From hostage to historian: Josephus, the emperors, and the city of Rome

The voluminous works of the Judaean historian Flavius Josephus have been and continue to be of tremendous importance for our understanding of the worlds in which he lived. For centuries his works have been thoroughly investigated by scholars in diverse fields. Until more recently, however, the Roman context in which Josephus lived as he wrote was rarely explored at length, despite the fact that it is indispensable for our knowledge and understanding of the man and the historian. Recent scholarship has, however, taken up the exploration of his interactions with his environment with enthusiasm, undermining longstanding conceptions regarding his relationship with the Roman world in the process. The present study builds on these current trends and considers particularly the social circumstances in which Josephus lived in Rome during the latter part of his life. By exploring the relationship between Josephus and each of the Flavian emperors-Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian-individually, this study seeks to explore the nature of these relationships more comprehensively than has been done in the past. This aim of comprehensiveness is achieved in part by beginning not with Josephus' arrival in Rome in AD 71, but with his first voyage to the imperial capital during the reign of Nero, and by considering also the contact between Josephus and the future Roman emperors within the Roman army camp in Judaea during the course of the 1st Judaean War. In the examination of these relationships, this study supports the increasing recognition in Josephan scholarship that the Judaean historian cannot justifiably be characterized as a 'Flavian lackey' or propagandist, a view that has not yet been fully accepted by non-Josephan scholars. Having established the possible parameters of his relationships with the imperial family, the study also explores the contact between Josephus and other inhabitants of Rome, including the Herodian princes and the patron of his final works, the freedman Epaphroditus, in an attempt to determine as clearly as possible the social circles in which he functioned as he lived out the final years of his life in the city of Rome.