come anear the castle than a terrible great monster of a dragon entirely, the wildest ever Jack seen or heard tell of, came out from the castle and he opened his mouth as wide as the world and gave a roar that shook the nails on the toes . . . and rattled the eyes in the sockets of the great grey eagle on top of Croagh-pathrick mountain at home in Ireland . . . and he fell on Jack, and Jack fell on him, and he to it, and Jack to it, and if the fight was wild and terrible the first two days, it was ten times wilder and terribler this day." Kenneth Graham also has a most delectable dragon. I know of but one dragon with claims to serious appeal in modern literature. That one is Lord Dunsany's Tharagaverung. He is a dragon crocodile with back of steel and underparts of iron and a steel strip, Sacnoth, along his back. In only one way may he be slain and that is by starving. His nose is of lead, not to be cut with sword, for a sword would merely shear through to the impenetrable bronze beneath. But to be struck upon his nose causes him intolerable anguish, so that if, by beating upon it with a stick for three days, he be kept from food, he must die. Thus briefly to describe him does not do him justice—he sounds like mere merry nonsense. As a matter of fact he is much more. Plainly in line from the apocalyptic monsters of Scripture, in him whimsical humor and strange beauty are wedded through sheer power of fantasy and a use of symbolic suggestion that no more needs a key than does the evocative enchantment of a piece of fine music.

Such, then, briefly sketched, is the story of the dragon. Such is his end in jokes and laughter. Imaged in art, he can remain an appealing convention, or, in the far East, much more than that-grotesque, bizarre, magnificent in form and color. In literature, he has come to be turned to caricature, parody, foolery. Strange to think he was once terrible, a reality that stilled men's hearts with dread. After all, there is only one way in which old beliefs can really live on, and that is by the meaning, the poetry, the beauty, there is in them. Poetry he had in him, still may have in him, but only in a fixed relation, a fixed setting. Terror and horror are proper to

poetry surely, but they cannot inhere in forms that have grown to seem too bizarre and monstrous. The centaur, a shape of beauty and strength, is measurably free from the limitations of time. The goat-god, Pan, once a bestial and hideous deity that might well inspire the Panic terror, through the elements of beauty that grew into him and the purging of that which was gross, has had, in our day, a score of poetic incarnations, not forgetful of his ancient beauty and his fear. He has become a symbol of nature, of a pagan joy in life, even, in a notable essay of Clemenceau's, of natural science as opposed to superstition. But the dragon, once a haunting shape, potent for evil, a phantom of the mind, then strangely composite in varied forms, for all his parade of natural and supernatural terrors, had no vital, abiding meaning that time could save. He remains, today, static, a quaint archaism, a trite metaphor, a toy for trifling. One doubts if even genius could find for him, today, in his proper self, an avatar.

FLAVIUS JOSEPHUS THE JEWISH HISTORIAN

BY JAMES A. MONTGOMERY

Professor of Hebrew and Aramaic

There are three factors in a production of historical art which, if found in combination, make it of supreme interest. First, there is the worth of the field studied, if this be to any degree adequately honored by the historian. Secondly, there is the representative character of the historian, whether he be qualified to speak for his people and age. This element may indeed transcend the first in its value of reflecting the genius of the race or the spirit of the times. And thirdly, there is the personal element, in case the author is well known, and especially if he makes himself known through the course of his writing. This factor makes the history an autobiography, probably the most important kind of history. It enables us not merely to hear the story told but to know the story teller, so that knowing him we can the better criticize his art, while, what is still more impressive, the charm of a human life resuscitates the bones of a buried history.

