Josephus escaped from the general massacre at Jotapata with much difficulty. His life was threatened not only by the Roman soldiers who found him shut up in a cave and wished to have his life, but also by the forty other inmates of the cave who did not approve of Josephus’ desire to surrender. Josephus had recourse to the pious subterfuge of a divine vision ordering him to surrender to the Romans. But his companions in misery treated him as a contemptible coward, and he was forced to prove his physical valour by holding them all at bay. He finally suggested that they draw lots and kill each other successively. By some strange circumstance, which Josephus does not explain, the Jews in the cave bravely met death at the hands of one another until only two survived, of whom Josephus was one. Josephus easily persuaded this man to resign the privilege of martyrdom and join him in surrendering to the Romans. Josephus is our only authority for the story and he does not shine in particular brilliance even according to his own explanation. Dean Milman heaps contempt upon him for the hypocrisy and trickery of his attitude in this matter, but in the first place it would have been a profitless folly to yield to the fanaticism of his comrades, and in the second place his death would have deprived us of his invaluable history. And even Milman, while confessing the inconsistency of Josephus’ character, admits the glory of his generalship in spite of his lack of previous military instruction, confesses that he held the Roman arms in check for two months on the very frontier of an “insignificant province,” and takes the siege of Jotapata as a type of “the nature of the conflict of the Jews with the Roman supremacy, against which, in the wide circle of the empire, they were the last desperate combatants for freedom.” Josephus was treated as a traitor by the Jews, even as Thucydides had been exiled by the Greeks, but he strove hard to mitigate the horrible extremes to which Roman cruelty was driven by the superb courage of the doomed nation.