Owing to this popularity, we have abundant manuscripts of Josephus. The oldest of the Latin is as early as the sixth century; the Greek date from the tenth century and later. Niese, the most authoritative editor of Josephus in modern times, thinks that our manuscript families go back to one archetype of the second century in the epoch of the Antonines. The earliest printed copy like the earliest manuscript of his work contains the Latin version, being a part of the _Antiquities_, which was issued in 1470 at Augsburg. The whole corpus was printed in 1499, and, after a number of Latin editions, the first Greek edition was published at Basel by Arten, in 1544, together with the Fourth Book of the Maccabees, which was ascribed to the historian. In the days of vast but undiscriminating scholarship that followed the Renaissance, Josephus still enjoyed a great repute, and Scaliger, prince of polymaths, regarded him as superior to any pagan historian. The great Dutch scholar Havercamp made a special study of the manuscripts, and produced, in 1726, a repertory of everything discovered about his author. A little later Whiston, professor of mathematics at Cambridge, published an English translation of all the works, which is still serviceable, but not critical, together with some dissertations, which are neither serviceable nor critical. Later translations into English and almost every other language were made, but the greatest work of modern times on Josephus is the edition of Niese. Lastly, it may be mentioned that we have a Slavonic version, which goes back to the eighth or the ninth century, and a Syriac version of the sixth book of the _Wars_, which is included, immediately after the Fourth Book of the Maccabees, in a manuscript of the Syriac version of the Bible dating from the sixth century, and is entitled the Fifth Book of the Maccabees. It has been suggested that the Syriac was based on the work which Josephus published in Aramaic before he wrote the Greek; but Professor Noeldeke has shown that the theory is not probable, since the translator clearly used the Greek text.[1] Somewhat late in the day a Hebrew translation of the books _Against Apion_, which were regarded as the most Jewish part of his work, was made in the Middle Ages, and printed, together with Abraham Zacuto's Yuhasin, at Constantinople, in 1506, by Samuel Shullam. The Hebrew translation is very free, and is marred by several large omissions. It was very probably made with the help of the Latin version. [Footnote 1: Literarisches Centralblatt, 1880, no. 20, p. 881.]