My bedtime reading has been consumed lately by Flavius Josephus's book, The Jewish War, though I do feel the word 'war' should have been plural. He left it singular despite documenting a myriad of conflicts both among various Jewish tribes throughout antiquity and their neighbours, but he meant to focus on Judea under Rome's Imperial Rule. Jews are always held to be a stiff-necked people; they are at present and were back in an ancient era when Roman legionary occupation of most of the known world was a reality.

The Roman Empire stretched from Europe to North Africa and Western Asia and beyond, its disciplined conflict-seasoned military constantly busy putting down insurrections wherever people of other countries felt their value as national patriots was demeaned by being forced to give their devotion to a foreign empire. Josephus was one of those devout nationalists, Judea his pride and focus. As a general he was given the role of administrator of the Galilee.

 As administrator, while Jewish religious and political functionaries plotted an uprising against Rome, he ordered battlements to be constructed around Galilean towns to attempt to make them impervious to military conquest. Many of the towns were situated on or beside mountain slopes, giving them natural barricades against enemy ingress beyond the steep walls and towers erected to defend the towns.

One of the largest of which was Jotapata and which Josephus took personal control of, when Vespasian, an elite general in command of countless brigades (horse and foot) and his son Titus were dispatched by Caesar to put down the Judean insurrection. Josephus's account of himself as commander, referring to himself in the third person is full of praise for his own acumen, skill and daring. He describes in excruciating detail the siege that encircled Jotapata with the brute force the Romans could exert with their gigantic slings and battering rams, and his resourcefulness in strategic defence against the invaders.

And while tens of thousands of Jews of all ages were slaughtered by the Roman legions as towns fell one after another, he managed to find it in himself to praise Vespasian and Titus and the 'generosity of spirit' and 'kindness' of Rome, in sparing his own life through admiration of the exploits of a seasoned and clever defense stratagist. Gripping and self-serving, but also, through his writing and observations and descriptions handing down for posterity a detailed account of an ancient episode in history.

As for our present era, we've more than enough of barbaric episodes of conflict; the one unfolding now in Afghanistan a dire case in point, where an oppressed people whose nation has seen more than enough strife through the ages, is once again in the grip of a medieval-era theocracy for which savage administration of the affairs of the nation in the interests of obeisance to the strictures of a religion all too often interpreted to detract from quality of life in favour of quality of death, reminds us that not much has changed in human nature.

None of which is known to Jackie and Jillie to trouble their little canine minds happy to be in our company, focused on food sources and the comforts they have become accustomed to in their daily lives, one of which is their daily visit to the forest trails in our nearby ravine. This morning they were out early again with the assurance the woods would still be overnight-cool, the heat of the afternoon not yet penetrating.

Others in the wider community had the same brilliant thought, so this was not one of those long circuits that we sometimes experience, seeing no one else at all out on the trails, neither people nor their companion animals. For the first half of our circuit we kept bumping into others of our acquaintance and of Jackie's and Jillie's, a kind of happy free-for-all encounter with some trails becoming quite crowded with the happenstance presence of people and dogs.

A vast world apart from the era of the Roman Empire, of national disasters where many countries are bled by one belligerent, proud country that views itself as the natural and sole authority to reign over all.