yield to them, either out of favor to them or out of their old grudge at those whose wicked opposition they had subdued in the war, nor would they alter any of the ancient favors granted to the Jews. Rather, they said that those who had raised up arms against them and fought them had suffered punishment already and that it was not just to deprive those who had not committed any offense of the privileges they enjoyed.