Representing the dynasty in flavian rome: the case of josephus' jewish war jonathan davies all chapt
Representing the Dynasty in Flavian Rome: The Case of Josephus' Jewish War Jonathan Davies
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Representing the Dynasty in Flavian Rome: The Case of Josephus' Jewish War (Oxford Classical Monographs) Dr Jonathan Davies
The aim of the Oxford Classical Monographs series (which replaces the Oxford Classical and Philosophical Monographs) is to publish books based on the best theses on Greek and Latin literature, ancient history, and ancient philosophy examined by the Faculty Board of Classics.
Representing the Dynasty in Flavian Rome
The Case of Josephus’ JewishWar
JONATHAN DAVIES
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom
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Acknowledgements
This work has benefited from the input of many people, and it is a great pleasure to acknowledge those debts here. My primary academic debt of gratitude is owed to my doctoral supervisor, Prof. Martin Goodman, who consistently provided me with rigorous, patient, generous, and insightful guidance, not only on this work but also on the MPhil thesis from which the idea arose. I am also very grateful to my Assessors for Transfer and Confirmation of Status, Prof. Rhiannon Ash, Dr. Anna Clark, Prof. Katherine Clarke, and Dr. Luke Pitcher, whose astute insights and suggestions radically improved sections of this work. The full version of the thesis was read and commented on by Dr. Tessa Rajak and Prof. Katherine Clarke (again), whose comments were invaluable in transforming the work from a thesis into a monograph. Graduate student colleagues at Oxford in Classics, Jewish Studies, and Theology also contributed to the thesis in a variety of ways, ranging from proffering their insights during casual conversations to reading and commenting on draft sections of the work. I am especially grateful to Andy Stiles, Olivia Thompson, Elizabeth Foley, Bradley Jordan, Panayiotis Christoforou, Aitor Blanco Pérez, Juliane Zachhuber, Ursula Westwood, J. E. Glas, David Friedman, Anthony Rabin, and Joshua Blachorsky, as well as to the regular attendees at the weekly Ancient History Work in Progress Seminar, who have scrutinized my ideas more than once. I am grateful to Prof. Rhiannon Ash, Georgina Leighton, Karen Raith, Charlotte Loveridge, and Jamie Mortimer for their assistance in the final stages in advance of publication and to my colleagues at Maynooth University for creating such a congenial professional home while I worked on those final stages. The staff at the Sackler Library, multiple other Bodleian reading rooms, and the
Wolfson College library in Oxford, the Firestone Library in Princeton, the Brotherton Library in Leeds, and the libraries of Maynooth University and Trinity College, Dublin, also provided much needed support and assistance throughout. All errors and deficiencies of thought remain my own.
This work could not have been undertaken without the extraordinary generosity of the Littman Foundation, which created a scholarship in memory of Louis Littman and Prof. Geza Vermes; it is a pleasure to record my gratitude here. Thanks are also due to the Craven Committee and Wolfson College, which funded a highly productive two-week research trip to Israel, and to the Lorne Thyssen Travel Fund (administered by the Ancient World Research Cluster at Wolfson), which enabled me to undertake a short visit to Rome to examine the Flavian building programme. I also thank Liz Baird, Wolfson’s archivist, for obtaining a copy of Levick (2000) for me.
I dedicate this book to my mother Gill and to the memory of my father Brian, with love and gratitude.
Contents
TextsandAbbreviations
Introduction
Political Expression in Flavian Rome
Preliminary Observations on Publication and Censorship
Writing Politics in Flavian Rome
Constraining and Policing Political Expression
Ideologies and Strategies of Veridiction
The Prince and His Virtues
The Problem of Contemporary Historiography
Conclusions
The JewishWar: Audience, Structure, and Date
Audience
Structure
Date
Conclusions
The Flavians in JewishWar1–6
Vespasian in JewishWar1–6
Vespasian as a Military Commander
Vespasian and the Divine
Vespasian and the Legitimacy of the Flavian Accession
The Virtues of Vespasian
Titus in JewishWar1–6
Titus as a Military Commander
Titus and the Divine
The Virtues of Titus
Titus and the Destruction of the Jerusalem Temple
Domitian in JewishWar1–6
The Flavians in JewishWar7
Conclusions
Josephus as Liar
Josephus as Panegyrist
Josephus as Propagandist
Josephus as Dissident
Josephus as Historian
Josephan Futures
Bibliography Index
Texts and Abbreviations
Works of Josephus were consulted in the Loeb Classical Library editions. The following abbreviations are used:
JewishAntiquities
JewishWar Against Apion Life
Other classical texts were consulted in the latest edition of the Loeb Classical Library, unless another edition is cited in the bibliography. All English translations of Greek texts cited in this book are by the author. Abbreviations are those used by the OxfordClassicalDictionary (4th edn), with the following additions:
Isocrates, To Nicocles
Nicolaus of Damascus, Agoge ofAugustus
Onasander, The General
Orosius, Historyagainstthe Pagans
Philo of Alexandria, Who is the Heir ofDivine Things?
