If in the _Wars_ Josephus assumes the air of a scientific historian, in the _Antiquities_ he is more openly the apologist. Despite his professions in the preface of the earlier work, he seems to have found it necessary or expedient to give to Greco-Roman society a fresh account of the ancestry and the early history of his people and of the constitution of their government. The Roman _Archaeologia_ of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who fifty years earlier had written in twenty books the early events of Rome, probably suggested the division and the name of the work. He issued it after the death of his protector, in the thirteenth year of the reign of Domitian and in the fifty-sixth year of his own life.[1] In the preface, inconsistently with the statement in the earlier work, he declares that he intended from the beginning to write this apology of his people, but was deterred for a time by the magnitude of the labor of translating the history into an unaccustomed tongue. He ascribes the impulse to carry out the task to the encouragement of his patron Epaphroditus and of his other friends at Rome. It probably came also from his circumstances at Rome and the necessity of refuting calumnies made against him on account of his race and religion. And with all his weaknesses and failings he was not lacking in a feeling of national pride, which must have moved him to defend his people. [Footnote 1: Ant. XX. xi. 3.] Following on the destruction of Jerusalem, a passion of mixed hatred and contempt against the Jews moved the Roman nobility and the Roman masses. The Flavian court, representing the middle classes, by no means shared the feeling, and indeed the infatuation of Titus for the Jewish princess Berenice, the sister of Agrippa, was one of the scandals that most stirred the anger of the Romans. But the nobles hated those who had obstinately fought against the Roman armies for four years, and scorned those whose God had not saved them from ruin. At the same time Jewish persistence after defeat and the continuance of Jewish missionary activity offended the majesty of Rome, which, though tolerant of foreign religious ideas, was accustomed not merely to the physical submission of her enemies, but to their cultural and intellectual abasement. The hatred and scorn were fanned by a tribe of scribblers, who heaped distortion on the history and practices of the Jewish people. On the other hand, the proselytes to Judaism, "the fearers of God," who accepted part of its teaching--and in the utter collapse of pagan religion and morality they were many--desired to know something of the past grandeur of the nation, and doubtless were anxious to justify themselves to those who regarded their adoption of Jewish customs as an utter degradation. For those who mocked at him as a renegade member of a wretched people, which consisted of the scum of the earth, which harbored all kinds of low superstition, and which fostered inhumanity