[208]
But wonderful it was what a dream I saw that very night; for when
I had betaken myself to my bed, as grieved and disturbed at the news that
had been written to me, it seemed to me, that a certain person stood by
me, 1
and said, "O Josephus! leave off to afflict thy soul, and put away
all fear; for what now grieves thee will render thee very considerable,
and in all respects most happy; for thou shalt get over not only these
difficulties, but many others, with great success. However, be not cast
down, but remember that thou art to fight with the Romans." When I
had seen this dream, I got up with an intention of going down to the plain.
Now, when the whole multitude of the Galileans, among whom were the women
and children, saw me, they threw themselves down upon their faces, and,
with tears in their eyes, besought me not to leave them exposed to their
enemies, nor to go away and permit their country to be injured by them.
But when I did not comply, with their entreaties, they compelled me to
take an oath, that I would stay with them: they also cast abundance of
reproaches upon the people of Jerusalem, that they would not let their
country enjoy peace.
1 This I take to be the first of Josephus's remarkable or divine dreams, which were predictive of the great things that afterwards came to pass; of which see more in the note on Antiq. B. III. ch. 8. sect. 9. The other is in the War, B. III. ch. 8. sect. 3, 9.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.