Plutarch, Life ofDion
Plutarch, Life ofOtho
Plutarch, How to Tella Flatterer from a Friend
Suetonius, Life ofOtho
Sulpicius Severus, Chronicles
Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica
Books of the Hebrew Bible were consulted in the Masoretic text as printed in the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (5th edn, Stuttgart, 1997). Abbreviations used are those recommended in New Hart’s Rules.
Abbreviations for scholarly journals follow the conventions of L’Année Philologique, with the following additions:
Annualofthe Japanese BiblicalInstitute
Erfurt Electronic Studies in English
History andTheory
Hirundo: The McGillJournalofClassicalStudies
JournalofAncientJudaism
JournalofEuropean Studies
JournalofJewishStudies
JournalofPolitics
JewishQuarterly Review
JewishStudies, an InternetJournal
JuridicalReview
Marburger Winckelmann-Programm
Publications ofthe Modern Language Association
Revue de l’Organisation Internationalepour l’Étude des Langues Anciennespar
Ordinateur
PoliticalStudies
Society ofBiblicalLiterature Seminar Papers
War andHistory
Zutot: Perspectives on JewishCulture
Other abbreviations are as follows:
Aufstieg undNiedergang der römischen Welt
H. Mattingly and E. A. Sydenham (rev. C. H. V. Sutherland), Roman ImperialCoins in the BritishMuseum, i (London, 1984)
H. Mattingly and E. A. Sydenham (rev. I. A. Carradice and T. V. Buttrey), Roman ImperialCoins in the BritishMuseum, ii.1 (London, 2007)
Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum
F. Jacoby, Die Fragmente der Griechischen Historiker, 7 vols (Leiden, 1940–58)
T. J. Cornell (ed), The Fragments ofthe Roman Historians, 3 vols (Oxford, 2013)
H. Dessau, Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae (Dublin, 1974)
M. McCrum and A. G. Woodhead, Select Documents ofthe Principates ofthe Flavian Emperors, Including the Year ofRevolution, AD 68–96(Cambridge, 1961)
Prosopographia ImperiiRomani(2nd edn)
R. K. Sherk, Roman Documents ofthe GreekEast (Baltimore, MD, 1969)
W. Dittenberger, Sylloge Inscriptionum Graecarum (Leipzig, 1915–24)
1 Introduction
This book constitutes a study of dynastic representation in a major narrative history of the early Principate, Flavius Josephus’ Jewish War. The great interest of this work for Roman historiographers lies in its status as our only extensive extant example from the early Principate of a once common type of literature, contemporary historiography, understood here to mean an account of recent events which prominently features individuals still in powerful positions at the time of composition. As we shall see in Section 2.2.4 (pp. 40–1), such histories are derided in some extant authors; Josephus (though rarely read from such a perspective today) allows us to get beyond the strictures of ancient critics of contemporary historiography and see how a contemporary historian negotiated potentially difficult issues concerning bias, obligation, historiographical ‘truth’, and the constraints that defined the boundaries of permissible discourse about the imperial family at Rome. This study will attempt to explore these issues, considering the JewishWarin its context of composition (Rome under Vespasian and possibly Domitian), closely examining the pictures of Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian which emerge from the work, and attempting to situate Josephus’ dynastic representations within the broader landscape of discourse about the Flavian dynasts which obtained at Rome under Flavian rule.
In this introductory chapter, I will survey the picture of Josephus’ relationship to the Flavians which has evolved in scholarship since the nineteenth century. The traditional view of Josephus’ relationship
to Flavian power is scathing and can be well illustrated by a quotation from one of the classic studies of Josephus’ work:
It will be evident that his is not a wholly admirable, still less an heroic character, and that as a writer he lacks some of the essential qualifications of the great historians. Egoist, self-interested, time-server and flatterer of his Roman patrons he may be justly called: such defects are obvious.1
This devastating assessment of his character and works is far from unparalleled in older scholarship. Josephus’ defection in captivity following the siege of Jotapata and his subsequent willingness to vaunt his close connections with the Flavian emperors have seen him reviled as an untrustworthy quisling and, in a familiar phrase, a ‘Flavian propagandist’.2 Broadly speaking, two tendencies in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Josephus scholarship underpin this unflattering picture. First, a tendency towards moralistic judgement leads some scholars to base their assessments of Josephus’ worth as an author or historian on their assessments of his worth as a human being, derived largely from unflattering appraisals of his career and behaviour, especially his defection to the Roman side during the early stages of the Jewish Revolt. Second, in keeping with the source-critical approach which dominated both classical and biblical studies in the nineteenth century, we see a tendency to diminish Josephus’ responsibility for his own writing, to view him as more of a compiler or copyist than an author, and specifically to claim that the Jewish War is closely based on one or more strongly pro-Flavian lost prototypes, so that the text which we possess slavishly and uncritically reproduces Flavian discourse (which is usually imagined, in such scholarship, as unitary, static, and monolithic). These two tendencies are often in evidence in the same work, and indeed they are mutually supportive. If a scholar determines that Josephus was an untrustworthy, dependent, servile character, it seems to make sense that he would slavishly follow the words of an approved forebear without regard for the truth. We will briefly survey these tendencies before moving on to look at how the picture of Josephus has evolved since then.
