To appraise him fairly is difficult. He has few of the qualities, either personal or literary, that attract sympathy and many of the defects that repel. He is at once vain and obsequious, servile and spiteful, professing candor and practising adulation, prolix and prosaic. As a general he proved himself a traitor; as apologist of the Jews, a function which he asserted for himself, he marred by a lack of independence the service which he sought to render his people. In his account of their past he was often false to their fundamental ideas of God and history. Whether he was really under the influence of the debased Greco-Roman culture of the day, which consigned mankind to the dominion of fatality, or whether he deliberately masked his own standpoint to please his audience, he presented the history of the Hebrew nationality in the light of ideas of fate strange to it. He has perpetuated a false picture of the Zealots, whose avowed enemy he was, and he reveals an inadequate understanding of the deeper ideas and deeper principles of the Pharisees, whose champion he professed to be. Generally, in dealing with the struggle against Rome, his dominating desire to justify his own submission and please the Romans led him to distort the facts, and rendered him blind to the real heroism of his countrymen. The client in him prevails over the historian: we can never be sure whether he is expressing his own opinion or only what he conceives will be pleasing to his patrons and masters. This dependence affects his presentation of Judaism as well as of the Jewish people. He dissembled his theological opinions in his larger historical works, and it is only in his last apologetic composition that he asserts confidently a Jewish point of view.