Dexippus’ speech touches on the broad (and difficult) issue of the reception of elite historical consciousness outside the ranks of the elite. It is plain that the imperial representations of the past discussed in this chapter, Roman or Greek, stem chiefly from persons equipped by a liberal education to participate as readers or writers in a sophisticated literary discourse, and reflect the attitudes and interests of a well-to-do social class. In what form and with what force they permeated down to the urban population at large is a difficult question, one we can only glance at here. For the literate, the inscribed word was clearly important; we hear of ‘‘history walls’’ in the provinces, collections of texts of local interest inscribed on some central civic monument, and quite often presenting official communications between Rome and the city concerned in summarized or excerpted form (Potter 1994: 117-19). At Rome, theatrical games still drew the crowds (Tac. Ann. 11.13) and were possibly a conduit, though proof is lacking that historical drama as such featured in that setting (the only extant item of possible relevance is the pseudo-Senecan Octavia, a treatment of Nero’s matrimonial crimes written in the 70s with the stage arguably in mind; Wiseman 1998: 53). Mythological rather than historical scenarios seem to characterize the Colosseum’s ‘‘fatal charades’’ (Coleman 1990), but the Campus Martius saw ad hoc ‘‘historical’’ shows like Claudius’ ‘‘sack of a town and the surrender of British kings’’ (Suet. Claud. 21.6; Potter, this volume), and his conquest of Britain was visually commemorated in far-off Asia in an Aphrodisian relief personifying a female Britannia fallen at the feet of the divine emperor (R. R. R. Smith 1988). And there were always spectacles and visual imagery of the sort we have noticed earlier: the Augustan and Neronian recreations at Rome of the battle of Salamis; the sculptures of‘‘great men’’ in the Augustan Forum; the friezes on the emperors’ triumphal arches, and the coin images commemorating imperial victories; the statues led in procession through Trajanic Ephesus; the festivals of ‘‘Hadrian Panhellenios’’ at Athens - all of these could speak clearly enough to persons hardly literate. So, for that matter, could monumental inscriptions: many were impressive physical objects in their own right, and needed no close reading to impart a sense of the continuity of imperial power. It seems likely, too, that local tradition would count specially strongly with the humbler provincial classes, and the accommodation of its observances to the imperial present - most notably, by the linking of imperial cult to the festivals of civic cult - signals the concern of local elites to advertise the consonance of local patriotism with the imperial status quo. There are hints on this score of an awareness that popular feeling for the past, unless channeled, was potentially disruptive of civic order. Plutarch’s elite Greek readers were advised to tailor their praises of the past according to the audience being addressed: to dwell on inspiring victories like Marathon was acceptable in the lecture hall, but ‘‘liable to make the common people swell with vain pride’’ and best avoided in public speeches (Praec. ger. reip. 814c). Even at Rome itself, a plebeian historical consciousness with a potentially anti-aristocratic slant apparently still existed for Sejanus to exploit in his bid for the consulship (Syme 1956), and traces of it arguably persist in the late fourth century (R. B. E. Smith 2002: 159). We have also noted Tiberius’ worries over an unauthorized ‘‘Sibylline’’ book; its content is not specified, but it is well known that disaffected versions of‘‘history’’ could masquerade as prophecy: several of the texts now extant as the ‘‘Sibylline Oracles’’ were second - or third-century ce Christian and Jewish forgeries whose content was shaped by their authors’ hopes for the fall of the empire (Momigliano 1987: 114-15, 138-41; Potter 1994: 87-90, 171). That said, not all oracles were eschatologically-obsessed, and not all who read them were rabidly anti-Roman. Some could offer readers ‘‘potted history’’ in a picturesque form owing little to elite historiography, but much to what a local writer might cull from the sorts of epigraphic and visual material we have just mentioned: their stylized representations ofimperial power have been aptly related to the images their authors encountered on coins and sculpture (Potter 1994: 110-30). ‘‘Alternative’’ history, then, did not always express active disaffection. The power of elite discourse to control the views of ‘‘the many’’ had its limits, and the concern of the Roman and provincial elites to head off potential recalcitrants is a reminder that to control is not to achieve total consensus; but it is implicit in the fundamental stability of imperial social structures up to the mid-third century that the cooperation of the elite effectively protected the basic interests of their class.