Early evidence of a ‘moralistic’ bent in Josephus’ scholarship can be found in the general histories of Judaism in the ancient world by Jost (1857) and Graetz (1888), whose works pour intemperate scorn on Josephus’ character and, consequently, his reliability as a historian.3 The quest for Josephus’ sources really began with Justus von Destinon’s study of JewishAntiquities12–17 and JewishWar 1, which postulated that those books were very closely based on a lost anonymous source which preceded Josephus in retailing Jewish history to a Hellenized audience.4 This work’s (apparent) establishment of the fact that Josephus’ writing is closely based on lost precursor documents served partially to validate subsequent studies which focused on Josephus’ historiographical practices in the JewishWar. Gustav Hölscher’s article on Josephus in Pauly-Wissowa draws together both the moralistic and the source-based criticisms and applies them to its discussion of the Jewish War, presenting Josephus as a commissioned author eager to please his powerful patrons and basing much of the content of the Jewish War on the commentarii of Vespasian and Titus, which Josephus claims in his later works to have consulted when writing the Jewish War.5 The notion that largely plagiarized content from the commentarii underlies at least some parts of the JewishWar would be influential for much of the twentieth century; however, other early scholars, aware that the content of the commentariiare unlikely to have fully encompassed all of the variegated subject matter of the JewishWar, suggested additional Roman sources from which Josephus also copied material. Adolf Schlatter identified a lost second source as the historical work on the Jews supposedly written by Antonius Julianus, a loyal Flavian official and the governor of Judaea at the time of Titus’ siege of Jerusalem.6 Weber does not attempt to identify by name the author of Josephus’ supposed main Roman source but presents it simply as a now anonynmous prior literary history of the revolt which was itself closely dependent on Vespasian’s and Titus’ commentarii.7 Thus, Josephus’ evident character flaws are compounded by his slavish copying of one or more precursor works; identification of these works may vary from scholar to scholar, but
what they all have in common is a close adherence to the Flavian line and a close alignment with Flavian interests. Therefore, in following these source texts closely and uncritically, Josephus is established unquestionably as an apologist for the new imperial dynasty.
As the twentieth century progressed, this established picture of Josephus’ relation to Flavian power began to break down and to mutate in interesting ways. Broadly speaking, the source-critical element of this conception of Josephus was dispensed with first, while the moralistic tendencies lingered on and are even in evidence in the works of those scholars who were instrumental in demolishing the notion of a hypothetical lost Flavian urtext (like Thackeray, as illustrated by the highly moralistic quotation with which this chapter began). The groundwork was laid by the important study of Laqueur (1920). Laqueur emphasized the need to understand The Jewish War as a unified composition with its own aims, tendences and perspective. However it may have been composed, and whatever its relationship to its sources, the JewishWaris best studied in the form in which we presently understand it, always bearing in mind that Josephus retains ultimate responsibility for the finished product. Thus, Josephus becomes an author, rather than a lazy or dishonest copyist, and the nature of the JewishWarcan best be understood by reading it in the light of what is known of Josephus’ life and evolving career.8 This is, of course, methodologically problematic (almost all that we know of Josephus’ life derives from his own works and so cannot be considered as ‘context’ straightforwardly independent of those works), and, moreover, some of Laqueur’s judgements are based largely on his own rather idiosyncratic reconstruction of the life of Josephus. Furthermore, the moralistic tendency is still amply in evidence here, and this cannot help but colour some of Laqueur’s assessments of Josephus’ aims and objectives in writing. Nonetheless, the process of reattributing authorial responsibility and agency to Josephus had begun, a trend which (in qualified form) would also characterize the works of Thackeray. Thackeray’s most famous contribution to Josephan studies was the introduction of the
