What is History? Using Josephus for the Judaean-Roman War

he Jewish Revolt against Rome Interdisciplinary Perspectives Edited by Mladen Popović LEIDEN • BOSTON 2011 © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV CONTENTS List of Figures and Tables ................................................................ Preface ................................................................................................. List of Contributors ........................................................................... vii ix xi he Jewish Revolt against Rome: History, Sources and Perspectives ............................................................................ Mladen Popović 1 Provincial Revolts in the Early Roman Empire ........................... Greg Woolf Die römischen Repräsentanten in Judaea: Provokateure oder Vertreter der römischen Macht? ....................................... Werner Eck Identity Politics in Early Roman Galilee ....................................... Andrea M. Berlin 27 45 69 Not Greeks but Romans: Changing Expectations for the Eschatological War in the War Texts from Qumran .............. Brian Schultz 107 Going to War against Rome: he Motivation of the Jewish Rebels .................................................................................. James S. McLaren 129 What is History? Using Josephus for the JudaeanRoman War .................................................................................... Steve Mason 155 Rebellion under Herod the Great and Archelaus: Prominent Motifs and Narrative Function ............................... Jan Willem van Henten 241 © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV vi contents Josephus, the Herodians, and the Jewish War ............................. Julia Wilker Josephus on Albinus: he Eve of Catastrophe in Changing Retrospect ................................................................ Daniel R. Schwartz 271 291 Philosophia epeisaktos: Some Notes on Josephus, A.J. 18.9 ....... Pieter W. van der Horst 311 Who Were the Sicarii? ...................................................................... Uriel Rappaport 323 A Reconsideration of Josephus’ Testimony about Masada ................................................................................. Jodi Magness 343 Coinage of the First Jewish Revolt against Rome: Iconography, Minting Authority, Metallurgy .......................... Robert Deutsch 361 Identifying the Mints, Minters and Meanings of the First Jewish Revolt Coins ............................................................. Donald T. Ariel 373 he Jewish Population of Jerusalem from the First Century b.c.e. to the Early Second Century c.e.: he Epigraphic Record ................................................................. Jonathan J. Price 399 he Jewish War and the Roman Civil War of 68–69 c.e.: Jewish, Pagan, and Christian Perspectives ................................ George H. van Kooten 419 Index of Modern Authors ................................................................ Index of Ancient Sources ................................................................. 451 457 © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES Berlin 1. he Paneion (Sanctuary of Pan) .............................................. 2. he ancient Israelite high place at Tel Dan ........................... 3. he Zoilus inscription found in the High Place at Tel Dan .................................................................................... 4. Open-air sanctuary of Mizpe Yammim, eastern upper Galilee ............................................................................... 5. Bowls and saucers made in coastal workshops ..................... 6. Casserole made in Akko ........................................................... 7. Serving and perfume vessels made in Tyre ........................... 8. Oil lamps made in Tyre ............................................................ 9. Wine amphora from Rhodes ................................................... 10. Black-slipped bowls made in northern Phoenicia ................ 11. Red-slipped plates and cups made in northern Phoenicia .................................................................... 12. Cooking pots from Gamla, irst century b.c.e. ..................... 13. Storage jars from Gamla, irst century b.c.e. ........................ 14. Tel Anafa, view of courtyard villa, looking north .............................................................................. 15. Pottery of the irst century b.c.e. from one room of a house at Gamla ........................................................ 16. Bathtub inside neighborhood bathhouse at Gamla, irst century b.c.e. ........................................................ 17. Miqveh inside neighborhood bathhouse at Gamla, irst century b.c.e. ........................................................ 18. Plain unadorned lamps typical of the irst century c.e. .................................................................................. 19. Nozzles from plain, unadorned lamps typical of the irst century c.e. .............................................................. 20. he synagogue at Gamla, dating to the irst century c.e. .................................................................................. 21. Roman temple at Horbat Omrit, view of stylobate .................................................................................. © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 72 73 75 76 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 87 88 89 91 93 94 97 98 100 102 viii list of figures and tables 22. Roman temple at Horbat Omrit, view of front steps .................................................................................... 23. Coin of Herod Philip ................................................................. 103 105 Deutsch Figures 1. Reverse of a silver shekel of Israel .......................................... 