e smoothness of their periods; because they look upon this sort of
accomplishment as common, not only to all sorts of free-men, but to
as many of the servants as please to learn them. But they give him the
testimony of being a wise man who is fully acquainted with our laws, and
is able to interpret their meaning; on which account, as there have been
many who have done their endeavors with great patience to obtain this
learning, there have yet hardly been so many as two or three that have
succeeded therein, who were immediately well rewarded for their pains.

3. And now it will not be perhaps an invidious thing, if I treat briefly
of my own family, and of the actions of my own life [28] while there
are still living such as can either prove what I say to be false, or can
attest that it is true; with which accounts I shall put an end to these
Antiquities, which are contained in twenty books, and sixty thousand
verses. And if God permit me, I will briefly run over this war [29], and
to add what befell them further to that very day, the 13th of Domitian,
or A.D. 03, is not, that I have observed, taken distinct notice of by
any one; nor do we ever again, with what befell us therein to this very
day, which is the thirteenth year of the reign of Caesar Domitian, and
the fifty-sixth year of my own life. I have also an intention to write
three books concerning our Jewish opinions about God and his essence,
and about our laws; why, according to them, some things are permitted us
to do, and others are prohibited.

*****

PREFACE FOOTNOTES

[1] This preface of Josephus is excellent in its kind, and highly worthy
the repeated perusal of the reader, before he set about the perusal of
the work itself.

[2]That is, all the Gentiles, both Greeks and Romans.

[3] We may seasonably note here, that Josephus wrote his Seven Books of
the Jewish War long before he wrote these his Antiquities. Those books
of the War were published about A.D. 75, and these Antiquities, A. D.
93, about eighteen years later.

[4] This Epaphroditus was certainly alive in the third year of Trajan,
A.D. 100. See the note on the First Book Against Apion, sect. 1. Who he
was we do not know; for as to Epaphroditus, the freedman of Nero, and
afterwards Domitian's secretary, who was put to death by Domitian in the
14th or 15th year of his reign, he could not be alive in the third of
Trajan.

[5] Josephus here plainly alludes to the famous Greek proverb,