briefly influential ‘assistants’ theory, that much of Josephus’ work in both the Jewish War and the JewishAntiquities was in fact written by two Greek-speaking assistants, one heavily stylistically influenced by Thucydides, the other by Sophocles, who each wrote sections of the finished work under Josephus’ overall authority and supervision.9 This is a halfway house: on this model, Josephus is something more than a mere copyist and is responsible for the overall tenor and interpretative framework of his work, but he still does not deserve the credit or blame for full authorship. The ‘assistants’ hypothesis has now fallen decisively from favour in scholarship, seen to be based on insufficient evidence and to understate the degree of stylistic unity within Josephus’ writing.10 The real significance of Thackeray’s work is twofold: it further supports Laqueur’s insistence on reading the Jewish War as an integrated text produced by a single guiding intelligence rather than as an atomized series of plagiarized excerpts from lost Flavian originals; and it discerns and places at the heart of the JewishWar not propagandistic pro-Flavian messaging, but rather advocacy and counsel for the author’s people, with Josephus as an adviser who counsels submission to Rome not so much out of craven cowardice or regard for his own future prospects, but because he saw in that the only valid route to the salvation of Jews under Roman rule.11 No doubt influenced by these readings, Lindner (1972) illustrates how far we have come by the late twentieth century. Professing ultimate agnosticism on Josephus’ sources, Lindner nevertheless takes as a working hypothesis the notion that a single Roman source lies behind much of the Jewish War. This may seem like a backward step, but Lindner further argues that, if this is the case, Josephus must have revised and reworked it to an extremely significant extent, and that the only way in which the JewishWar can be understood is not by attempting to reconstruct its sources, but by attempting to identify Josephus’ conception of history.12 Thus, even in an author who retains a (qualified) adherence to the ‘Roman source’ hypothesis, we find that in practice it is Josephus, not the source, who should take priority.13 The cumulative effect of this trio of crucial twentieth-century voices
in Josephan scholarship is that Josephus has re-emerged as an author, not as a mere copyist, and therefore we need to rethink any conclusions about his relations to Flavian power that may have arisen from mistaken beliefs about how he may have used a lost ‘Flavian’ source.
Thus, by the end of the twentieth century, within the specialist field of Josephan studies it was widely recognized that the old ‘Flavian lackey’ approach to this author was inadequate. However, this is not a universal picture, and in places old prejudices die hard. Thus Beard (2003) urges classicists to engage with Josephus, but precisely on the grounds that he is a propagandist for the Flavian line; a similar perspective is found in Morgan (2006: 270), Rappaport (2007: 68), and Ash (2007: 29). Swoboda (2017a) depicts Josephus as ‘a “defector” with an eye to his own well-being’ and attempts to argue that the JewishWar was fundamentally a sort of CV in which Josephus set out to depict himself as an ideal mediator between Rome and the Jews, with an eye to appointment to some political office. Outside academia too discussions of Josephus can still be rooted in the old conception. The title of Seward (2007), Jerusalem’s Traitor, is a fair reflection of how the author conceptualizes Josephus and his relation to Roman power. The American conservative humourist P. J. O’Rourke, in a somewhat unexpected chapter on Josephus in his book on war, dismisses our author as ‘slithering filth’, offering a moralistic reading that would have felt right at home in the nineteenth century.14 Despite these aberrations (mostly coming from outside the specific field of Josephus studies), the modern consensus among Josephus scholars is clearly somewhat different. However, while most Josephus scholars can agree on what Josephus was not (a Flavian propagandist), it does not seem that we have achieved any form of consensus on what understanding of Josephus’ relationship to Flavian power should replace the old view. That is the desideratum which this book aims to address.
What we have seen since roughly the year 2000 is a great efflorescence of scholarly writing on Josephus, much of which engages, directly or obliquely, with the issue of Josephus and the
Flavians. The great volume of published scholarship precludes the possibility of an exhaustive survey here (and such a survey may not be needed, given that much of this more recent scholarship will be discussed directly later in this book). What I will attempt in the rest of this chapter is more restricted than that. I will illustrate what I believe are the two main trends in recent scholarship which underlie the various transformations in how we understand Josephus and read him as a political communicator, and offer examples of those two trends. These two key trends are the increasingly frequent application of postcolonial theory to readings of Josephus and changes since the mid-twentieth century in the way that classical scholars understand the role of the emperor and the relation of the emperor to authors active in his reign.
