How terrible the tragedy became! Of my friends, one in three fell to the tyrant: Antigonus dragged down by the rumor of a fishmonger; Barnabas slain because he held land the king wanted; Shmuel, the uncle of my wife and a trusted Jew, beheaded on the accusation of a drunken Greek sailor; Leonidas, Marcus and Abraham, all dead for no reason that I know; the poet Lycidas and the songwriter Marcellus slain as members of a conspiracy whose outlines were not defined; Isaac and Yokneam dead merely because they owned silver. I could continue but the roll call is meaningless, for any family in Judaea
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