Tragic Elements in Josephus

Abstract

While the discussion on how to classify Josephus’ works within ancient historiography is not new and attention is increasingly being paid to the genre of “tragic history,” more recently there have been attempts to draw parallels between the Jewish War and Greek tragedy (e. g., Chapman and Feldman). Following a sociological definition of “Hellenism,” my paper argues not only that optimal conditions existed in Flavian Rome after 70 C. E. for Josephus to use in his account of the Jewish War certain elements of tragedy and that at least in reference to some aspects a bridge can be constructed from Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles to Josephus via the Exagoge of the Jewish tragedian Ezekiel, but also that the Jewish War, among other goals, in many ways pursues the same goal as the influential theory of the Aristotelian Poetics defined for the tragedy and that was already named by Gorgias of Leontini: Pity is to be aroused by scenes that cause horror. In discussing this theory of tragedy, which is controversial in many details and must be brought into relation with other statements by Aristotle on awakening pity, this paper presents arguments for the thesis outlined above, which is based on the observation that Josephus’ horrific representation of suffering is without parallel in the context of Greco-Roman historiography, that he embeds the motif of pity in the work in various ways, and that in the proem he himself problematizes the classification of the account as historiography by justifying the pathetic elements, which ancient historians like Polybius criticized as being only suitable for the tragedy. Of critical importance in all of this is a clear distinction between tragedy and ancient drama on the one hand and pathetic and horrible elements of ancient historiographies and tragedies on the other. With reference to the key text, Ant. 7.127–129, this paper concludes that the generally accepted intentions of the Jewish War—to sketch the Jewish people as inherently noble and for the most part not to blame for the insurrection—can in some respects also to be understood against the background of the theory of tragedy, according to which pity can only result from the staging of a suffering “tragic hero.”