Postcolonial theory has changed the approaches that scholars in a range of disciplines take towards colonial identities in ways which can directly relate to Josephus’ position. For our purposes, the key finding of Said’s Orientalism is that the Orient (itself a Western category) is never allowed to speak for itself: it exists solely to be studied, catalogued, and explained by the learned men of the dominant culture.15 Subsequent theorists, influenced by Said, paid more attention to how representatives of colonized peoples can try to speak in a colonial framework, often by appropriating and deploying the language of the hegemonic culture in order to present themselves and their cultures in ways comprehensible to their colonial masters, but which nonetheless have the power to unsettle. Homi K. Bhabha has been particularly influential in this area, especially with his concept of colonial mimicy. Mimicry is to Bhabha inherently subversive of colonial thought, insofar as the figure of the mimic makes visible the interstices between two major and internally incongruent aspects of imperial ideology, the colonists’ desire for a civilized and reformed Other (‘the civilising mission’), and the notion of the essential and fixed racial inferiority of the colonized to the colonizer.16 Later theorists have developed Bhabha’s ideas by considering the notion of strategic mimicry, the adoption of modes of discourse or of categories and ascriptions from the colonizing culture
by the colonized as a strategy of deliberate resistance.17 John Barclay has been especially influential in bringing postcolonial theory into the field of Josephus studies. His extensive commentary on the Against Apion begins with a methodological discussion on postcolonial theory and its applicability to our author, and the commentary throughout applies such insights, presenting Josephus as a crafty and cultivated spokesman for Judaism, exploiting his mastery of both Jewish and Graeco-Roman culture to present a version of Judaism agreeable to potential Roman readers, while also subtly indicating critiques of certain aspects of broader imperial culture such as idolatry.18 Mader (2000) documents how Josephus adopts, in the Jewish War, a Thucydidean framework of ‘scientific history’ in order to bolster his partisan objectives under an illusion of impartiality, an illustration of how Josephus’ ‘double mastery’ allows him to exploit Graeco-Roman expectations of the historiographic genre in pursuit of advocacy for the Jews. Sievers and Lembi (2005) includes three contributions which read Josephus in postcolonially inflected ways, those by Barclay, Mason, and Spilsbury. Barclay’s essay, focused again on Against Apion, examines how Josephus ostentatiously ‘plays the game’ of Graeco-Roman historiography, ultimately in order to subvert its truth claims relative to the histories of Near Eastern peoples like the Jews; Mason argues for a predominantly local intended audience in Flavian Rome, which encourages us to reflect on how these (from a Roman perspective) strange works of historiography might have resonated with such readers; Spilsbury looks at how Josephus’ biblical paraphrases simultaneously reflect and undermine common Roman notions of ethics. Kaden (2011) examines Josephan mimicry and hybridity in his account of Agrippa II’s gentes devictae speech (BJ 2.345–402), situating the speech in the context of literary imperial propaganda before going on to note that Agrippa’s reattribution of responsibility for the rise of Rome to the God of Jerusalem smuggles a distinctly Jewish version of divine providence into the picture, complicating the propaganda in a way that only postcolonial inbetweenness can. Ferda (2013) examines Josephus’ channelling of Jeremiah’s Temple
Sermon at various points of his work in the JewishWar, repackaging biblical historiographical notions in Graeco-Roman forms in ways which would only have been visible to Jewish readers. Rajak (2014) discusses the productive alternation between ‘outsider’ and ‘insider’ perspectives in Josephus’ writings, a phenomenon enabled by his mastery of both Jewish and Graeco-Roman culture.19 My 2019 article, which focuses on the portents of the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple at BJ 6.293–9, argues that Josephus’ inbetweeness allows him, at times, to adopt a strategy of ‘culturallydirected doublespeak’, constructing passages which would resonate differently to Jewish and non-Jewish readers and potentially sending out different messages to each constitutive reading community.20 In an article written partly in response to the last item, Eelco Glas has argued for the notion of ‘cultural brokerage’ in Josephus’ works and investigated the ways in which Josephus evokes and intensifies emotions in ways familiar to Greek and Roman readers in order to inspire sympathy for the Jewish people among potential Gentile readers.21 It should be clear from this survey that postcolonial theory has had a significant and highly productive effect on modern readings of Josephus, complicating what were once seen as simple and binary questions of loyalty and allegiance. This phenomenon should have profound consequences for any discussion of Josephus’ engagement with the Flavians.
