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“I shall describe the cruelty of the [Jewish] tyrants to their fellow countrymen, in contrast to the clemency of the Romans towards a race of foreigners, and how often Titus showed his eagerness to save the City and the Temple by inviting the rebels to make terms.”
JOSEPHUS, THE JEWISH WAR, 1, 27
FOR AN AMBITIOUS young man who still had a career to make there could be no point in staying in a wrecked Judea. Josephus does not tell us whether Vespasian had invited him to settle in Rome, but it seems more than probable in view of his “lodging” in the former Flavian mansion on the Quirinal, his Roman citizenship, and his pension. Since his family’s estate outside Jerusalem had been appropriated (presumably to supply the garrison with food), Titus gave him as compensation another estate, “in the plain,” which meant the fertile shefelah near the sea.1 Vespasian also presented him with another large tract of good Judean land.
Yet we should not read too much into such gifts. Although he took the emperor’s name, so did many other new citizens, and it is likely that Flavius Josephus was never quite as high in favor as he would have us believe. It is also possible that his lodging in the Flavian mansion was just a room for a short period. He did not receive the title of “Friend of Caesar” (amicus Caesaris), nor was he among the comites, the emperor’s formally acknowledged companions. It has even been suggested by a modern historian that he had a comparatively low place at court, in the same category as magicians and buffoons.2
Nobody could claim that Vespasian’s Rome was a tranquil haven of security during its early years. When Josephus arrived with Titus in 71, he must have noticed the uneasy atmosphere all over the city. Everybody remembered how the Roman Empire had nearly disintegrated only a few months earlier. The public buildings that burned down during Vitellius’s overthrow had not yet been rebuilt, while the civil war, the uprisings in Gaul and Germany, and the need to reward the troops had left the administration desperately short of money. Despite the victories of Vespasian and Titus, and their triumph in Rome, the new dynasty was still very insecure. The Senate dreamed of regaining the right to choose emperors, so much so that Vespasian ordered the execution of one of its members, Helvidius Priscus, and sent other senators into exile.3
The problem of who would succeed Vespasian was far more dangerous than any senatorial nostalgia for a republic, however. Even after he gave his elder son titles to show that he was his heir, the succession remained in doubt. The events of 69 had shown that an emperor might be elected by the army. Licinius Mucianus, the extremely able general who, after establishing an alliance with Titus had captured Rome for Vespasian in 70, thought he had not been properly rewarded, and there is some evidence that he was trying to turn the new emperor against Titus, even hoping to become his heir, which may be why Titus had suddenly come rushing back to Rome. Fortunately for Titus, Mucianus died in 75. Then Domitian began to dream of supplanting his elder brother, who in any case had other secret enemies. Throughout Vespasian’s reign there were whispers of conspiracy. 4 The politically minded Josephus must have sensed these menacing undercurrents, which scarcely made for peace of mind.
While there is no indication that he spent much time at court, he saw a lot of King Agrippa II, who came to Rome as a favorite of Vespasian and was granted the rank of praetor. It looks as if Agrippa was not quite sure what to make of Josephus; there are hints that sometimes he may have listened to slanders about him. However, we can be sure that Josephus took great care to flatter the last prince of the House of Herod. Someone else from Judea was in Rome during these days. Queen Berenice was living with Titus in his palace, despite her being ten years his senior. The Romans loathed Berenice, seeing her as a new Cleopatra, eager to become empress. They were repelled by rumors of her former incestuous relationship with her brother, Agrippa, and irritated by her glittering panoply of diamonds. Josephus does not refer to receiving any favors from her.
“My privileged position aroused envy and exposed me to dangers,” he tells us.5 He was envied by other Jews, and not only by those in Rome. This became evident in the case of a Jewish weaver called Jonathan, who had stirred up a rising at Cyrene that caused the death of 2,000 Jews whom he persuaded to join him. Promising the usual signs and portents, he had led them into the desert, where they were massacred by the troops of Catullus, governor of the Libyan Pentapolis. When caught, he accused the richest Jewish citizen in Cyrene of having given money to arm the rebels. The governor then forced him to accuse another 3,000 Jews in Libya, who had their property confiscated and were executed. After exhausting this source of plunder, Catullus aimed still higher, and ordered Jonathan to denounce well-known Jews in Alexandria and Rome, among them being Josephus. Hoping to convince Vespasian, the governor went to Rome, bringing Jonathan in chains. Brought before the emperor, the man insisted that Josephus had given him money and weapons. He did not deceive Vespasian, who had him burned alive—“the punishment he deserved,” says Josephus. Catullus escaped with a rebuke but was not allowed to return to Cyrene.
Josephus records Catullus’s last days with characteristic relish, telling us how the governor was struck down by a disgusting disease. He would dream that those whom he had murdered were standing by his bed, and then he would leap out of it as if he were on fire. In the end his bowels became riddled with ulcers and fell out, “providing unusually striking evidence that God in his providence visits the wicked with punishment.”6
“Subsequently, many other false accusations were made against me by people who envied my good fortune, but by the providence of God, I survived them all safely,” says Josephus.7 By his own account, his private life suddenly became very happy. “At about this time I divorced my wife, dissatisfied by her behavior,” he tells us in the Vita. “She had borne me three children, two of whom died although one called Hyrcanus is still alive. Afterwards I married a woman of Jewish extraction, who belonged to a family that had settled in Crete. Her parents were very distinguished, the most prominent people in the country. In character she infinitely surpassed the majority of her sex, as she would show throughout her subsequent life. By her I had two sons—Justus, the elder, and then Simonides, who is surnamed Agrippa.”8
Shortly after 70 CE, Josephus wrote a history of the recent war in Judea. It was probably little more than a pamphlet written at Vespasian’s bidding, but no copy has survived. As Josephus describes it in the preface of The Jewish War, it was written in Aramaic and was designed “to give an accurate account of the war and all the miseries that resulted from it, and how it ended, to Parthians, Babylonians and remote Arabians, to our Jewish kindred beyond the Euphrates and to the Assyrians.”9 His goal was to make these potentially troublesome compatriots realize how futile it would be for them to try and encourage any further rebellions in Judea.
