upon ourselves, but I shall esteem this as a most just apology
for us, and taken from those our laws, according to which we
lead our lives, against the many and the lying objections that
have been made against us. Moreover, since this Apollonius
does not do like Apion, and lay a continued accusation
against us, but does it only by starts, and up and clown his
discourse, while he sometimes reproaches us as atheists, and
man-haters, and sometimes hits us in the teeth with our want
of courage, and yet sometimes, on the contrary, accuses us of
too great boldness and madness in our conduct; nay, he says
that we are the weakest of all the barbarians, and that this is
the reason why we are the only people who have made no
improvements in human life; now I think I shall have then
sufficiently disproved all these his allegations, when it shall
appear that our laws enjoin the very reverse of what he says,
and that we very carefully observe those laws ourselves. And
if I he compelled to make mention of the laws of other
nations, that are contrary to ours, those ought deservedly to
thank themselves for it, who have pretended to depreciate
our laws in comparison of their own; nor will there, I think,
be any room after that for them to pretend either that we
have no such laws ourselves, an epitome of which I will
present to the reader, or that we do not, above all men,
continue in the observation of them.

16. To begin then a good way backward, I would advance
this, in the first place, that those who have been admirers of
good order, and of living under common laws, and who began
to introduce them, may well have this testimony that they are
better than other men, both for moderation and such virtue