Acts 13:6

Acts 13:6. Unto Paphos. Salamis was at the eastern extremity of Cyprus, Paphos at the western. The apostles had thus passed through the whole length of the island. New Paphos was then the capital and the residence of the governor; it was only a few miles distant from Old Paphos, where the famous temple of Venus stood.

They found a certain sorcerer, a false prophet, a Jew. On the presence of this Jew, who professed to be a magician, with the Roman governor of Cyprus, Howson (St. Paul, chap, 5) writes: ‘All the Greek and Latin literature of the empire, from Horace to Lucian, abounds in proofs of the prevalent credulity of this sceptical period.... The faith of educated Romans was utterly gone. We can hardly wonder when the East was thrown open the land of mystery, the cradle of the earliest religions that the imagination both of the populace and the aristocracy of Rome became fanatically excited, and that they greedily welcomed the most absurd and degrading superstitions. Not only was the metropolis of the empire crowded with hungry Greeks, but Syrian fortune-tellers flocked into all the haunts of public amusement. Athens and Corinth did not now contribute the greatest or the worst part of the dregs of Rome, but, to adopt Juvenal's words, “The (Syrian) Orontes itself flowed into the Tiber.”... Every part of the East contributed its share to the general superstition.... The more remote districts of Asia Minor sent her music and her medicines, Chaldea her Babylonian numbers and her mathematical calculations. To these... we must add one more Asiatic nation, the nation of the Israelites.... The Jewish beggar-woman was the gipsy of the first century, shivering and crowding in the outskirts of the city, and telling fortunes, as Ezekiel of old said, “for handfuls of barley and pieces of bread.”... Not only were the women of Rome drawn aside into this varied fanaticism, but the eminent men of the declining republic and the absolute sovereigns of the early empire were tainted and enslaved by the same superstitions. The great Marius had in his camp a Syrian, probably a Jewish prophetess, by whose divinations he regulated the progress of his campaigns.... Pompey, Crassus, and Caesar, at the close of the republic, when their oracles were silent, sought information from Oriental astrology. No picture in the great Latin satirist (Juvenal) is more powerfully drawn than that in which he shows us the Emperor Tiberius sitting on the rock of Capri with his flock of Chaldeans round him.'