Another purpose of the pamphlet was to reinforce the Parthians’ fear of Rome. Their king, Vologaeses, remembered all too well the defeats that had been inflicted on his soldiers by the Roman legions during the 60s. Living in terror of a rival for his throne, he had cravenly offered 40,000 troops to Vespasian in 69 when he saw that he was winning, and he had been so impressed by Titus’s capture of Jerusalem that he sent him a golden crown during his visit to Zeugma on the Euphrates. The Romans understood perfectly that these friendly gestures were inspired by fear and that the Parthians would not hesitate to attack them if they saw any chance of success.
A third purpose was to explain to the Jews of the Diaspora not only how the Temple itself had been destroyed but why: it was a judgment of God on the people of Jerusalem.10 This was among Josephus’s most fervently held convictions.
Apparently he had a Greek translation made and showed it to Vespasian, who liked what he read. It may have been the emperor and not Josephus who first realized that a book could be useful for his insecure dynasty; lacking the aristocratic background of their blue-blooded Julio-Claudian predecessors, the Flavians needed monuments to give them an air of permanence. This was the reason that the triumph had been so welcome, and why Vespasian had ostentatiously founded his new Temple of Peace. The reconquest of Judea featured prominently on their coins, that vital means of propaganda, and it would later be depicted on the Arch of Titus.
A full-scale chronicle of the war in Judea, written in Greek, with numerous copies made by professional scribes on papyrus rolls (the period’s method of publication) could command a wide circulation in the Roman world and would demonstrate that throughout the campaign the Flavians had enjoyed the favor of the gods. The author was expected to make the most of his Jotapata prophecy of Vespasian’s future greatness and to praise the heroic exploits of Titus. If no more than conjecture, this is certainly a plausible explanation of the origin of the book that we know as The Jewish War.
“There are people who by necessity and force of circumstance are obliged to write history because they took part in what happened and have no excuse for not putting it on paper for posterity’s sake,” he writes in the preface to his Antiquities of the Jews.11 He adds, “Some people decide to explain little known events on which light needs to be shed, because the general public should be made aware of them on account of their importance, events in which the writers have been involved. These are my reasons [for writing].”12
He had his own notebooks, and Vespasian and Titus lent him their war diaries, and these may have been supplemented by the jottings of other soldiers. Yet apart from his booklet, he had no apparent qualifications for such a task, especially for writing in Greek. In the last chapter of the Antiquities , written years after The Jewish War, he tells us frankly, “I have worked hard to . . . understand the elements of the Greek language, but I am so used to speaking our own tongue that I cannot pronounce Greek properly.”13 Yet if he could not speak Greek with a perfect accent, we know that he wrote it very well indeed.
“In the leisure provided by Rome, with my sources at hand and the aid of assistants to help me with the Greek tongue, I settled down to writing my account of what had taken place,” Josephus tells us in Contra Apionem, another work written long after The Jewish War.14 This passage has convinced some scholars that he relied on secretaries to write his books for him, and some argue that it is obvious from the different prose styles he uses. However, the “assistant theory” has been demolished by Tessa Rajak, who points out that it was normal for an author to use different styles in a long book, in a period when authors often copied the prose of writers whom they admired.15
Clearly, Josephus thoroughly enjoyed writing history, and he may have seen himself as following in the footsteps of giants such as Thucydides and Livy. (It is unlikely that he read Livy in the original since the interminable volumes of the great chronicler of Rome were in Latin, although he may have acquired a superficial, outline knowledge of them from some Greek epitome.) This perhaps explains his desire to be as comprehensive as possible and why The Jewish War’s first two books, a third of the entire work, have nothing to do with the war but tell the story of Judea from the Maccabees up to the last rulers of the House of Herod.
His greatest problem, however, was to give an account of the recent conflict with Rome that would absolve the Jews of as much blame as possible. He does so by portraying the Zealot regime as a bloodthirsty jacquerie against the aristocracy, who were the only real Jews. If some of the magnates joined in the revolt, it was only because they were forced into it by Florus; they had always wanted peace. He conceals the fact that many of them had been only too willing to join the Zealots, whom he caricatures as brutish fanatics or godless criminals.
And Josephus has a deeper message: God deserted his Chosen People and used the Romans to destroy the Temple, just as God had used the Babylonians to destroy the first sanctuary. This is why the Jews must never fight the Romans again; they are bound to lose.
Loyal though Josephus may have been to Rome, he can never forget that he is writing about the ruin and humiliation of the country of his birth. Even if he hides it, he must have been deeply distressed at having to tell the story during the years that it took him to write The Jewish War. Then, while he was in the middle of his task, in 73 or 74, he heard reports of an incident that would provide an epilogue to restore Jewish pride. It was that of the Zealots’ magnificent last stand at Masada.