2. Obverse of a silver shekel of Israel .......................................... 3a–b. Bronze prutah of the irst year .......................................... 362 364 367 Tables 1. Metallurgic Analysis of Jewish Silver Shekels ....................... 2. Metallurgic Analysis of Jewish Silver Half Shekels .............. 3. Metallurgic Analysis of Silver Shekels of Tyre ...................... 370 370 371 Ariel 1. Diferences in Iconography ...................................................... 2. Diferences in Terms Used in Inscriptions ............................ 3. Diferences in Dating Conventions ......................................... 4. Diferences in Epigraphy ........................................................... 5. Diferences in Denominations ................................................. 6. Diferences in Technology ........................................................ 7. First Jewish Revolt Coins: Summary of Minters and Minting Places .................................................................... © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 377 378 378 379 380 381 396 WHAT IS HISTORY? USING JOSEPHUS FOR THE JUDAEAN-ROMAN WAR Steve Mason Methodology in this general or pure part is in point of fact almost wholly neglected by historians. hey live in this respect from hand to mouth, and on the rare occasions when they start thinking about the subject they are apt to conclude that all historical thought is logically indefensible, though they sometimes add a saving clause to the efect that they personally can interpret evidence pretty well because they have a mysterious intuitive lair for the truth, a kind of μ μ which informs them when their authorities are telling lies.1 Around the middle of the irst century c.e. conlicts in southern Syria erupted in widespread and lethal violence. Ater various unsuccessful attempts to calm the situation, a large Roman-led military force invaded Judaea, eventually besieging and destroying the mother-city Jerusalem with its world-famous temple. Of this much we are conident because many independent lines of literary and material evidence would be inexplicable otherwise. But the hundreds of thousands of persons involved in the growing conlict, on all sides, each had an incalculable number of experiences, thoughts, feelings, and interactions. his we know by analogy: they were human beings, and so must have had thoughts, feelings, and interactions. Some few of them played signiicant roles in the events. If we think only of the most prominent— the emperor Nero and his advisors, the senatorial legate(s) based in northern Syria, the equestrian governors in the south, Jerusalem’s aristocracy with its many members and diferences, the leaders of the coastal and Decapolis cities around Judaea, the Samarian leadership, the councils, village elders, and prominent individuals in Galilee, Peraea, and the Golan, the Roman commanders and senior military staf, and members of the royal family descended from Herod—we realize 1 R. G. Collingwood, Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1926) in he Idea of History (rev. ed.; ed. J. van der Dussen; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 389. Either Collingwood in hurriedly penning his lecture notes (he wrote the series in ive days) or his editor guessed the accents incorrectly. His allusion is to Plato’s “otherμ ῖ ), the inner pilot that kept Socrates acting in true worldly sign” ( μ character (Resp. 6.496c; Euthyd. 272e; Phaedr. 242b). © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 156 steve mason that each must have had relationships among their own kind and with those they governed, commanded, or served. As what turned out to be “the revolt” was taking shape, all of these igures acted in certain ways, making decisions week by week and day by day, motivated by roughly the same mixes of ideology, social standing and connections, ambition, anger, and fear that have always motivated people. Without knowing anything more than this, which we may posit without historical investigation, we know that untold myriads of things happened in this region from, say, 65 to 74 c.e. Whatever was said, done, and thought by all of these players—and by the ordinary inhabitants of the area—was real life then and there. Against this chaos of human interaction, fundamental questions facing the historian include these: What are our aims in undertaking a history of this war? Of those uncountable events, which ones are suitable targets for historical study, and on what criteria? How should we go about investigating them? What sorts of evidence do we have: in each case what is the nature of the thing and why do we have it still today? How sure can we be of our results, on particular points and in our larger portraits? What language and categories should we use in our eforts at description: what combination of ours and theirs, for which kinds of things? What is the relationship between the historical past, which we generate by investigation, and the actual lived reality two millennia ago? My general thesis is that the diferent views of history held by those of us who study Roman Judaea is a sizable but mostly neglected problem. In other explorations of the Roman Empire, in spite of many diferences of perspective among investigators, the methodological situation seems a bit clearer, even as conclusions are less tightly embraced. Lacking narratives comparable to those of Josephus, historians of Roman Africa, Asia Minor, Spain, Britain, or Arabia are in a mostly shared predicament, which they recognize from the outset. With little hope of recovering many speciic events, causes, and motives from a given week, month, year, or decade, many prefer to stay with the kinds of social, economic, and demographic history that can draw from evidence over long periods and diferent sites: l’histoire de la longue durée.2 2 One excellent example of many is R. Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 157 In the case of Judaea, Josephus’ detailed narratives and essays in thirty volumes, which include seven substantial books on the war and its contexts, tantalize us with the lure of a diferent approach. Along with Josephus, of course, we have a treasury of other post-biblical literature including the Qumran Scrolls. Intensive archaeology in Israel and Palestine has turned up spectacular sites, small inds, and inscriptions. Much of this material is still being discovered, classiied, and interpreted. Still, because most post-biblical literature is intramural and assumes rather than explains its context, while the archaeological inds illuminate moments in the stratigraphy of a site but not usually political motives or the meaning of events, Josephus continues to provide the interpretative spine for the period from about 200 b.c.e. to 75 c.e., when his narrative ends. Because we have this uniquely rich resource in Josephus, it is a nearly overwhelming temptation to lean on it, to begin our study of anything he mentions by looking irst to his account and asking: How reliable is it? his orientation need not entail the naive quotation of Josephus as historical fact, though that has been the most common way of writing Judaean history, and it continues unimpeded in popular works.3 Josephus-dependence might take the form of more critical exercises, such as trying to extract his sources (as though undigested) or setting logical traps to shake loose low-hanging factual fruit from his narrative tree, even if that tree is admitted to be nourished by his “apologetic” concerns. Josephus-dependence might even take the form of a systematic mistrust or rejection of Josephus in principle, coupled with the attempt to rescue from his tendentious presentation the supposedly uncomfortable truths that he mentioned in spite of himself. But however we do it in ine, when we take any of these approaches we still treat Josephus’ writing as our authority, map, or guide. We begin our investigation with his narratives and try to ind some way of converting them (if we cannot simply accept them) into a mirror of the lived past. I shall argue that such dependence on any ancient text cannot be justiied by a defensible historical method, let alone in view of the particular nature of Josephus’ narratives, and that clinging to this approach severely handicaps our conception of history, our procedures, and therefore our results. Our good fortune in having Josephus does not 3 E.g., D. Seward, Jerusalem’s Traitor: Josephus, Masada, and the Fall of Judea (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo, 2009). © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 158 steve mason change the basic conditions of historical research, which require that we treat his works the same way we handle other, less comprehensive ancient accounts. hat he wrote elaborate histories makes no diference to the essential historical predicament, which we have also where Herodotus, hucydides, Polybius, Livy, or Tacitus is our main guide. My paper has two parts. In the irst I outline a method that, though basic and not pretending to solve perennial problems in the philosophy of history,4 seems appropriate to the study of a war such as this. his part may strike some readers as trite or naive, others as supercilious in an essay ofered to professional colleagues. Such readers may prefer to move directly to Part II. I include the irst part because of the great variety of approaches in the study of Judaean history, literature, and archaeology. hat diversity attaches diferent meanings to such terms as history/historical, the past, accuracy, reliability, facts, hypotheses, objectivity, and probability. I hope to ofer some useful relections on these matters, both for their own sake and as a basis for the second part. here I consider two episodes in the Judaean-Roman War: the campaign of Cestius Gallus in late 66 c.e. and Titus’ destruction of the temple.5 For the limited purposes of this essay, my aim there is only to illustrate how our approach to history produces a particular kind of research problem, investigation, and results. Part I. What is History? Towards a Model In asking about the nature of history I do not mean to suggest that the question can be answered succinctly, certainly not to the satisfaction of every historian. Within a History department of any size, such as my own, the diferences of practice according to period and chronological span, geographical area, and tools deemed appropriate for each area, from quantitative to documentary to archaeological to literary study, are daunting. Another sort of problem is the widespread mistrust of claims to historical knowledge in other bays and inlets of the humanities, where history may be regarded as only the addition of yet more 4 hese continue to be debated in, for example, the journal History and heory published by Wesleyan University. 5 Each receives a chapter, as do the Galilean campaign and the capture of the desert fortresses, in my forthcoming book, he Judaean-Roman War of 66 to 74 c.e.: An Inquiry (Cambridge University Press). © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 159 narratives, scarcely distinguishable from iction, by new stakeholders.6 In this irst part I shall not try to defend history, or to classify or rationalize its many expressions and modes. Assuming an audience that considers the historical investigation of Roman Judaea worthwhile and also possible in some fashion, I want only to describe what seems to me a sound and productive method. I.1. Debates and Confusions It is not easy to ind scholars’ explicit statements about their method in the study of Roman Judaea, or in ancient history generally. Specialists in our ield come from an unusually wide range of disciplines: history-of-religions, biblical, New Testament, rabbinic, Semitic- or classical-philological, Jewish-historical, theological, Near Eastern, and archaeological studies, to