In parallel with this, changes in the understanding of the relationship between emperors and literature have also contributed to the development of our understanding of Josephus. Since Millar’s Emperor in the Roman World (1977), there has been more of an awareness of the reactive nature of Roman imperial government and consequently less of a tendency to see the emperor closely involved in every aspect of Roman society. One symptom of this has been that the notion of poets and other authors as literary propagandists has been somewhat in abeyance, even in the cases of authors known to have been in a direct relationship to members of the regime. More recent work has tended to stress authorial independence, with authors aware of the necessity of not upsetting
the emperor and consequently aiming to write works which did not overtly disrespect him, but nevertheless retaining much independence and remaining responsible for the content of their own works.22 Furthermore, starting with Frederick Ahl’s essay on safe criticism in Greece and Rome, a number of classicists have undertaken specific studies of political expression, censorship, and dissidence in Roman literature, and found potentially unsettling content in Roman authors once almost universally considered as propagandistic.23 Steve Mason has brought such scholarship into the conversation about Josephus, principally in an important 2005 essay which explicitly cites Ahl as its methodological inspiration.24
Beginning by sketching out various Greek rhetorical notions of irony and misdirection, Mason proceeds to read closely an extensive dossier of passages from Josephus’ body of work which may demonstrate concealed dissidence in the manner expected of Roman authors according to the rhetorical handbooks. Mason’s conclusions are far-reaching: he argues that, far from being Flavian propaganda, the JewishWaractually contradicts the official Flavian line on almost every point, depicting Titus as reckless and undisciplined and transferring all the glory for Rome’s suppression of the revolt from the Flavians to the Jewish God.25 At around the same time as the publication of this chapter, other readings of Josephus also appeared which demonstrated increased sensitivity to possible veiled critique or dissidence. Thus, Barclay argues that Josephus adopts aristocratic Roman values in order to use them to criticize Rome’s conduct during the revolt, while Chapman’s work has focused on how Josephus uses classical literary models to transform the Jews from enemies into tragic victims in the eyes of Greek and Roman readers, in flat contradiction of the pitliless Flavian narrative of the suppression of the revolt.26 In another influential article, Mason has argued that Josephus even positions himself within internal Roman constitutional debates: his express preference for aristocratic over monarchical forms of government constitutes a criticism of the Principate, his focus on the dynastic struggles of Herod and his subtle attempts to link this theme to Augustus deliberately highlight
one of the most hazardous aspects of Roman-style autocracy, and his deployment of the language and arguments of Stoicism in the speech of Eleazar ben Yair on Masada reflects the so-called Stoic opposition.27 Barton and Boyarin (2016: 178–99) bring Shadi Bartsch’s concept of doublespeak into play, charting how Josephus creates studied ambiguity through the use of certain polyvalent Greek words (θρησκεία,
to create passages which can simultaneously reflect a Roman and a Jewish perspective, often with starkly different connotations and evaluative stances. This sudden interest in the possibility of figured critique in Josephus, coming at precisely the same moment as postcolonial theory was breaking down old binary understandings of Josephus as a traitor, has greatly enriched the possibilities for engagement with this author. Ahl and others teach us that, in the rhetoricized culture of early imperial Rome, even the most (ostensibly) obsequious authors could plausibly be suspected of going off message from time to time, a lesson which should not be ignored by those of us devoted to the study of this supposed Flavian lackey.
This brief survey is necessarily piecemeal and selective, but nonetheless sufficient to show the radically changed tenor of recent Josephan scholarship and the central importance that postcolonial insights and evolving understandings of Roman political communication have had on effecting this transformation. Far from him being a mouthpiece of the Flavians, modern trends in scholarship have enabled us to reconceptualize Josephus as a product of fertile colonial inbetweenness, whose double mastery of Jewish and Graeco-Roman culture and command of the rhetorical techniques prevalent in contemporary Roman literature potentially enabled him to remain a consistent advocate and spokesman for Israel, even while living at the court of Nebuchadnezzar.
What is still lacking in the scholarship, however, is a detailed study of Josephus’ delineation of his Flavian friends and patrons. The last book-length study of this topic, Weber (1921), still contains worthwhile insights, but is vitiated by a now archaic conception of political expression in Rome and by the fact that the purpose of the
book seems largely to be to argue for an elaborate composition history of the Jewish War which has no adherents today.28 This study aims to fill that lacuna. It is hoped that the findings will be of value to Roman historians interested in regime representation under the Flavians, to historiographers curious about our sole substantial contemporary history from the early Principate, to Josephus scholars in helping to situate Josephus in his immediate political context of composition, and to historians of the Jewish Revolt, who need to consider the extent and nature of Josephus’ obligations to the Flavians.
Chapter 2 surveys political expression in Flavian Rome. It considers literary ideologies of veridiction, especially in relation to the historiographical genre, as well as ways in which the limits of acceptable discourse were conceptualized and policed, and how those limits could be challenged. Chapter 3 addresses important and related questions of intended audience, date, and structure in the JewishWar, particularly the long-debated question of the date of the seventh book of that work. It concludes that there is a reasonable likelihood that Book 7 was added in the reign of Domitian to an already completed work comprising Books 1–6; therefore, Josephus’ Flavian representations in that book need to be treated separately from the rest because of the different political conditions which obtained under Domitian. Chapter 4 examines Josephus’ portraits of the Flavians in Books 1–6, in dialogue with ways in which these figures were represented in Flavian Rome; Chapter 5 considers how the Flavians are represented in the seventh book and aims to stay alert to possible resonances with regime representation in Domitian’s Rome. The final chapter, Chapter 6, provides a series of overall conclusions and suggests some possible directions for future research.
5 Moralizing: Hölscher (1916) 1943; commentarii: Hölscher (1916) 1951–94. Josephus on the commentariiof Vespasian and Titus: V . 342, 358; C.Ap. 1.56.
