A Very Stable Genius: Flavius Josephus and the Perils of Self-Praise (on E. Glas, Flavius Josephus' Self-Characterisation in First-Century Rome)

ver the years, Flavius Josephus has had to endure more than his fair share of hostile moralising scholarship.Among the many grave defects which such scholarship has attributed to this author, the charge of vanity is prominent, alongside accusations of cowardice, sycophancy, and opportunism. 1 The perception of vanity derives, above all, from the fact that Josephus is one of the most autobiographically inclined of all the ancient historical writers.Not only did he write what many readers have characterised as an actual autobiography, the Life of Josephus (originally an appendix to his Jewish Antiquities), but he also made himself a major character in his earlier Jewish War, the dominant figure of Book of that work and a significant recurring presence before and after that book too.Much of this autobiographical content seems to be devoted to the ancient and ignoble art of self-glorification.However, if Josephus was a boaster, it seems that his boasts have not impressed many modern readers.That moralising scholarship which delights in damning Josephus draws entirely on Josephus' own works to construct its hostile characterisations.It is tempting to conclude on the basis of this that, if self-apologia is indeed a prominent tendency in Josephus' works, he was quite spectacularly bad at it.This would, of course, be to judge Josephus' self-characterisation solely in the light of its modern scholarly reception.This new volume by Eelco Glas (henceforth EG),