It is also plain that the representations of the past we have treated reflect the views of persons who identified themselves in cultural terms as Roman or Greek. But by no means all of the emperor’s subjects, of course, even if they spoke Latin or Greek, identified themselves that way: to pick random examples from the frontier provinces, there were Celts, Germans, Berbers, Jews, Nabataean Arabs, each a culturally distinctive group. ‘‘Greekness’’ itself, for that matter, was an elastic cultural badge: the Panhellenion, as we noted, configured Greekness in Athenocentric terms that favored the old Greek homeland as against the Greek settlements in the east in the Hellenistic age - and among the latter were Egyptian Alexandria and Syrian Antioch, both great cities and cultural centers in their own right. Like the question of ‘‘non-elite’’ historical consciousness, the ways in which these subject-communities ‘‘constructed’’ their past under Roman rule is a large and difficult subject (Millar 1993a), and largely outside the compass of a chapter focused on elite Greco-Roman discourse.
One extraordinary witness to the Jewish case, though, the historian Josephus, is too important to pass unmentioned here. Greeks and Romans themselves sensed that the historical consciousness of the Jews constituted a special case on various counts - its religious nationalism and exclusiveness, the authority it assigned to sacred texts, its very longevity, and its bearing on the rebellions in Judea under Nero and Hadrian sharpened its interest for them (e. g. Tac. Hist. 5.1-13). Josephus (37-c.100 ce) wrote partly with gentile readers in mind, and presents us with a fascinating case of divided loyalties: a rebel general who surrendered to and later served the Romans in the catastrophic first revolt; an aristocratic and priestly Jew from Palestine writing history in Greek on Jewish subjects - writing at Rome, moreover, as a beneficiary of the Flavian dynasty’s patronage, and a Roman citizen by imperial grant, but remaining a Jew by religion, and always concerned to defend and extol Judaism. Unsurprisingly, both his personal integrity and his honesty as a historian are often debated (Rappaport 1994), but for us the prime interest of the case lies elsewhere: Josephus’ works reflect the power of Greco-Roman representations of the past to affect the historical outlook of a writer raised in a Palestinian Jewish cultural tradition, but equally, the resilience of the Jewish sense of history, and the ability of a resourceful writer to spot cracks in the Greco-Roman cultural facade.
On the first count, both of Josephus’ major works disclose not just a general engagement with Greek historiographic models, but significant intellectual debts to specific Greek historical texts. In the Jewish War, for instance, the borrowings from Thucydides go deeper than the sort ofliterary play which makes Jerusalem respond to the news that Jotapata has fallen as the Athenians had to the Sicilian disaster (BJ 3.432, echoing Thuc. 8.1); a prime aim of the work was to exonerate the bulk of the Jews from the charge of disloyalty to Rome by emphasizing the pernicious role of a faction-riven extremist minority, and Josephus’ notion of the workings of Jewish factionalism in this connection draws on Thucydides’ famous analysis of revolutionary stasis at Corcyra (Rajak 1983: 84, 92-4). As for the Jewish Antiquities, written in the 90s and narrating Jewish history from the Creation to the start of the revolt in 20 books, it has been called ‘‘the first great achievement of Greek historiography in the imperial period’’ (Millar 1969: 14); a debt to Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ Roman Antiquities is patent in its title and structural arrangement, and probably also at a deeper level: a central preoccupation in both works is the issue of how a nonRoman ethnic culture could hope to be accommodated within a ‘‘universalizing’’
Roman Empire (Gabba 1991: 214-16). For Jews and Romans alike, this question had a very practical edge in the wake of the revolt of 66-70 ce. The Flavians’ claim to dynastic power was intimately linked to their victory in Judea, and both Vespasian and Titus wrote reports of their campaigns that Josephus, and presumably others, could consult (Rajak 1983: 215-16). His own Jewish War was composed in the 70s for a mixed readership of gentiles and Jews of the Diaspora (his earlier version in Aramaic, Josephus observes [BJ 1.3-6], had catered to oriental readers, among them the Jews of Mesopotamia). A major contention of the work was that Judaism and Roman power were now compatible, the war having eliminated the ‘‘bad’’ Jews who had led their nation to ruin. Similarly, Josephus offered his Antiquities to gentile readers in the conviction that it would interest and benefit them to learn the entire course of Jewish history ‘‘up to the last war involuntarily waged against Rome’’; Mosaic Law, they would find, chimed well with their own philosophers’ best prescriptions for virtue ( BJ 1.5-7, 15-20). This line of argument was obviously appealing for the hope it offered that the rift between Rome and the Judean elite was not irreparable; it is often assumed, though, that in the Jewish War Josephus’ argument was chiefly self serving, a contorted effort to justify his own accommodation with Rome in a work whose prime purpose was to supply his Flavian patrons with an account of the revolt that glorified their suppression of it. That assumption is vulnerable in what it takes for granted: that Josephus secretly acknowledged himself to be what his critics claimed, an opportunist turncoat and imperial lackey who had irredeemably deserted his people and religion. The War undeniably flatters the Flavians, but its paradoxical insistence that Judaism was not inimical to Roman power is certainly no reflection of Flavian publicity. The Flavian version of the matter was just the opposite; it is enshrined on their victory arches in the friezes depicting the crushing of the rebellion, and in the inscription placed on the Flavian Amphitheater (a recent study has disclosed that the commemorative text originally displayed on this dynastic showpiece highlighted Vespasian’s funding of it ex manubiis - ‘‘from the spoils,’’ that is, of the Jewish War [Alfoldy 1995]).
