Chapter 13 Josephus’s Jewish War and Late Republican Civil War

Honora Howell Chapman

The Jewish War of Flavius Josephus (37 CE–c. 100 CE) is hardly the first text a scholar would turn to in order to learn more about the historiography of Late Roman Republican civil war, since this seven-volume history focuses upon the background for and events of a rebellion inside the Roman Empire that lasted from 66 to 74 CE, over one hundred years after the deaths of Licinius Crassus, Pompey the Great, and Julius Caesar. In fact, throughout all thirty volumes of Josephus’s four extant works, one will not find the Gracchi brothers or Marius at all, and Cicero and Cato the Younger only appear once.1 If, however, a scholar seeks to understand Josephus’s historiography through an examination of his use of stasis and emphylios polemos as themes, with his specifically Judaean2 perspective on events leading up to the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, then Jewish War provides a fascinating comparandum to classical sources used

1 Joseph AJ 14.66 for Cicero and AJ 14.185 for Cato the Younger. Commenting on the former passage, Marcus 1933, n. c, 480–481 shows the complexity of using Josephus as an historical source, in this case for Pompey’s army capturing Jerusalem in 63 BCE: “The 179th Olympiad (first year) extended from July 64 to July 63 BC; the consulship of Antonius and Cicero was in 63 BC; the combination of the two dates gives us the first half of 63 BC for the capture of the city. This date cannot be harmonized with the mention of the Fast Day, if by this Josephus means the Day of Atonement, which falls on the 10th of Tishri (roughly October) (…) Josephus is here supplementing Nicolas’ account from those of Strabo and other histori- ans, who, like many pagan writers, erroneously referred to the Sabbath as a fast day; cf. Strabo xvi.763 [=16.2.40], who says Pompey took Jerusalem ‘on a fast day, they say, when the Jews refrain from all work,’ and Dio Cassius xxvii.16, who says that the city was taken ‘on the day of Kronos’ (=the Sabbath). The city probably fell about July 63 BC if, as Josephus (or Nicolas) says, the siege lasted three months, since Pompey apparently started operations in the spring of 63 BC. (cf. [14.]53 note d).” See also Mason 2016a, 100: “He dates Pompey’s capture of Jerusalem in 63 BCE. to the consulship of Cicero and Marcus Antonius, citing as witness ‘Titus Livius, the author of the Roman history’ (AJ 14.66–68). And the magnum opus displays many parallels with both Cicero’s Republic and Laws and Dionysius of Halicarnassus’s 20-vol- ume Roman Antiquities (…) We have no grounds for thinking of Josephus as a Latinist again, but nor can we imagine that he was barred from the most famous literature in Rome.” 2 This chapter uses “Judaean” and “Jewish” or “Jew” interchangeably; the former reminds us that Josephus came from Judaea, as in the IVDAEA CAPTA coinage minted by the Flavians after the war.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004409521_014 Josephus’s Jewish War and Late Republican Civil War 293 more often for the study of Roman history and historiography of civil war.3 After all, the Rome in which Josephus wrote had just survived yet another civil war, and his writings, therefore, reflect the current anxieties that many must have felt about civil unrest and their desire for a stable society and government in the 70s CE. This chapter will provide biographical information on Josephus, followed by an analysis of his approach in Jewish War (hereafter BJ) toward the Roman capture of Jerusalem in 63 BCE and the three Late Roman Republican generals who made their mark on Jewish history. Born Yosef ben Matityahu into an aristocratic family of priests, and with a great-great-grandmother who was Hasmonean,4 Josephus composed his his- tory of the Jewish War as a “free man,” Lucian’s ἐλεύθερος ἀνήρ,5 both legally and professionally. Choosing to live, instead of committing suicide when cor- nered as a rebel general in a cave at Jotapata in 67 CE, this elite Jewish priest then led the life of a slave and subsequently free man (not freedman) that sounds almost fictional to us, especially since we rely on his writings for virtu- ally his entire life story.6 He was released from captivity in 69 CE thanks to his prophecy that the Roman commander Vespasian would be made emperor.7 According to his own accounts, Flavius Josephus (taking the gens name of his former master and making his original name a Latinized cognomen) then as

3 Schwartz 2013, 14 advises, “But if he or she who reads Josephus’ works as literature can af- ford to ignore history, those who read him in order to learn history cannot afford to ignore literature.” 4 Joseph Vit. 1–6; on Josephus’s pedigree, see Mason 2001, 1–10. Josephus’s defensive posture in Vit. 6: τὴν μὲν τοῦ γένους ἡμῶν διαδοχήν, ὡς ἐν ταῖς δημοσίαις δέλτοις ἀναγεγραμμένην εὗρον, οὕτως παρατίθεμαι τοῖς διαβάλλειν ἡμᾶς πειρωμένοις χαίρειν φράσας (“I thus present the succession of our ancestry as I have found it recorded in the public registers, sending a greeting to those who try to malign us” [trans. Mason 2001]), reminds us that the author had enemies, includ- ing a certain rebel Jonathan who had accused Josephus of sending him arms and money (Vit. 424). 5 Lucian Hist. conscrib. 61. 6 Joseph BJ 3.340–391; for a modern mathematical application of this episode with Josephus and 40 other people in the cave drawing lots to kill each other, called the Josephus Problem, see Weisstein 2005. See Lowrie and Vinken in this volume for the theme of suicide in Lucan. The echo of Josephus’s life in Lew Wallace’s fictional Ben.-Hur is no accident: see Solomon 2016. 7 Joseph BJ 4.623–629 recounts his dramatic emancipation, including Titus asking his father that an axe be used to sever Josephus’s chain in order to remove the shame of slavery, since Josephus had prophesied back at BJ 3.401–402 that both Vespasian and Titus would become emperor; a few decades later, Suetonius recalls the prophecy (Vesp. 5.6): et unus ex nobilibus captiuis Iosephus, cum coiceretur in uincula, constantissime asseuerauit fore ut ab eodem breui solueretur, uerum iam imperatore (“One of the noble captives, Josephus, when he was being thrown into chains, very firmly insisted that he would be released by the same man [Vespasian] shortly, in fact surely as emperor”).