The flood of scholarship in English on the biography, politics, religious outlook and literary output of Flavius Josephus shows no sign of abating. The Brill Josephus Project is proceeding apace, with D.R. Schwartz’s volume on Antiquities 18–20 published in 2024, and new voices, including that of J. Davies, author of an elegant introduction to Josephus for Greece and Rome’s New Surveys in the Classics (2025), continue to feed the appetite for the study of the Jewish writer.
The daunting task facing any scholar wanting to make an impression on the discourse is to find something new and interesting to say. G. sets himself just such a task with the volume under review. The book’s subtitle, A Historiographical Analysis of Autobiographical Discourse in the Judaean War gives the first indication of the writer’s highly controlled approach to the project, determined at the outset to define its scope as tightly as possible. This is an entirely understandable response to the volume of scholarship already published and to the reasonable requirement that any new thinking on the subject declares itself clearly. It also shows the debt to the work of S. Mason, which has long sought to keep methodological first principles vigilantly in view.
The book is part of the Brill series Historiography of Rome and Its Empire, which seeks ‘to help to provide a better understanding of ancient historiography, as well as to identify fruitful approaches to Roman history and historiography’ (p. ix). In this work the focus is on Josephus’ ‘self-fashioning’, specifically in the Jewish/Judaean War (the distinction between the adjectives now a question upon which scholars commonly take a position, see p. 2 n. 6), and G. thus positions himself in a strand of recent scholarship less interested in the biography of the Jewish writer, instead examining the condition and seeming textual dynamics of his work; as G. puts it, echoing his mentor: looking at, not seeing through (p. 6).
G. sees Josephus as embedded in ‘a strong social network’ (p. 20), a figure located in a Roman literary milieu to which he had sought access through laborious study of the Graeco-Roman historical tradition, and above all its attraction to the power of exempla in history-writing. Seeing Greek and Roman historiography as ‘a genre steeped in rhetorical values’ (p. 27), G. ranges widely in illustrating the point, summoning up Cicero, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Aristotle, Polybius, Livy, Seneca et al. in support of the way in which ‘character’ is revealed in this tradition, above all through speeches, like those inserted into the War at critical points.
According to G., Josephus’ hard-won skills as a ‘Roman’ historian were his key point of contact with his elite readers, and his presentation of himself in the War accordingly exhibits a range of techniques designed to impress: apology, moderated self-praise, self-identification as a ‘Krisenhistoriker’ (like Thucydides) reflecting on the moral disaster of stasis and as an embodiment of virtus (carefully including Titus’ admiration for his leadership). Josephus’ famous speech at Jotapata has echoes of Stoic virtues even as it displays ‘an ability to switch between all sorts of tools in his vast arsenal – emotion, philosophy, rhetoric, personal authority, and physical strength – to achieve the ends he deems worthy’ (p. 112). G. depicts a Josephus determined to deliver a virtuosic historiographical performance for his audience and readership in Rome.
Josephus’ notorious ‘exegetical imprecision’ when invoking Jewish Biblical history – seen in speeches like the one addressed to the people of Jerusalem (BJ 5.362–419) – can be seen too to take its place in the context of ‘Roman exemplary discourse’ (p. 132) as a device flexible and ‘multivalent’ (p. 132), serving the historian’s high moral purpose.
Josephus’ self-praise is one of the vehicles by which this purpose is achieved, and, here again, G. connects him to a long Greek tradition of reflection on the hazards to the author of self-praise and the consequent need for ‘decorum’. G. hears echoes of writers from Aristotle to Pseudo-Hermogenes and Quintilian, attributing to Josephus in one important Josephan reflection on his literary achievements in the Antiquities (20.262–7) a ‘deep knowledge and creative use of the Greek cultural register’ (p. 167).
On the great turning-point in Josephus’ life, his defection to Rome, all the stops provided by the Graeco-Roman tradition are pulled out to counter any suggestion that Josephus was a common coward: the exempla from Herod, Agrippa II and the High Priest Ananus; Titus’ moderation towards the Jews; the illegitimacy of suicide; felicitas; and divine intervention. ‘This reinforces the impression that Josephus inserted these references partly for their rhetorical force, in accordance with Graeco-Roman autobiographical conventions’ (p. 206).
G. has produced a well-informed and highly disciplined book. Some readers, however, might see its thesis as suggestive, rather than compelling. G. is too wise a historian to conceal how few of the many connections made are explicitly evident in Josephus’ text; Josephus expresses a debt – directly or stylistically – to virtually none of the Graeco-Roman writers examined. But the speculation is welcomely both provocative and legitimate. Regardless of the book’s main argument, G.’s review of the Graeco-Roman tradition, a splendid compendium of historiographical reflections, is so accomplished that it and its commentary can easily stand as a detachable stand-alone study of Graeco-Roman history-writing.
G.’s admirable determination to control the study runs the risk of exhibiting an over-rigorous inflexibility that could be avoided by stepping outside of the constrictions created by this process of juxtaposing so many writers. The decision, for example, to downplay the suggestion that Josephus’ motivation was other than addressing Judaean opponents unnecessarily glosses over both the significant number of Judaeans resident in Rome post-70 ce, some of them writing about the war, as well as the sheer regional detail visible in Josephus’ text (one thinks of Josephus’ accounts of the territorial extent of the Hasmonaean state or the travails of Herod, fleeing through the villages and districts of Judaea and Idumaea – what did these elite Romans make of the roll-calls of villages of Galilee)? Why is it so difficult to imagine Josephus as a writer who was capable of communicating to a diverse audience (and would members of the Jewish community in Rome really have paid no attention to his recitations on the recent war)?
The book is a valuable contribution to the ongoing discourse on Josephus and his audience but not, perhaps, in entirely the way in which the author suggests. It is curious that scholars like G. (and others) seem to believe that their studies in some way successfully avoid or even exclude the biography of Josephus. But the clear implication of their work is that Josephus was a flesh-and-blood working writer who deliberately deployed the techniques so extensively described here – an observation that is solidly biographical. And this is being offered to readers as a ‘reliable’ biographical observation in precisely the tradition that G. wants to eschew.
In the end G. successfully shows the Josephus of the War to be a complex literary character, drawn with skill and some subtlety. Uncomplicated people rarely successfully depict themselves as complex. The mystery of Josephus is set to continue.
