Domitian, [A.D. 93,] and after that wrote the Memoirs of his own
Life, as an appendix to the books of Antiquities, and at last his
two books against Apion, and yet dedicated all those writings to
Epaphroditus; he can hardly be that Epaphroditus who was formerly
secretary to Nero, and was slain on the fourteenth [or fifteenth]
of Domitian, after he had been for a good while in banishment;
but another Epaphroditas, a freed-man, and procurator of Trajan,
as says Grotius on Luke 1:3.

(3) The preservation of Homer's Poems by memory, and not by his
own writing them down, and that thence they were styled
Rhapsodies, as sung by him, like ballads, by parts, and not
composed and connected together in complete works, are opinions
well known from the ancient commentators; though such supposal
seems to myself, as well as to Fabricius Biblioth. Grace. I. p.
269, and to others, highly improbable. Nor does Josephus say
there were no ancienter writings among the Greeks than Homer's
Poems, but that they did not fully own any ancienter writings
pretending to such antiquity, which is trite.

(4) It well deserves to be considered, that Josephus here says
how all the following Greek historians looked on Herodotus as a
fabulous author; and presently, sect. 14, how Manetho, the most
authentic writer of the Egyptian history, greatly complains of
his mistakes in the Egyptian affairs; as also that Strabo, B. XI.
p. 507, the most accurate geographer and historian, esteemed him
such; that Xenophon, the much more accurate historian in the
affairs of Cyrus, implies that Herodotus's account of that great
man is almost entirely romantic. See the notes on Antiq. B. XI.
ch. 2. sect. 1, and Hutchinson's Prolegomena to his edition of