_hasta pura_, a
military decoration. Orelli and Henzen, _Inscr. Lat._, Nos. 3574,
6852, etc. _Pilatus_ is, on this hypothesis, a word of the same form
as _Torquatus_.]

[Footnote 2: Philo, _Leg. ad Caium_, Sec. 38.]

Jerusalem, the centre of a great national fermentation, was a very
seditious city, and an insupportable abode for a foreigner. The
enthusiasts pretended that it was a fixed design of the new procurator
to abolish the Jewish law.[1] Their narrow fanaticism, and their
religious hatreds, disgusted that broad sentiment of justice and civil
government which the humblest Roman carried everywhere with him. All
the acts of Pilate which are known to us, show him to have been a good
administrator.[2] In the earlier period of the exercise of his office,
he had difficulties with those subject to him which he had solved in a
very brutal manner; but it seems that essentially he was right. The
Jews must have appeared to him a people behind the age; he doubtless
judged them as a liberal prefect formerly judged the Bas-Bretons, who
rebelled for such trifling matters as a new road, or the establishment
of a school. In his best projects for the good of the country, notably
in those relating to public works, he had encountered an impassable
obstacle in the Law. The Law restricted life to such a degree that it
opposed all change, and all amelioration. The Roman structures, even
the most useful ones, were objects of great antipathy on the part of
zealous Jews.[3] Two votive escutcheons with inscriptions, which he
had set up at his residence near the sacred precincts, provoked a
still more violent storm.[4] Pilate at first cared little for these
susceptibilities; and he was soon involved in sanguinary suppressions
of revolt,[5] which afterward ended in his removal.[6] The experience
of so many conflicts had rendered him very prudent in his relations
with this intractable people, which avenged itself upon its governors
by compelling them to use toward it hateful severities. The procurator
saw himself, with extreme displeasure, led to play a cruel part in
this new affair, for the sake of a law he hated.[7] He knew that
religious fanaticism, when it has obtained the sanction of civil
governments to some act of violence, is afterward the first to throw
the responsibility upon the government, and almost accuses them of
being the author of it. Supreme injustice; for the true culprit is, in
such cases, the instigator!

[Footnote 1: