The Flavian Jewish War: A Senecan Tragedy

The Flavian

Jewish War

A Senecan Tragedy

Dr. Suresh A. Shenoy

Copyright © 2011 Suresh A. Shenoy

All rights reserved.

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Cover information

Title: The Destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem

Artist: Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665)

Date: 1625

Medium: Oil on canvas

Location: Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna, Austria

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For Elvira again

and our Thirteen Jewels!

‘That history should have copied history was already sufficiently astonishing;

that history should copy literature was inconceivable…’

Jorge Luis Borges

Theme of the Traitor and the Hero

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction

Part 1: Lucius Annaeus Seneca and Flavius Josephus

1. Seneca and Josephus: Private Persons behind Public Personae

2. The Contexts of Seneca’s Tragedies and the Judaean War

3. Herakles of Euripides and Seneca’s Hercules Furens

4. Genre Conventions in Hercules Furens of Seneca

5. The Herod Narrative in the Mode of Hercules Furens

6. The Herod Narrative as a Five-Act Tragedy

Part 2: Judaean War as a Five-Act Tragedy

7. Act One of Judaean War - The Exposition

8. Act Two of Judaean War - The Complication

9. Act Three of Judaean War - The Climax

10. Act Four of Judaean War - The Reversal

11. Act Five of Judaean War - The Catastrophe

Part 3 Extensions of the Tragedy Form

12. Events and Personalities in the Judaean War

13. The Judaean War in Genres Disjunction

14. The Creator and the Readers of the Judaean War

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements

The Flavian Jewish War: a Senecan Tragedy is my second book in print. It has been long in preparation, almost a decade. It began as a doctoral thesis in the Early Christian Studies at the Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, in 2001. In 2006, at my graduation, it took on the identity of ‘Josephus’s Jewish War as a Five-Act Tragedy’. In the course of my research for the thesis, I discovered the implications of my studies in Josephus’ war narrative for the Gospels and the Acts of Apostles. Having completed the thesis, I immediately undertook to follow my insights into the New Testament texts with encouragement from my academic friends. It resulted in the publication through Kindle eBooks of my first book The Four Fabulists: the Literary Genres of the Gospels and the Acts of Apostles.

It is the advice from the examiners of my thesis that guided me to add explicit Senecan links to Flavius Josephus’s war narrative and to give the book the form it has taken in print. I am grateful to my doctoral supervisors Associate Professors James S. McLaren and David Sim of the Australian Catholic University. Their encouragement and guidance have been invaluable to me. So have the insights of Professors Tessa Rajak of Reading University and of William Dominik of Otago University, both scholars of renown and experts in classics and Flavius Josephus. However, be it noted that the concept, the design, the arguments and the conclusions of my book are entirely mine.

I owe my thanks to Premila and Prakash Shenoy, two of my children, for their creative contribution in developing the cover and the author photograph.

The many years devoted to studies of this kind do not happen by chance. I have had a devoted family, my wife Elvira, our children and their families as a constant source of encouragement. I thank them whole-heartedly. With the inspiration I derive from them, other books will surely see the light of day.

Melbourne, October 2011

Suresh A. Shenoy

Abbreviations

Ab Urb.: Ab urbe condita, Livy

Ag.: Agamemnon, Seneca

A.J.: Antiquitates judaicae, Flavius Josephus

Ann.: Annales, Tacitus

Ant. rom.: Antiquitates romanae, Dionysius of Halicarnassus

Apol.: Apocolocyntosis, Seneca

B.J.: Bellum judaicum, Flavius Josephus

Ben.: De beneficiis, Seneca

C. Ap.: Contra Apionem, Josephus

De Or.: De Oratore, Cicero

Clem.: De Clementia, Seneca

Dial.: Dialogi, Seneca

Ep.: Epistulae Morales, Seneca

Eth. eu.: Ethica eudemia, Aristotle

Eth. nic. : Ethica nichomachea, Aristotle

Helv.: Ad Helviam, Seneca

Herc. fur.: Hercules furens,. SenecaHistoriae, : HerodotusHist.Consc.: Quomodo Historia Conscribenda Sit, Lucian of Samosata

Histo.: Histories, Tacitus

Inst.: Institutio Oratoria, Quintilian

Ira: De Ira, Seneca

JA: Jewish Antiquities, Judaean Antiquities, Flavius Josephus

JJS: Journal of Jewish Studies

JRS: Journal of Roman Studies

JW: Jewish War, Judaean War, Flavius Josephus

LCL: Loeb Classical Library

Lucil.: Ad Lucilium, Seneca

Marc.: Ad Marciam de consolatione, Seneca

Med.: Medea, Seneca

Nat.: Naturales Questiones, Seneca

Oed.: Oedipus, Seneca

Pelop. War.: The Peloponnesian Wars, Thucydides

Phaed.: Phaedra, Seneca

1-4 Philip.: Pilippica i-iv, Demonsthenes

Phoen.: Phoenissae, Seneca

Poet.: Poetica, Aristotle

Polyb.: Ad Polybium de consolatione, Seneca

Repub.: De Republica, Plato

SCI : Scripta Classica Israelica

The Hist.: The Histories, Polybius

Thy.: Thyestes, Seneca

Tranq.: De tranquillitate animi, Seneca

Tro.: Troades, Seneca

Vita: Vita, Flavius Josephus

Vit. beat.: De vita beata, Seneca

Introduction

Flavius Josephus holds some scholars permanently mesmerised should they ever venture into his life and works. One of the scholars whom I greatly admire said of Josephus, ‘If once one gets acquainted with him, there is no way to get him out of one’s system’. It has certainly been my pleasurable pain like that of a bee stuck on its back in a dollop of honey!

There is, however, no guarantee that everyone who gets to know Josephus becomes his admirer. Probably fewer admire Josephus than those who despise him. Those few who admire Josephus, I dare say, are able to read him more correctly, than a host of others who cannot. The underlying approach of this book is that the Judaean War is the symbol of Josephus who wrote it. The symbol is the key to the man. By understanding it comprehensively, we can understand the person of the author as distinct from his public persona. In other words, only if we can comprehend Josephus’ work, the Judaean War, as it demands to be, then we can know him more reliably. If we can recognize his true self, I feel assured we will admire him.

It is a matter of record, that the earliest comments in modern scholarship dating back to 1853 denigrated the character of Josephus and extended the negativity to his history of the Judaean War. By the end of the nineteenth century, other scholars maintained their negative perceptions of the character of Josephus but were more appreciative of his history. Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, appreciation of the history as an example of classical history has prevailed without significant recognition of the true authorial intent or of his personality.

My position, happily, has nuances of which previous scholars on Josephus have been unaware. I approach the Judaean War from the perspective of its genre with a firm focus on it as history in the classical sense, not as ‘expository’ or ‘scientific’ history. The Judaean War doubtless imitates classical ‘narrative’ histories incorporating their appropriate conventions. This is in the foreground. In the background, I discovered that the Judaean War further replicates a five-Act tragedy. Thus, we have two texts in two different genres in one work of Josephus, creating a ‘genres disjunction’.

My detailed analysis of the Judaean War firstly demonstrates that it is literature in two different genres. Further, the dual literary texts do not stand in isolation from the author, free of his biases and complex intents. The ‘genres disjunction’ is in fact the textual re-creation of the author’s own personal attitudinal disjunction towards the subjects of his narrative, the Romans, on the one hand, and the Judaean nation, on the other. The Judaean War, as noted above, is a metaphor for Josephus himself, hence a symbol of him.

The general assumption down to our times has been that Josephus was critical of the Roman army but was unquestionably loyal to the Flavians in general, to Vespasian, Titus and Domitian in particular. Similar belief extends to the relationship between the Judaean nation and Josephus, its erstwhile commanding general in Galilee against Vespasian. Josephus carries the unfortunate ignominy of a turncoat, of a despised traitor to his nation.

These ancient perceptions point to their bases as unadulterated myths. My study of the ‘genres disjunction’ of the Judaean War will convincingly prove the opposite is true; that Josephus considered the Romans, including the Flavians, as his enemies and that he despised them as he did the Jewish rebels. His patriotism towards the Judaean nation remained unshakable, albeit covert. If the opposite of the old perceptions is true, then the Judaean War cannot but be an exceptionally ironic work in the uniquely Roman sense. What had remained undiscovered for two millennia is now explicit in my book. It is high time to allow Josephus full credit due to him even if it means that our long held opinions of him turn on their heads.

The other myth about Josephus is that despite being a Roman citizen with a Roman cognomen ‘Flavius’, he did not know Latin, much less was he acquainted with Latin literature. A whole host of Josephan scholars has poured rivers of ink over reams of paper trying to ferret out every non-Roman source to which his text owed something or other, yet he consistently failed to acknowledge his debt to them. That made Josephus an obdurate and shameless plagiarist.

