the storming of
Bethar, when Barcochebas perished in the field, ten of the most learned
of the rabbis were taken and put cruelly to death, while Akiba, reserved
to expire last, and torn in pieces with hot pincers, continued to attest
the great principle of the Jewish doctrine, still exclaiming in his
death throes, _Jehovah Erhad_! ("God is one").

The Jews who fell in these their latest combats are counted by hundreds
of thousands, and we may conclude that the suppression of the revolt was
followed by sanguinary proscriptions, by wholesale captivity and general
banishment. The dispersion of the unhappy race, particularly in the
West, was now complete and final. The sacred soil of Jerusalem was
occupied by a Roman colony, which received the name of AElia Capitolina,
with reference to the Emperor who founded it, and to the supreme God of
the pagan mythology, installed on the desecrated summits of Zion and
Moriah.

The fane of Jupiter was erected on the site of the holy Temple, and a
shrine of Venus planted, we are assured, on the very spot hallowed to
Christians by our Lord's crucifixion. But Hadrian had no purpose of
insulting the disciples of Jesus, and this desecration, if the tradition
be true, was probably accidental. A Jewish legend affirms that the
figure of a swine was sculptured, in bitter mockery, over a gate of the
new city. The Jews have retorted with equal scorn that the effigy of the
unclean animal, which represented to their minds every low and bestial
appetite, was a fitting emblem of the colony and its founder, of the
lewd worship of its gods, and the vile propensities of its Emperor.

The fancy of later Christian writers that Hadrian regarded their
coreligionists with special consideration seems founded on
misconception. We hear, indeed, of the graciousness with which he
allowed them, among other sectarians, to defend their usages and expound
their doctrines in his presence; and doubtless his curiosity, if no
worthier feeling, was moved by the fact, which he fully appreciated, of
the interest they excited in certain quarters of the empire. But there
is no evidence that his favor extended further than to the recognition
of their independence of the Jews, from whom they now formally separated
themselves, and the discouragement of the local persecutions to which
they were occasionally subjected.

So far the bigoted hostility of their enemies was overruled at last in
their favor.

In another way they l