Page:Selections. Translated by H. St. J. Thackeray (1919).djvu/25

 representative of Israel's enemies; a grammarian and interpreter of Homer, he is best known as the leader of the embassy to Caligula in 38, which brought accusations against the Jewish residents in Alexandria, and was opposed by a counter-embassy of Alexandrian Jews, headed by Philo. Josephus challenges the extreme antiquity claimed for the Greeks; accounts for the silence of Greek writers with regard to Jewish history; cites evidence for the antiquity of his nation from Egyptian, Phœnician, Babylonian and Greek sources; refutes the malignant and absurd accusations of the anti-Semites; and concludes with an able and eloquent defence of the lawgiver and his code, contrasting his conception of God with the immoral ideas current among the Greeks. The numerous quotations from lost writings give the work a special value. Its date must be later than 93 (the date of Ant.), but whether written before or after the Life is uncertain.

Two further works, as he tells us at the end of Ant., were projected by Josephus, viz.: (1) A summary sketch of the war and the subsequent history of his nation down to 93-4; (2) "A work in four books concerning God and His being and concerning the Laws, why some actions are permitted to us by them and others are forbidden." It is unlikely that either was ever completed. But the work on "Customs and Causes," as he elsewhere calls it, appears, from the mention of the four books and from scattered allusions in the Antiquities to its intended contents, to have already taken shape in his mind, and was perhaps begun. The failure to carry out this scheme is regrettable.

From the repeated occurrence, usually with reference to the Seleucid dynasty or Parthian affairs, of the phrase "as we have shown elsewhere," Josephus might appear