All these factors are contained in the historical work of Flavius Josephus, even if they have not always been diagnosed. His worth as a historian has been amply studied, appreciated or depreciated. In matter of fact he is our sole continuous authority for the two most momentous centuries of Judaism. But even if his worth is discounted, he stands forth as the one orthodox Jew of the first Christian century whose life we know at length. He was a foremost actor in the stirring and tragic times which his pen describes. He had the learning and the traditions of his race and religion at his command. He is the one Jew who attempted such a monumental work as he accomplished in the field of history until we reach the nineteenth century. And he wrote it when he saw the curtain fall upon

Israel's greatest tragedy. A man in his personality, a diplomatist and soldier of distinction, a scholar and a student of Jewish learning and a dilettante of the world's literature, a representative of his people's religious genius, he was uniquely qualified to speak the mind of that people at the moment it was passing into the age when it lost its historic consciousness. Joseph the son of Matthias (his cognomen would then be Ben Mattai) was born in Jerusalem A. D. 37, the year in which Saul of Tarsus became a Christian. He was of priestly stock, of the first order, and was descended through marriage from John Hyrcanus, the great Hasmonæan king, and no little proud was he of his high lineage. He had a thorough Rabbinic learning, and boasts conceitedly how when a young man his advice on matters of the Law was sought by the doctors. Between the years of sixteen and nineteen he cultivated the delights of religious experience and tried out the different schools of his religion, the Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes, and also spent a novitiate with an ascetic hermit. As a result of this comparative quest he became a convinced Pharisee, although his early experiences enabled him always to look with sympathy and impartiality upon the varieties of Judaism. At twenty-six he went on a semi-diplomatic voyage to Rome to obtain the release of a captive cousin priest, experiencing shipwreck on the way in the Adriatic Sea, gained the favor of the notorious Poppæa, wife of Nero, the patroness of the Jews and returned home successful. In 66 the Jewish revolt broke out, and, outraged by the indignities to which the Jews had long been subjected by profligate and inhuman governors, he appears to have thrown himself wholeheartedly into the cause. He was made the general of the Jewish forces in Galilee, and while we have only his word for it, there is no reason to doubt that he acted with both prudence and great courage. He had to contend not only with the wellnigh invincible Romans but also with the miserable factions and jealousies among his own people, and apparently acquitted himself with success. In the following year the city Jotopata, which he was defending, fell after a gruelling siege and he escaped from a suicide compact

with a few survivors hidden with him in a cave only by some astute practice on his part. He finally surrendered himself to the Romans, and was brought before Vespasian, whose favor he gained by prophesying to him his coming imperium. Upon its accomplishment two years later the new emperor gave him his liberty. In gratitude for the boon Joseph assumed the family name of the new dynasty, becoming Flavius just as Saul assumed the name of his patron Paul. He went off with Vespasian to Alexandria, but was summoned back to Palestine by the emperor's son Titus, who was proceeding to invest the city of Jerusalem. He doubtless desired to use Josephus as a diplomatic agent with the rebels, for he was fully aware of the military job before him. Josephus was present throughout at the siege, did what was in his power in counsel to the defenders to surrender, and witnessed its awful fall. Of this soulracking scene Josephus is our sole witness, for the tragedy entered into his soul, while the mute but eloquent witness to it in stone is the Arch of Titus in Rome. He then went with Titus to Rome, was assigned quarters in one of the imperial palaces by Vespasian, receiving also Roman citizenship, a pension, and estates in Palestine. Here he lived in ease and occupied with literary labors until his death, which occurred early in the second century. He was married four times and two of his wives he divorced. His life, if not a long one, was certainly full of variety and adventure.

Such a wealth of biographical detail, as suggested by this sketch, displays a man conscious of his own importance. He was indeed an egotist by nature, and this characteristic was only aggravated by the experiences he had passed through, as a born aristocrat, a scholar of the rabbis, a political and military leader, a friend of kings, a successful bookwriterwhich more than aught else tends to conceit. But if he is garrulous about himself, it all shows us the man, and we must remember that conceit was almost the necessary characteristic of anybody who would be somebody in the early Empire. One critic has suggested that Josephus must have been a man of commanding presence and evident ability to explain the favor