This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
View text chunked by:
[53]
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 rest, and was not unacquainted with any thing whatsoever that
was either said or done in it. How impudent then must those deserve to
be esteemed that undertake to contradict me about the true state of those
affairs! who, although they pretend to have made use of both the emperors'
own memoirs, yet could not they he acquainted with our affairs who fought
against them.
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.