Against Apion

by Flavius Josephus

Against Apion is the last surviving work of Flavius Josephus, the Jewish historian who wrote in Rome at the end of the first century. Addressing his patron Epaphroditus, he defends the antiquity of the Jewish people against Greek writers who ignored or slandered them, citing Egyptian, Phoenician, Chaldean and Greek historians, among them Manetho, to prove that his nation was far older than its critics allowed. In the second book he refutes the accusations of the Alexandrian scholar Apion and others, then sets out the laws of Moses as a constitution superior to those of the Greeks. This is William Whiston's eighteenth-century translation, long the standard English Josephus. The full text is available to read online in your browser on Vinteuil, and the first chapter is free.