Page:Selections. Translated by H. St. J. Thackeray (1919).djvu/31

 very serious charge against the writer of Ant. That work is, on the whole, a skilful compilation, its value varying with that of the authorities consulted, while the criticisms passed on some of them show that these were not always used without discrimination. He professes in several passages to have a high ideal of a historian's duty, and, speaking generally, one may allow that he so far comes up to it as to deserve a fairly high, if not a foremost, place among the historians of antiquity. As the historian of the Jewish War, Josephus comes before us with the highest credentials. Holding command in Galilee in its opening stages and behind the Roman lines throughout the siege of Jerusalem, he was exceptionally well qualified for this task, and must have relied mainly on his own recollections and the notes which he made at the time (c. Ap. I. 49). Deserters kept him informed of events within the city (ib.). He seems also to have had access to the emperor's memoirs (Life 358). He submitted the books as they were finished to Herod Agrippa and the completed work to Vespasian and Titus, and from them and others received testimonials to his accuracy (c. Ap. I. 50 ff., Life 361 ff.). We may therefore unhesitatingly accept the general trustworthiness of his account. Exception should, perhaps, be made for a tendency to exaggeration, e. g. in the matter of numbers, and for some, though not a marked, bias for extolling the achievements and clemency of the Roman generals. His statement that Titus desired to spare the Temple runs counter to that of another historian (Sulpicius Severus), who asserts that the destruction received his sanction; the Jewish historian was, at any rate, in a better position to know the facts. Besides the authorities whom he names in the Antiqui-*