Macrobius on the Jews
Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius is the name of a Roman or Greek (scholars are heavily divided on this issue and more precisely where he was born) grammarian and philosopher who lived in the fifty century AD. We know next to nothing about Macrobius, but his works have been incredibly influential in Western though given that they were some of the most commonly read and cited works by medieval Christian philosophers given their clear and well-presented arguments in favour of neo-Platonism.
However one of the things that Macrobius is well-known for: is being the origin for a particularly cruel anti-jewish joke that was attributed by him to the Emperor Augustus, which the Jewish Virtual Library predictably doesn't quote in full but rather just the particularly offensive punchline. (1)
The full passage from Macrobius' 'Saturnalia' is as follows:
'When Augustus heard that among the boys under two years old in Syria whom Herod the King of the Jews had ordered to be killed, his own son had also been slain, he said, 'It is better to be Herod's pig than his son.'' (2)
In this we can clearly see two things: firstly that Augustus is appalled at what Herod has done and that in order to express his distaste he points out - via implication in the humour - that Herod is a vicious and immoral jewish tyrant (the image of the quintessential Eastern despot in Romano-Greek eyes) willing to murder even his own son in order to maintain his power.
Secondly that although Augustus was by enlarge a friend of the jews having given them privileged status in the Roman Empire: (3) the cause of this friendship had nothing to do with his personal feelings about the jews (which we can see from the somewhat off-colour joke were far from complimentary), but rather to do with the practical politics of running and unifying an empire.
Augustus knew that the jews had only lately been brought under Roman governance (by Pompey the Great following the jewish alliance with the Greek king of Pontus: Mithradates), (4) but would have also been aware that they had made themselves available as administrators and religiously-motivated killers in order form a locally governing jewish clique to powerful empires in the past such as the Egyptians and Seleucids in order to weld together their multiracial and multicultural empires. (5)
Indeed it is reasonable to suggest that Augustus himself was fundamentally hostile to the jews as a people - and he certainly saw the jewish religion as being both irrational and fundamentally stupid (hence Augustus' view of the jews as barbarians who are so superstitious that they won't eat pork but with the qualifier that they could be useful in enabling him to fulfil his own ambitions and goals) - but in his role as the bringer of political order to the Empire - in the wake of the civil wars between the aristocratic families of Rome that so characterised the late Republican period - he decided that the jews could serve as a kind of human adhesive to weld his empire in the East together given their historic service in this role to previous empires.
That he was wrong is neither here nor there as even in the reign of his step-son Tiberius; the jews had proven that they were not interested in a mutually beneficial relationship with Roman authority, but rather were interested in being the only master of the world rather than just a business partner of that master.
In essence it was Augustus' mistaking the jews for a people who he could work with that set of a series of events - notably the creation of the 'God-Fearers' under jewish tutelage in Rome - which ultimately lead to the first jewish revolt by giving the jews the opportunity to understand the workings of Roman politics and administration and also access to the presence of the power brokers (and especially their wives) of Rome who in part became the nucleus for what we may reasonably term the ancient Israel Lobby.
Indeed while Augustus lived long enough to see the failure of his policy (6) he did not live long enough to be able to change it: leaving his successor Tiberius a proverbial Gordian knot to untangle that no Roman Emperor was to successfully slice through until Vespasian.
References
(1) http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0013_0_12980.html
(2) Macrobius Sat. 2:4.11 (Translation of Margaret Williams, 1998, 'The Jews among the Greeks and Romans: A Diaspora Sourcebook', 1st Edition, Duckworth: London, p. 57)
(3) Harry Leon, 1960, 'The Jews of Ancient Rome', 1st Edition, Jewish Publication Society of America: Philadelphia, pp. 10-16; Erich Gruen, 2002, 'Diaspora: Jews amidst Greeks and Romans', 1st Edition , Harvard University Press: Cambridge, pp. 28-29
(4) On this see Adrienne Mayor, 2010, 'The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy', 1st Edition, Princeton University Press: Princeton, p. 331
(5) Williams, Op. Cit., p. 4
(6) Gruen, Op. Cit., pp. 26-27