Josephus did not enjoy the advantage of a full chronicle to guide him much beyond the death of Herod. Nicholas died, or ceased to write, in the reign of Antipater, who succeeded his father. Apparently he had no successor who devoted himself to recording the affairs of the Jewish court. Hence, though the events of the troubled beginning of Antipater's reign are dealt with at the same length as those of Herod, and we have a vivid story of the Jewish embassy that went to Rome to petition for the deposition of the king, the history afterwards becomes fragmentary. Such as it is, it manifests a Roman flavor. The nationalists are termed robbers, and the pseudo-Messiahs are branded as self-seeking impostors.[1] After an enumeration of various pretenders that sought to make themselves independent rulers, there is a sudden jump from the first to the tenth year of Archelaus, who was accused of barbarous and tyrannical practices and banished by the Roman Emperor to Gaul. His kingdom was then added to the province of Syria. Josephus dwells on the story of two dreams which occurred to the king and his wife Glaphyra, and justifies himself because his discourse is concerning kings, and also because of the advantage to be drawn from it for the assurance both of the immortality of the soul and the Providence of God in human affairs. "And if anybody does not believe such stories, let him keep his own opinion, but let him not stand in the way of another who finds in them an encouragement to virtue." [Footnote 1: Ant. XVII. xiii. 2.] The last three books of the _Antiquities_ reveal the weaknesses of Josephus as an historian: his disregard of accuracy, his tendency to exaggeration, his lack of proportion, and his mental subservience. He had no longer either the Scriptures or a Greek chronicler to guide him. He depended in large part for his material on oral sources and scattered memoirs, and he is not very successful in eking it out so as to produce the semblance of a connected narrative. His chapters are in part a miscellany of notes, and the construction is clumsy. The writer confesses that he was weary of his task, but felt impelled to wind it up. Yet, just because we are so ignorant of the events of Jewish history at the period, and because the period itself is so critical and momentous, these books (xviii-xx) are among the most important which he has left, and on the whole they deal rather more closely than their predecessors with the affairs of the Jewish people. The palace intrigues do not fill the stage so exclusively, and some of the digressions carry us into byways of Jewish history.