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Who's the Toughest of them All? Jews, Spartans and Roman Torturers in Josephus' Against Apion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2014
Extract
Josephus, the Judean general, Roman captive and Flavian protégé, devoted the last twenty-five years of his life, as a privileged resident in Rome, to the redescription of Jewish identity and to the strategic placement of his cultural tradition on the controverted map of the late first-century empire. After writing his delicately poised account of the Judean War, and the large-scale ‘autoethnography’ known as the Jewish Antiquities, his final and most intricate literary endeavour is his apologetic work, Against Apion. Here Jewishness is constructed and positioned in carefully nuanced dialectic with images of ‘Egyptian’, ‘Chaldean’, ‘Greek’ and (to some degree) ‘Roman’ cultural tradition. The rhetorical flamboyance of this piece and its predominantly polemical tone give Josephus considerable licence to manipulate the tropes that suit his argumentative needs. His eye-catching exordium and the opening vilification of ‘Greek’ historiography (1.1-56) start this treatise with a familiar antithesis between Eastern antiquity and the comparative youth and fickleness of the Greeks. But as the discourse develops we find Josephus deploying his considerable knowledge of the Greek literary and historical tradition to place his Jewish tradition both outside and inside ‘Greekness’, indeed also above (superior to) and behind (historically earlier than) what may be variously labelled ‘Greek’. What gives this manipulation of Greek historical and literary tropes particular interest is not only that Josephus writes explicitly as a Jew, and in defence of his own Jewish tradition, but that he does so in Rome, aware of how ‘Greekness’ may be variously bought and sold in the Roman market-place, ‘displayed or excoriated for its decadence’. It is within this triangulation of Jewish, Greek and Roman—the last always implicit if not explicit in Josephus' text—that the subject of Sparta becomes a particularly interesting topic of discussion.
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References
1. For recent introduction, translation and commentary on Apion, see Barclay, J.M.G., Flavius Josephus, Translation and Commentary, Vol. 10: Against Apion (Leiden 2007).Google Scholar
2. For Josephus’ literary indebtedness to the Greek tradition in this work, see Schäublin, C., ‘Josephus und die Griechen’, Hermes 110 (1982), 316–41Google Scholar; for his rhetorical directions and misdirections regarding Jews and Greeks, see Gruen, E.S., ‘Greeks and Jews: Mutual Misperceptions in Josephus’ Contra Apionem’, in C. Bakhos (ed.), Ancient Judaism in its Hellenistic Context (Leiden 2005), 31–51.Google Scholar
3. Whitmarsh, T., Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation (Oxford 2001), 15.Google Scholar
4. Josephus does not use in this treatise the tradition of the political (and even ethnic) link between Sparta and the Jews that he had deployed in his Antiquities; see Gruen, E.S., ‘The Purported Jewish-Spartan Affiliation’, in R.W. Wallace and E.M. Harris (eds.), Transitions to Empire: Essays in Greco-Roman History, 360–146 B.C., in honor of E. Badian (Norman & London 1996), 254–69.Google Scholar
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6. On colonial mimicry, see Bhabha, H., The Location of Culture (London 1994Google Scholar), a collection of essays of which ‘Sly Civility’ and ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’ are especially significant in this connection. Bhabha’s notion of mimicry suggests an ambivalence in which the copying of the dominant culture both affirms its power and subtly undermines its claim to be special and superior.
7. My own translation, based on the Munster text, as in Barclay (n.l above).
8. 
(
is Dindorf’s conjecture rightly followed by modern editors).
9. The phrase contains some textual uncertainty (ἑπιτεθυμηκώς is Hudson’s conjecture, followed by all modern editors), but is clearly about the control of desire.
10. For a similar vagueness concerning the destruction of temples, see 2.131; and for argument concerning its applicability to Roman conquerors, see Barclay, J.M.G., ‘The Empire Writes Back: Josephan Rhetoric in Flavian Rome’, in J. Edmondson, S. Mason, and J. Rives (eds.), Flavius Josephus and Flavian Rome (Oxford 2005), 315–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
11. For the history, and the Roman invention of tradition, see Cartledge, P. and Spawforth, A., Hellenistic and Roman Sparta: A Tale of Two Cities2 (London 2002), 190–211.Google Scholar
12. Cf. AJ 1.16 and Philo (?), Hyp. 6.9; one could calculate the same figure from Ap. 1.1, 39. For Josephus’ assumption that Moses was of an era much earlier than Lycurgus, see 2.154.
13. By a loose definition of ‘Asia’, the reference could be to Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians and Seleucids (cf. 2.128, 133).
14. For Jewish deployment of the ancient presumption that good things prove their value by long usage and continuity, see Pilhofer, P., Presbyteron Kreitton: Der Alterbeweis der jüdischen und christlichen Apologeten und seine Vorgeschichte (Tübingen 1990).Google Scholar
15. See AJ 20.224–51. Although Strabo thought that Moses’ laws had been altered (by the Hasmonean ‘bandits’, 16.2.34–39), that perception was rare among non-Jews; normally, without any special reflection on their longevity, it was assumed (for aetiological convenience) that current Jewish customs originated in the circumstances of the Jews’ departure from Egypt.
