irony. He does not shrink from a piece of dubious special pleading in his assertion—which became a commonplace with Christian writers—that only bad emperors had oppressed the Church: he even claims that Marcus Aurelius favoured Christians; a claim which would have seemed curious to Justin, and to Pothinus and his fellow martyrs in Gaul. Alexandria was the chief intellectual centre of the Hellenistic world; it was also the metropolis of Greek-speaking Jewry and the headquarters