It is quite unreasonable, it seems to me, to deny Josephus at least the ability to understand and speak Latin, in addition to Greek, the lingua franca of the Empire. His writings show explicitly that he could speak and write in Greek. It is curious, yet true, that his Greek in the Judaean War is superior to what he uses in his other works. This superiority, by his own admission, is due to the ‘assistants’ who helped him in improving the style of Greek in the Judaean War.

Unknown hitherto is that the ‘assistants’ helped Josephus with far more. To begin with, they helped Josephus to improve his Greek draft of the War written in the genre of classical narrative history. This is ‘sufficiently astonishing’. Beyond that, they assisted him to accomplish the ‘inconceivable in making his history copy literature’. They introduced a second genre of five-Act tragedy as developed by their contemporary, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the Latin playwright.

With his involvement in the Judaean public affairs, Josephus would have had no time or opportunity to master Seneca’s plays. The literary dependence of Josephus is demonstrable specifically in the Herod narrative in the Judaean War and more generally and extensively in the rest of this work. It is an historical irony that Josephus’s ‘assistants’ helped him to undermine his Roman patrons through the use of Roman plays. How delicious could that irony be!

My book has three parts. The focus of Part 1 is to establish connections between Lucius Annaeus Seneca and Flavius Josephus as private citizens and as public personae. Such a process leads us to investigate potential coincidences in the lives of the two personalities. Next, we begin to discern, for the first time, actual similarities in the contexts of Seneca’s eight tragedies and the Judaean War. Of the eight tragedies, only Hercules Furens becomes a direct model for the Herod Narrative. Josephus uses it in two ways. First, he employs the Senecan thematic and stylistic peculiarities and, second, he caps his narrative with the five-Act tragedy structure borrowed, not from Euripides, but from Seneca.

Part 2 furthers the five-Act structure from the Herod Narrative to the whole of the Judaean War, except to the second part of the Book 7, (7.164-454). Analysis shows that Books 1 and 2 incorporate the conventions of the Exposition, the first as the remote and the latter the proximate setting. Book 3 conforms to the second Act, the Complication, with a specific ‘exciting force’ as a trigger and a whole host of conflicts at work.

Book 4 develops the Complication into the Crisis-Climax of the Judaean War. The Jewish rebel activities proceed in a geographic pattern. From the ‘turning point’, the friends and foes of the Jewish nation, the ‘hero-victim’,[1] are involved in significant events with identifiable impact. The complex play of multiple narrative voices appears so equally impressive is the march of the twelve trials of the ‘hero-victim’ to the Climax.

Book 5 offers the Reversal, or the fourth Act of the tragedy. The civil war is in three orders, chronological, geographical and logical. In the third order, three sequences work in tandem: the Jewish, the Roman and the combined in which the two combatants meet in a staged battle. The tragic narrative has its beginning in a ‘tragic force’ as the antagonists pit themselves against each other. The fortunes of the ‘hero-victim’ fall in fifteen structured steps. They also are six stages of madness.

Books 6 and 7.1-162 are together the Catastrophe of the five-Act tragedy. On the surface, the foreground text, Book 6 is about the final Roman assault on the City and its political and religious landmarks. As the Catastrophe, in the background text, it is a narrative of the death of the ‘hero-victim’, symbolically in the burning of the Temple and then of the City. There is a third stage through the deaths of the captives in 7.1-162. The Flavian Triumph in Rome becomes the celebration of reward for the three-fold death of the ‘hero-victim’.

Part 3 discusses three different outgrowths of the Tragedy mode in the Judaean War. A close analysis, to begin with, brings out how events and personalities in the tragedy of the War, rather than strewn around haphazardly, do weave into a tightly knit bond through the motif of madness. Secondly, the presence of two genres in one work raises the question of ‘genres disjunction’. As a literary innovation of Josephus, it helps to decide the primacy of a specific text for the authorial intention in a work with two different texts.

In the final chapter, the discussion of Judaean War in the Senecan mode helps to draw inevitable conclusions about the identity of Josephus as the creator of the work and about his intended and unintended audiences. Above all, the unresolved questions about the role of the ‘assistants’ and about which of the two, the Roman Flavians or his Judaic nation, held his unwavering loyalty find a satisfactory solution. Only at the end of the book, can the reader conclude decisively in what sense Josephus, the Flavian Roman, is a traitor and a hero.

Part 1

Lucius Annaeus Seneca and Flavius Josephus

1. Seneca and Josephus: Private Persons behind Public Personae

2. Contexts of Seneca’s Tragedies and the Judaean War

3. Herakles of Euripides and Hercules Furens of Seneca

4. Hercules Furens of Seneca as a Five-Act Tragedy

5. Senecan Mode of Hercules Furens in the Herod Narrative

6. Herod Narrative as a Five-Act Tragedy

1.