16. For Plutarch’s relationship to Romans and to Rome, see Jones, C.P., Plutarch and Rome (Oxford 1971Google Scholar); Preston, R., ‘Roman Questions, Greek Answers: Plutarch and the Construction of Identity’, in S. Goldhill (ed.), Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire (Cambridge 2001), 86–119Google Scholar; for the purpose and ideology of the Lives, see Duff, T., Plutarch’s Lives: Exploring Virtue and Vice (Oxford 1999), esp. 287–309Google Scholar. Plutarch’s comparison of Lycurgus and Numa finishes with critical comments on Numa’s attitude to education; for their relationship to recent debates in Rome on this topic, see Desideri, P., ‘Lycurgus: The Spartan Ideal in the Age of Trajan’, in P.A. Stadter and L. van der Stockt (eds.), Sage and Emperor: Plutarch, Greek Intellectuals, and Roman Power in the Time of Trajan (98–117 A.D.) (Leuven 2002), 315–27Google Scholar. Whitmarsh’s general comments on the uses of Greek identity in this period are clearly relevant to both Plutarch and Josephus: ‘The central points, however, are two: first, that this imaginary “Greece” was always circumscribed by the Roman empire (and this is the case even when the Roman present seems most explicitly ignored); secondly, that Greekness was not a selfevident essence, but a locus of conflict between multiple, at times exclusive, definitions’ (Whitmarsh [n.3 above], 29).
17. Josephus’ idealised portrait of Jewish agricultural work (cf. Ap. 1.60; 2.234, 291, 294) may owe something to old-fashioned Roman ideals, just as his critique of Spartans in this regard is parallelled by Tacitus’ complaint about German fighters who do not also till the land (Germ. 14.3–4).
18. The same verb is used earlier in relation to Greek proselytes who abandoned Judaism, being unable to ‘endure’ its laws (2.123). άργία can, of course, carry negative connotations, but Josephus manages to turn it here into a difficult discipline.
19. As I write, British newspapers report a similarly ‘shocking’ inversion of stereotypes: it has taken an Italian (!) manager to instil discipline into the English football team. ‘Under Steve McClaren, it was do as you please. Wake up when you fancy, amble downstairs when it suits, eat what you like, take as long as you like. …Under Capello, it’s quick march down to the dining room in formation, eat what you’re told, chew the regulation number of times, eat together, leave together…’ (The Independent, 8 February 2008).
20. A highly ambiguous assessment of warfare also hangs around Plutarch’s comparison between Lycurgus and Numa: while Lycurgus’ virtues were clearly military, his goals, Plutarch insists, were not imperialistic (Lye. 30–31). Numa is praised for keeping the early Rome at peace for so long (with the doors of the temple of Janus shut). But his system of peace and justice did not last, for soon after his death ‘Italy was filled with the blood of the slain’ (Numa 26.6). Did not Rome therefore gain improvement (
) by warfare? Plutarch notably refuses to answer: ‘That is a question that would need a long answer for people who hold that improvement consists in wealth, luxury and empire, rather than safety, gentleness and independence (αὐταρκεία) accompanied by justice’ (Numa 26.7). The comment is by no means straightforwardly ‘anti-Roman’ (an assessment too crude for a complex and in many respects Romanised figure like Plutarch), but it plays on Rome’s own anxieties that her military success is, in moral terms, an ambiguous phenomenon. On Plutarch’s cultural self-positioning in his Lives, see Jones (n.16 above), 88–109,122f.
21. See esp. Barton, C.A., Roman Honor: The Fire in the Bones (Berkeley 2001).Google Scholar Cicero famously made the gender connotations explicit: ‘the uirtus (“virtue”) proper to a man is fortitude (“courage”), for which there are two main tasks: scorn of death and scorn of pain (mortis et doloris contemptio). We must practise these if we wish to possess uirtus, or rather if we wish to be uiri (“men”)’ (Tusc. 2.18.43). Cf. Quintilian, Inst. 12.3.30.
22. On the tradition, see esp. van Henten, J.W., The Maccabean Martyrs as Saviours of the Jewish People: A Study of 2 and 4 Maccabees (Leiden 1997Google Scholar); for the gender dynamics of 4 Maccabees, see Moore, S.D. and Capel Anderson, J., ‘Taking It like a Man: Masculinity in 4 Maccabees’, JBL 117 (1998), 249–73.Google Scholar
23. Plutarch had witnessed the famous ‘floggings’ (Lye 18.1), and the rite remains a topic of fascinated comment for generations thereafter: see, e.g., Luc. Anach. 38 (parallelled with torture); Philostr. VA 6.20; Lib. Orat. 1.23.
24. For Josephus’ awareness of such semiotics, see M. Gleason, ‘Mutilated Messengers: Body Language in Josephus’, in Goldhill (n.16 above), 50–85.
25. Whom is he writing this for? On the ever-controverted question of Josephus’ audience(s), see Barclay (n.l above), xlv–liii.