The distance between Josephus and his imperial patrons on this point is enough to refute the notion that he wrote Flavian propaganda to order. Moreover, a distinctively Jewish theological strand plainly subsisted in his basic historical outlook, his conciliatory attitude towards gentile readers and borrowings from their historians notwithstanding. Thucydides’ analysis of faction dynamics might illuminate the actions of the Jewish rebels 66-70 ce, but for Josephus it could never offer a full and definitive explanation of the rebellion and its outcome: faction was a sin and God had willed the defeat of the Jews as punishment for it, using Rome as his instrument (BJ 6.109, 411); Rome herself only ruled the world because God, to whom past and future are one, was presently on her side (BJ 5.367). And it was not only that the cause of historical events lay ultimately in God; for Josephus, the history that God willed was prophetically revealed in Scripture, and the prophets were themselves inspired historians and valuable sources: Samuel, for instance, had not needed a good memory or archive to write the history of Israel’s kings - God had given him secret knowledge of future events, and Samuel had written them out before they occurred (BJ6.66, with J. Barton 1986: 130). Similarly, Josephus believed that the Book of Daniel (a key text for the argument of the Antiquities) had accurately predicted the Roman Empire, not to mention Alexander’s (AJ 11.337, 10.276; Momigliano 1987: 117). The logical corollary, unthinkable to a Greek or Roman, was that a historian’s own clairvoyance could constitute part of his knowledge and could legitimately feature in his narrative - and for Josephus, this was not just theory. A famous passage in the War recounts that in 67 CE, while Nero still ruled, Josephus was brought before Vespasian as a prisoner of war, and predicted to him his future rule as emperor (BJ 3.401): whatever moderns care to make of it, Josephus himself unequivocally ascribes the event to his own prophetic inspiration, ‘‘dreams by night in which God had foretold to him the impending fate of the Jews and the destinies of Roman kings’’ (BJ 3.351-2; J. Barton 1986: 127-8).
Josephus, then, only ever became a ‘‘Greek historian’’ in a significantly qualified sense: in some of his guiding presuppositions, he interpreted the past in a way quite foreign to Greeks and Romans. If one of his purposes as a historian was to represent the Jews as fundamentally loyal to the empire by emphasizing points of consonance between Judaism and Greco-Roman culture, the extent to which he personally could feel part of that culture was surely restricted - by his own mentality as much as any prejudice in the imperial system (Goodman 1994). His engagement with Greek culture, in particular, has an ambivalent and sometimes competitive edge, and a political background in long-standing tensions between the local Greek and Jewish populations in Palestine. Josephus commends his Jewish War to Greek readers by archly contrasting its probity and grand contemporary theme with the disengaged exercises in nostalgia that Flavian Greek historians prefer: forgetting what made Thucydides great, they spend their time re-telling the histories of the Assyrians and Medes, ‘‘as if the old narratives were not fine enough’’ (BJ 1.12). So too, while the preface of the Antiquities may dress Moses as a Greek philosopher-statesman in terms congenial to Greek readers, it also pointedly tells them that that he lived 2,000 years ago, and that the Jewish scriptures embrace a history stretching back 5,000 years ( AJ 1.13, 16). The point implicit here - that if antiquity legitimated a national culture, the Greeks could not compare - is made overtly, and overtly polemically, in a complementary late work written at Rome c.96 ce, Against Apion (1.19-27, 57-68): there, Josephus rebuts at length Greek critics’ claims that he had exaggerated the antiquity of the Jews, and ascribes the Greeks’ failure to recognize it to deficiencies in their own historiographic tradition as compared to the Jewish records (Bicker-man 1952: 76-8). The particular claim lends support to the broader argument of Against Apion that Judaism is demonstrably superior to Greek culture, and it has been acutely observed in this connection that the qualities in Judaism which Josephus picks out for special praise bear a striking likeness to those which Latin writers of the period attach to the Roman character when they wish to compare it favorably with Greek fickleness (Goodman 1994: 335): here, arguably, we see Josephus adroitly exploiting the ingrained ambivalence of one gentile culture towards another to represent Judaism in the form best suited to win it friends at Rome.
World History
