Page:Selections. Translated by H. St. J. Thackeray (1919).djvu/30

 out of a popular movement which had long been gathering force, with which he did not sympathize, which he could not stem and vainly tried to direct, realizing from the first the hopelessness of combating the Roman legions, and anxious to find some means of compromise by which to save his country from ruin, he nevertheless accepted the post with which he was entrusted, and threw himself into the task of organizing, to the best of his ability, the defences of Galilee, so long as resistance was possible; while he devoted the energies of his later life, when his position might have tempted him to disown his nation, to writing its history and defending his countrymen against the slanders of a malignant world.

On the position of Josephus as a historian, widely different opinions have been held, from that of Jerome who extolled him as a "Greek Livy," to the criticisms of some modern writers who have accused him of bias and gross misrepresentation.

The apologetic nature of the Antiquities is self-evident. The author's purpose was to represent his maligned nation in the best light to Greek readers, "to break down, if possible, the wall of partition that had hitherto secluded the Hebrew race from the communion and cut them off from the sympathies of mankind," to "plead the cause of the injured Jew at the bar of the world" (Traill). This object has occasioned the suppression of some (though not all) of the less creditable incidents in the Biblical narrative. With a view to attractiveness the narrative is diversified by legendary additions culled from various sources, while occasionally, it must be admitted, the author seems to have added minor details of his own invention (see below on the imitation of Thucydides). Granted some blemishes of this kind, there remains no