36 Cicero, Pro Flacco. Flaccus appears to have been acquitted.
35In 88 B.C. Mithridates raided the island of Cos and seized eight hundred talents which the Jews of proconsular Asia had deposited there for safety (together with money which Cleopatra III of Egypt had deposited there in 102 B.C.). Josephus, to whom we owe this information (Ant. 14.112-13), derives it from Strabo, but Strabo speaks generally of “the Jews.” Josephus infers (probably rightly) that it was the Jews of Asia, and adds that the money was “God’s”—i.e., that it was the yearly Jerusalem temple tax. But eight hundred talents would be the equivalent of nearly five million half-shekels: if the figure is accurate, it must have included much more than the proceeds of the half-shekel tax for one year.
36Cicero, Pro Flacco. Flaccus appears to have been acquitted.
37Pro Flacco 68. See A. J. Marshall, “Flaccus and the Jews of Asia (Cicero, Pro Flacco 28.67-69),” Phoenix 29 (1975), 139-54.