Our most complete source for the period is discredited by the _parti pris_ of the author, the disloyal Josephus. The Roman sources indicate that in the Jewish revolt there was nothing different from the revolts in other parts of the world, revolts to which Romans were accustomed. There was no direct external provocation. There was no one event that seemed to account adequately for an outburst just then. But we find no indication that Romans felt it to be a strange or inexplicable fact for men to rise in order to recover their freedom. The imperial interests demanded that the hopelessness of such rising should be made apparent. It was therefore to the leaders of the community, the aristocracy, that Romans looked to keep in check the ignorant multitude to whom the superiority of Romans in war or civilization might not at all be apparent. The contemptible young rake who, as Agrippa II, continued for some years the empty title of “king of the Jews,” was no doubt at one with the smug Josephus in his sincere conviction of the overwhelming might of the Romans and the folly of attacking it. We cannot sufficiently admire the successful way in which the king concealed his heartfelt pity for the sufferings of the Jews, “since he wished to humble the exalted thoughts they were indulging,” as Josephus naïvely tells us (Wars, II. xvi. 2). However, not mere truckling to the Romans, but sober conviction, would sufficiently account for the pro-Roman leanings of men like Agrippa and Josephus. The long speech put in the king’s mouth (_ibid._ II. xvi. 4) was perhaps never delivered, but it states the feeling of the pro-Roman party and of the Romans themselves eminently well. Both Josephus and Agrippa could hold no other view than that it was some single act or series of acts of the procurator Florus that animated the leaders of the revolt. It seemed to them a “small reason” for engaging in what was conceded even by the most hopeful to be a desperate and frightful war. The burden of the king’s supposed speech, however, in which we are justified in seeing the sentiment of the historian, is this: “Who and what are these Jews that they can refuse to submit to that nation to which all others have submitted?”[320] We find enumerated for us the extent and wealth of the Roman possessions with a fervor of patriotism that might have shamed many a Roman. “Are you richer than the Gauls, more powerful in body than the Germans, wiser than the Greeks, more numerous than all the inhabitants of the earth put together?” he asks, and enforces his question with a detailed account of the enormous numbers of people who in the several provinces are kept in check by a handful of legionaries.