as then seized on by the Romans, and became a captive.
Vespasian also and Titus had me kept under a guard, and forced me to
attend them continually. At the first I was put into bonds, but was
set at liberty afterward, and sent to accompany Titus when he came
from Alexandria to the siege of Jerusalem; during which time there was
nothing done which escaped my knowledge; for what happened in the
Roman camp I saw, and wrote down carefully; and what informations the
deserters brought [out of the city], I was the only man that understood
them. Afterward I got leisure at Rome; and when all my materials were
prepared for that work, I made use of some persons to assist me in
learning the Greek tongue, and by these means I composed the history
of those transactions. And I was so well assured of the truth of what
I related, that I first of all appealed to those that had the supreme
command in that war, Vespasian and Titus, as witnesses for me, for to
them I presented those books first of all, and after them to many of the
Romans who had been in the war. I also sold them to many of our own men
who understood the Greek philosophy; among whom were Julius Archelaus,
Herod [king of Chalcis], a person of great gravity, and king Agrippa
himself, a person that deserved the greatest admiration. Now all these
men bore their testimony to me, that I had the strictest regard to
truth; who yet would not have dissembled the matter, nor been silent, if
I, out of ignorance, or out of favor to any side, either had given false
colors to actions, or omitted any of them.

10. There have been indeed some bad men, who have attempted to
calumniate my history, and took it to be a kind of scholastic
performance for the exercise of young men. A strange sort of accusation
and calumny this! since every one that undertakes to deliver the history
of actions truly ought to know them accurately himself in the first
place, as either having been concerned in them himself, or been informed
of them by such as knew them. Now both these methods of knowledge I may
very properly pretend to in the composition of both my works; for, as I
said, I have translated the Antiquities out of our sacred books; which I
easily could do, since I was a priest by my birth, and have studied that
philosophy which is contained in those writings: and for the History
of the War, I wrote it as having been an actor myself in many of its
transactions, an eye-witness in the greatest part of the r