Seneca and Josephus:

Private Persons behind Public Personae

In their cultural backgrounds, Seneca and Josephus could not have been more different. Seneca was born into an erudite Spanish equestrian family of Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Elder. The family had aristocratic connections in Rome. Seneca was a nephew of the wife of L. Gallicus, who became the Prefect of Egypt under Tiberius. His wife was Seneca’s step-maternal aunt. He was educated at Rome from the age of five through grammar and rhetorical schools. Nothing else is on record until after Seneca turns forty years of age. Of his interest in morals or religion, much remains unstated, except that he followed what was mos maiorum.[2]

Josephus, on the other hand, was born into an aristocratic priestly family belonging ‘to the first of the twenty-four courses’ (Vita 2). Through his mother, he belonged to the Hasmonean dynasty (Vita 4). His religious education as a Jewish child was customary (Vita 7-9). Although a Hellenistic education does not receive explicit mention, it is perceivable in his writings, not only in the command of literary Greek, but also more fundamentally in his acquaintance with the classical writers, poets and historians, and in the astute use of the structures proper to the genres. If this literary expertise was not available to Josephus, then they are validly attributable to his ‘assistants’ (Ap. 1.50). His active religious zeal as an adolescent reveals itself in his supposed expert knowledge of the Torah and the three years he allegedly spent as a sect member of Bannus (Vita 10-12).

The cultural background reveals little in common with the two public personalities of Seneca and Josephus. The places where the two spent time during their lives are merely coincidental. Seneca was born at Cordoba in Spain and taken to Rome aged five through the initiative of his maternal step-aunt. He spent thirteen years with this aunt and her husband L. Gallicus in Egypt for reasons of his precarious health.

On his return to Rome with his uncle and aunt, he survived a shipwreck in which his uncle perished (Helv. 19.4). Back in Rome with his father, Seneca began to practice law in the Forum from the time of Caligula’s reign (Helv. 19.2). Under Claudius, he lived in exile in Corsica for eight years. Recalled from exile, Claudius permitted him to remain in Rome where he lived and died like the Roman elite of his time (Helv. 20.1; Polyb. 2.1).[3]

Josephus, on the other hand, was born in Judaea, probably at Jerusalem (Vita 5). There is no evidence of his travels outside Judaea until 64 C.E., when he went to Rome on a short visit as part of a diplomatic mission (Vita 13-17). After his surrender to Vespasian at Jotapata and his appointment as the official interpreter to Titus and negotiator, with the Jewish rebels at Jerusalem, on behalf of the Romans, he travelled to Egypt with the Roman army (Vita 414-17). Subsequent to the fall of Jerusalem, he accompanied Titus to Rome and witnessed the Flavian Triumph. He continued to live at Rome until he died, probably in the reign of Trajan.

Political achievements of the two historical figures once again lack any type of related development. Seneca’s initial involvement with the imperial household was through the alleged sexual misdemeanor with one of Caligula’s sisters, Julia Livilla, and with Agrippina before her marriage to Claudius (Tacit. Ann.13, 14; Dio 60.8.5; 61.10.1). At Agrippina’s insistence, Claudius recalled Seneca from exile and appointed him tutor to young Nero (Tacit. Ann.12.8). With Nero succeeding Claudius as Princeps, Seneca’s political status rose until, with A. Burrus, he became a ‘minister of state’, administering the empire on Nero’s behalf.

Josephus, on his part, has a few minor claims in terms of political achievements. In 64 C.E., at the age of twenty-six, he went to Rome as part of a mission to Nero to secure the release of Jewish priests whom Felix the procurator of Judaea had sent for trial. Unlike Seneca, Josephus was a citizen-soldier. The Council at Jerusalem designated him to lead the Jewish army against the Roman forces at Jotapata. As commander of Galilee during 66 C.E., he claimed to be successful in establishing control over the region for the Council even though he failed to defend it against Vespasian. The political achievements of the two were different and seemingly placed them in social positions where they could not establish any meaningful relationship with each other.

Beyond their unrelated political achievements, both Seneca and Josephus are celebrities in history for their literary achievements. Seneca is renowned for his extant seven Dialogues, three Consolations, two Treatises, a hundred and twenty four Letters, Natural Questions, Apocolocyntosis in prose and eight tragedies in verse, while all of his many orations are lost.[4]

Seneca’s eight tragedies dramatize malevolent tyranny in many shapes with