Tacitus's contemporaries were well-acquainted with his work; Pliny the Younger, one of his first admirers, congratulated him for his better-than-usual precision and predicted that his "Histories" would be immortal: only a third of his known work has survived and then through a very tenuous textual tradition; we depend on a single manuscript for books I-VI of the "Annales" and on another one for the other surviving half (books XI-XVI) and for the five books extant of the "Historiae". His books were clearly used by 2nd-early 3rd century historians such as Cassius Dio's report on Agricola's exploration of Britain, and Hegesippus may have borrowed from his account of the First Jewish–Roman War. His difficult historical methods and elliptic literary style, however, went unimitated except by Ammianus Marcellinus, who consciously set out to write a continuation of his works. His popularity waned with time: his unfavorable portrayals of the early emperors could not have earned him favor with Rome's increasingly autocratic rulers, and his obvious contempt for Judaism and Christianity (both troublesome foreign cults in the eyes of a 1st-century Roman aristocrat) made him unpopular among the early Church Fathers. The 3rd-century writer Tertullian, for example, blames him (incorrectly—see history of anti-Semitism) for originating the story that the Jews worshipped a donkey's head in the Holy of Holies and calls him ""ille mendaciorum loquacissimus"", 'the most loquacious of liars'.