My Family and Early Years

My family is not an obscure one; it descends all the way from priests. Different peoples ground nobility on different things, and among us a share in the priesthood is the proof of a distinguished family. I come not only from a priestly family in general, but from the first of the twenty-four courses — and there is a great difference even between these — and within that course from its foremost clan. On my mother’s side I am also of royal blood, for she was descended from the sons of Asamoneus, who for a very long time were both high priests and kings of our nation. [a]

I will set out my descent in order. My great-grandfather was Simon, surnamed Psellus. He lived at the time when the son of Simon the high priest held the high priesthood — the first high priest to be named Hyrcanus. This Simon Psellus had nine sons, one of whom was Matthias, known as the son of Ephaeus. He married the daughter of Jonathan the high priest, the first of the sons of Asamoneus to become high priest and the brother of Simon the high priest. In the first year of Hyrcanus’s rule a son was born to him, Matthias, surnamed Curtus. His son Joseph was born in the ninth year of Alexandra’s reign, and Joseph’s son Matthias in the tenth year of the reign of Archelaus. I was born to Matthias in the first year of the reign of Gaius Caesar. I have three sons: Hyrcanus, the eldest, was born in the fourth year of the reign of Vespasian Caesar, Justus in the seventh, and Agrippa in the ninth. That is my family’s line of descent as I found it written in the public records, and I set it down here with a farewell to those who try to slander me.

My father Matthias was distinguished not only for his noble birth; he was even more praised for his righteousness, and he was one of the best-known men in Jerusalem, the greatest of our cities. I was educated together with my brother Matthias, who was my full brother, by both father and mother. I made great progress in learning and was thought to excel in memory and understanding. While I was still a boy, about fourteen years old, everyone praised me for my love of letters, and the high priests and the leading men of the city used to come to me constantly to learn from me some point of our laws more exactly. [e]

When I was about sixteen, I decided to gain experience of the sects among us. There are three of them — the first that of the Pharisees, the second that of the Sadducees, and the third that of the Essenes, as I have often said — and I thought that if I came to know them all I would be able to choose the best. So I put myself through a hard discipline, endured much toil, and passed through all three. Even then I did not think that experience enough. I heard that a man named Bannus lived in the wilderness, wore clothing that came from trees, ate food that grew by itself, and bathed often in cold water, day and night, for purity; and I became his devoted follower. I stayed with him three years, and when I had fulfilled my desire I returned to the city. I was now nineteen, and I began to take part in public life as a follower of the sect of the Pharisees, which is close to the one the Greeks call the Stoic.

After my twenty-sixth year it fell to me to go up to Rome, for the following reason. At the time when Felix was procurator of Judea, he had put in chains certain priests I knew, men of excellent character, on a small and trivial charge, and sent them to Rome to answer for themselves before Caesar. I wanted to find some way to save them, all the more because I had learned that even in their misfortune they had not forgotten their piety toward God, but were living on figs and nuts. So I came to Rome, after great dangers at sea. Our ship foundered in the middle of the Adriatic, and about six hundred of us swam all night. At daybreak, by God’s providence, a ship from Cyrene came into sight, and I and some others, about eighty in all, got ahead of the rest and were taken aboard. [h]

Having come safely to Dicaearchia, which the Italians call Puteoli, I became a friend of Aliturus, a mime actor who was a great favorite of Nero and a Jew by birth. Through him I was introduced to Poppaea, Caesar’s wife, and I lost no time in asking her to have the priests set free. Besides this favor I received large gifts from Poppaea, and then I returned home.

There I found the beginnings of revolution already under way, and many people highly elated at the prospect of revolt from the Romans. I tried to restrain the agitators and urged them to change their minds. I told them to set before their eyes the people they would be fighting against, and to remember that they were inferior to the Romans not only in experience of war but in good fortune. I begged them not to bring the risk of the worst disasters on their country, their families and themselves, rashly and with complete folly. I said this, and pressed it on them earnestly, to turn them from it, because I foresaw that the war would end most disastrously for us. But I could not persuade them: the madness of desperate men was far too strong.

I then became afraid that by saying these things so often I would bring hatred and suspicion on myself, as though I sided with the enemy, and would run the risk of being seized and killed by them — for they already held the Antonia, which was the fortress. So I withdrew into the inner temple. After Menahem and the leaders of his band of robbers had been killed, I slipped out of the temple and stayed again with the high priests and the leading Pharisees. No small fear held us. We saw the people in arms; we ourselves did not know what to do and could not stop the revolutionaries; and the danger stood plainly before us. So we said that we agreed with their views, but we advised them to hold back and let the enemy make the attack, so that they might be believed to have taken up arms justly, in self-defense. We did this in the hope that Cestius would soon come up with a large force and put an end to the revolt. [l]

He came and fought a battle, but he was defeated, and many of those with him fell. Cestius’s defeat became the disaster of our whole nation. Those who were eager for war were all the more elated by it and hoped to conquer the Romans completely, and another cause of the same kind was added. The inhabitants of the surrounding cities of Syria seized the Jews who lived among them, with their wives and children, and killed them, though they had no charge whatever to bring against them; for those Jews had neither planned any revolt from the Romans nor shown any hostility or treachery toward the Syrians themselves. [n]

The people of Scythopolis acted most impiously and lawlessly of all. When Jews from outside attacked them as enemies, they forced the Jews living among them to take up arms against their own people, which is forbidden to us. With their help they engaged the attackers and defeated them. But once they had won, they forgot the pledges they owed their fellow residents and allies and slaughtered them all — many tens of thousands of them. The Jews who lived in Damascus suffered the same. I have given a more exact account of these things in my books on the Jewish War; I mention them here only because I want to show my readers that the Jews did not choose the war with the Romans, but were for the most part forced into it.

So, after Cestius had been defeated, as I have said, the leading men of Jerusalem saw that the robbers and revolutionaries had plenty of arms, and they were afraid that they themselves, being unarmed, would fall into the hands of their enemies — as in fact happened later. They had also learned that not all of Galilee had yet revolted from the Romans, but that part of it was still quiet. So they sent me and two other priests, men of excellent character, Joazar and Judas, to persuade the wicked to lay down their arms, and to teach them that it was better for the arms to be kept by the most capable men of the nation. The leaders’ decision was to keep the arms always ready for the future, but to wait and see what the Romans would do.

With these instructions I came into Galilee. I found the people of Sepphoris in no small anxiety for their city, because the Galileans had decided to plunder it on account of their friendship with the Romans, and because they had offered their right hands and their pledge to Cestius Gallus, the governor of Syria. I freed them all from their fear. I persuaded the crowds on their behalf, and allowed them to send messages as often as they liked to their own people who were held as hostages by Cestius at Dora — Dora is a city of Phoenicia. But I found that the people of Tiberias had already taken up arms, for the following reason. [p]