6 Schlatter (1923) 98–101. For the career of Antonius Julianus in Judaea, see BJ 6.238. Julianus’ supposed literary work on Jewish history will be discussed in more detail in Section 4.2.4 (pp. 170–2) below.
7 Weber (1921) 43–67. On commentarii as a literary or paraliterary form, see Riggsby (2006) 133–56.
8 Laqueur (1920), esp. 245–78. Czajkowski and Eckhardt (2021) is a suitably cautious and non-judgemental attempt to slightly wind the clock back on this and partially reconstruct the lost works of Nicolaus of Damascus from the extant text of Josephus, recasting him as a copyist to a greater extent than most modern scholarship would dare.
9 Thackeray (1929) 100–24.
10 For an overview of scholarship which undermined and ultimately overthrew Thackeray’s model, see Bilde (1988) 132–3.
11 Thackeray (1929) 1–50. See also Bentwich (1914: 52) and Shutt (1961), the latter of whom greatly downplays the contributions of the Greek assistants in comparison with Thackeray (18–40), for these tendencies.
12 See Lindner (1972), esp. 95–141, 142–50, and (on Josephus’ guiding conception of history) 21–48.
13 Bentwich (1914) is another good example of this ‘middle stage’, where portions of the text are attributed to Josephus’ Roman source(s) (44–5, 53–67), while overall responsibility for the work and its (predominantly pro-Jewish, rather than pro-Flavian) tendency lies with Josephus himself.
14 O’Rourke (1992) 107–111; quotation from 111.
15 Said (1978).
16 Bhabha (1994) 121–31.
17 Important to this trend, in different ways, are Spivak (1993), Schülting (1996), and (particularly usefully) Fuchs (2001: 64–99), a study of how Incan historians were able to adopt elite Spanish notions of chivalry and use them in their Spanish-language narratives to critique the Spanish occupation of Peru.
18 For introductory comments on postcolonial theory and Josephus studies, see Barclay (2007) lxvi–lxxi. Barclay’s commentary generated other articles also relevant to the application of postcolonial theory to Josephus. See Barclay (2005) and Barclay (2008).
19 See especially the methodological comments on postcolonial theory’s relevance to Josephus in Rajak (2014) 191–6.
20 Davies (2019).
21 Glas (2020). Other explicit discussions of postcolonial theory’s relevance to the study of Josephus include Rajak (2014), esp. 191–6, and Barclay (2007) lxvi–lxxi.
22 Particularly important contributions to this development have been Kennedy (1992) and Galinsky (1996), both contesting the notion that the members of the Maecenas circle were regime propagandists.
23 Ahl (1984a); Ahl (1984b); Rudich (1993); Bartsch (1994); Rudich (1997); Sluiter and Rosen (2004); Dominik et al. (2009a); Heilig (2015); Baltussen and Davis (2015a).
24 Mason (2005a)
25 Mason (2005a) 257–67.
26 Barclay (2005); Chapman (2005).
27 Mason (2009a). On the last point, see also Ladouceur (1987), esp. 99–101. Mason’s views, however, should be qualified by a recognition of the fact that the language of the Republic continued to be employed by the early emperors, which means that Josephus’ expressed preference for aristocratic rule need not have been interpreted by ancient readers as a critique of the Principate.
28 Despite its promising title, William Den Hollander’s book Josephus, the Emperors and the City of Rome (2014) has little to say about Flavian representation in Josephus’ texts and is much more concerned with considering what can be said about the life and social position of Josephus himself at Rome.
2
Political Expression in Flavian Rome
The purpose of this chapter is to establish a theoretical and methodological framework for an analysis of political expression and regime representation in the Jewish War, a framework which both takes into account modern thinking about issues of political expression and develops an approach to these questions rooted firmly in Josephus’ historical context. I begin with a consideration of relevant aspects of modern theoretical work on political expression; subsequent sections will survey the constraints operative on authors under the early emperors (Section 2.2.1), examine the countervailing literary ideologies of the time which correspond in various ways to modern notions of free speech (Section 2.2.2), consider the ways in which ancient authors represent and evaluate the characters of rulers (Section 2.2.3), and address the specific aspects of the genre of contemporary historiography which pertain to these issues (Section 2.2.4). As the goals of this chapter are methodological and contextual, the JewishWarwill not be discussed in detail at this stage, and references to that work will be infrequent and made in passing. Material from the other works of Josephus will be treated here in more detail, where appropriate.
