Josephus had no conception of the moral weakness, he felt only the invincible power, of the conqueror. He was a Jew, isolated in Rome, estranged from his own people, and not at home in his environment, a favored captive in a splendid court, a member of a subject people living in the halls of the mighty. Did ever situation more strongly conduce to moral servility and mental dependence! It was well nigh impossible for him, even had he possessed the ability, to write an honest and independent history of the Jews. It required some courage and steadfastness to write of the Jews at all. In such circumstances he might well have become an apostate, as his contemporary Tiberius Alexander had done, and it is a tribute to his Jewish feeling that he remained in profession and in heart true to his people, that he was not among those who with the fall of the second Temple exclaimed, "Our hope is perished: we are cut off." He had indeed chosen the easier and less noble way on the destruction of the national life of his people; he preferred the palace of the Palatine with its pomp to the Vineyard at Jabneh with its wise men. While Johanan ben Zakkai was saving Judaism, Josephus was apologizing for it. Yet he too has done some service: he preserved some knowledge of his people and their religion for the Gentiles, and became one of the permanent authorities for that heretical body of Jewish proselytes who in his own day were beginning to mark themselves off as a separate sect, and who carried on to some extent the work of Hellenistic Judaism. Perhaps the true judgment about him is that he was neither noble nor villainous, neither champion nor coward, but one of those mediocre men of talent but of weak character and conflicting impulses struggling against adversity who succumb to the difficulties of the time in which their life is passed, and sacrifice their individuality to comfort. But he wrote something that has lived; and for what he wrote, if not for what he was, he has a niche in the literary treasure house of the Jewish people as well as in the annals of general history. As a man, if he cannot inspire, he may at least stand as a warning against that facile subservience to external powers and that fatal assimilation of foreign thought which at once destroy the individuality of the Jew and deprive him of his full humanity. BIBLIOGRAPHY The best Greek text of Josephus is that edited by Niese (Berlin, 1887-1894), but the editions of Bekker (Leipzig, 1855) and Dindorf (Paris, 1845) are still serviceable. The standard English translation of the complete works is that made by William Whiston, of Cambridge, a century ago. It has been revised in modern times--not very thoroughly--by Shilleto (London, 1890) and by Margoliouth (London, 1909).