2.1 Preliminary Observations on Publication and Censorship
In considering Josephus’ place in the landscape of political expression under the Flavian emperors, we are engaging with themes already prominent in antiquity. The perceived loss of freedom openly to express one’s views on political affairs which accompanied the transformation of Rome’s political system under the Principate is one of the great themes of early imperial literature, and the contrast (implied or explicit) is almost invariably with the period of the ‘free’ Republic.1 While some authors grant that the emergence of the Principate brought greater stability, it came at a price: the stifling of expression, and the creation of a culture where the only literary art which could truly flourish was the debased rhetoric of the panegyrists and the delatores.2 When reading such verdicts, it is almost irresistibly tempting to reach for sinister parallels from the modern world to more recent and familiar societies which felt the malign censorial effects of the imposition of autocracy.3
However, such parallels should be resisted. Modern notions of both free speech and censorship are anachronistic to the Roman world, developed as they were after the advent of mechanized printing.4 The printing press brought a genuinely fundamental change in the history of censorship. Representing to ruling authorities both a threat (because of the massively expanded reach of published material) and an opportunity (because of the creation of a bottleneck in text circulation which might plausibly be monitored and controlled by the state), mechanized printing introduced the modern censorship regime, with its bureaucratized apparatus and its obsessive focus on the prepublication licensing of appropriate literature.5 Such systems are primarily preventive rather than punitive, and within them the punishment of authors and the destruction of works only become necessary when the censorship system fails, when illicitly printed or imported literature circumvents the safety net of the censorship bureau.6 Conversely, in antiquity,
nothing like this was known, and given the difficulty of controlling and policing manuscript circulation as it was practised at Rome, such systems could never have developed.7 John Milton, often seen as the originator of modern thinking about free speech in his Areopagitica(1644), always shows a clear awareness of the fact that the regulation of literature in antiquity worked fundamentally differently from in his own times.8
If we wish to avoid anachronism, our approach to literary regulation in imperial Rome must then proceed from a consideration of the ways in which literature circulated in that society. Much has been written on the nature of publication in the early Empire, and while there is some disagreement on specific details, the basic pattern is a subject of broad consensus.9 Unpublished texts would be shared by the author with their friends, acquaintances, and literary patrons in the form of private readings or written drafts for comment, all on the implicit understanding that these texts would not be shared further until the author decided the work was ready.10 Eventually, authors would relinquish control of their texts, beginning by sending gift copies of the polished work to friends and patrons (who would be expected to encourage further circulation), and perhaps by depositing some manuscripts with booksellers to make copies for their customers.11 If any moment in this process ought to be called ‘publication’, it is this final relinquishing of control, which was designated by a range of terms, ἐκδιδόναιand δημοσιοῦσθαιin Greek, edidere, emittere, and publicare in Latin.12 However, even at this stage we ought not imagine book production on a scale at all comparable with that of printing: in a well-known case study, Pliny the Younger describes how Aemilius Regulus circulated one thousand copies of a memoir of his deceased son’s life, and Pliny’s tone suggests that this rather modest scale of production was, by contemporary standards, wildly extravagant.13 Nothing comparable with the scale of manuscript distribution enabled by the printing press existed, which greatly limited the damage that written criticism could do to the reputations of those in power. Furthermore, considering the private nature of manuscript copying in the ancient
world, the lack of authorial control over who could make copies, and the absence of any centres of manuscript mass production, it is hard to imagine how the Roman emperors or their agents could have controlled or screened the production of literary texts in the way that the rulers of early modern England could, even if it occurred to any of them that this would be desirable.
It would seem from these preliminary remarks that the profound differences between publication and censorship ancient and modern make it impossible to apply any of our classic modern models of censorship wholesale to the situation in Rome under the early Principate. However, an approach to the study of censorship has emerged which is more promising for our purposes, not least because it enables the meaningful discussion of censorship in societies which, like Rome, had no official censorship apparatus. This approach, which Helen Freshwater calls the ‘New Censorship’, has its roots in theoretical models developed by Foucault.14
For Foucault, power-knowledge has intrinsically censorious qualities: one of the key techniques of Foucauldian disciplinary power is normative judgement, which necessarily creates domains of unacceptability.15 However, the generation of power-knowledge is not repressive, but rather constitutive and productive. Power both defines and produces knowledge about the areas declared taboo, not only (in the modern ‘carceral archipelago’) specific and administrative knowledge, but also categories and theoretical models to explain (and safely discuss) the deviant and the taboo.16 Once an authoritative discourse has become established and fixed its limits, it can be extremely difficult for the modern subject to redefine or step outside this discourse. Even art or literature which is ‘transgressive’ is, in its own awareness of the limit, complicit in the fixing of that limit.17 The ultimate telos of Foucauldian systems of domination is the same as the telos of Bentham’s Panopticon, that the subject, conscious of (the possibility of) constant surveillance, examination, and normative judgement, internalizes the dominant discourse, thus becoming complicit in their own subjection; under such a system perfectly formed, overt censorship should not be necessary at all.18