name some obvious candidates. Not all scholars working in the area consider themselves historians, therefore, or primarily historians, though most would grant that some conception of history plays some sort of role. hey may describe their ield as post-biblical literature or parabiblical, Jewish, or religious studies; they may see themselves as archaeologists, numismatists, exegetes, or social scientists. his diversity, which is not found to a similar degree in the study of Roman Britain, Egypt, or Syria, helps to explain the unusual variety of perspectives. hat diversity is more than welcome. It opens unparalleled possibilities for dialogue, checking one’s assumptions, and sharpening the requirement for clarity. But it can also make communication diicult, or perhaps lead to reticence in declaring one’s method. he following examples illustrate some basic diferences. I.1.i. History goes with Archaeology, not Historiography I wrote the heart of this paper in Oxford, where nowadays a distinction is made within the Faculty of Classics between the sub-disciplines “Classical languages and literature” and “Ancient history and classical archaeology.” History is ever more closely aligned with material culture, while the interpretation of ancient texts pairs with a philology that is not necessarily historical in aim. his marks a signiicant shit. he archaeologist and historian of Roman Britain, Robin G. Collingwood (1889–1943), became Waynlete Professor of Metaphysical 6 See the det survey in M. T. Gilderhus, History and Historians: A Historiographical Introduction (7th ed.; Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson, 2010), 86–125. © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 160 steve mason Philosophy at Magdalen College in 1936, ater years of tutoring at Pembroke College in the same university. His observation in 1926 that “Our tradition, in Oxford, is to combine historical with philosophical studies,”7 relected the old “Greats” course in literae humaniores. It summarized his own career too. Since that time, ongoing revisions of the undergraduate programme, notably the inclusion of a major paper in Classical Art and Archaeology, have relected the gradual realignment of the professorial complement. Nowadays, even scholars who work on ancient historiography in order to clarify the nature of such writing for the beneit of historical work (e.g., Christopher Pelling, John Marincola, Christina S. Kraus, Anthony J. Woodman)8 tend to be grouped with philologists rather than with historians, on the assumption that the latter deal primarily with material culture.9 I mention Oxford in part because of the great inluence it has exercised on these ields worldwide. In many other universities the distinction is even sharper, with Ancient History institutionally separated from Classical Literature. he fusion of ancient history with archaeology has a irm base also in popular culture. Archaeology’s great prestige, enhanced by the Indiana Jones and Lara Crot franchises in cinema, explains why many of us have met the assumption that ancient historians must also be archaeologists. In professional contexts the bond between history and archaeology relects a basic orientation in the discipline, emanating from the nineteenth-century Berlin of Barthold Georg Niebuhr and Leopold von Ranke: that the task of history in the university was to challenge long-familiar elite literary accounts and the sweeping historical syntheses based upon them by focusing on hard evidence—archival documents for the late medieval and modern worlds (oicial declarations, deeds, correspondence, church records, diplomatic dispatches) and for the ancient world inscriptions, papyri, coins, and excavated sites. he hunger for such material paved the way for the lood of ancient material evidence that colonial explorers brought home in the late nineteenth century. Collingwood, he Idea of History, 359. A. J. Woodman, Rhetoric in Classical Historiography: Four Studies (London: Croom Helm, 1988); J. Marincola, Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); C. S. Kraus, ed., he Limits of Historiography: Genre and Narrative in Ancient Historical Texts (Leiden: Brill, 1999); C. Pelling, Literary Texts and the Greek Historian (London: Routledge, 2000). 9 I am grateful to Christopher Pelling, Regius Professor of Greek at Christ Church College, for discussion of these changes in Oxford over the years. 7 8 © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 161 I.1.ii. History goes with Historiography, not Archaeology he opposite view, which would separate history from archaeology, is also well represented, most notably among archaeologists. he irst chapter of Harry Leon’s landmark study he Jews of Ancient Rome surveys “he Historical Record,” which is an account patched together from literary sources. Perhaps historical here means in part “old and familiar,” for it frames his original research into archaeological inds.10 In the same year Leo Kadman surveyed “he Historical Background”— essentially Josephus—before proceeding with his original study of the Judaean war’s coinage.11 his distinction is expressed programmatically by archaeologist Jodi Magness. She sees archaeology and history as diferent ways of knowing the past. History is: the study of the past based on information provided by written documents. In other words, although both archaeologists and historians study the past, they use diferent methods or sources to obtain their information. Archaeologists learn about the past through the study of the material remains let by humans, whereas historians study written records (texts). . . . [S]ince many texts were written by or for the ruling classes (elites) of ancient societies, they tend to relect their concerns, interests, and viewpoints. In contrast, although archaeologists oten uncover the palaces and citadels of the ruling classes, they also dig up houses and workshops which belonged to the poorer classes.12 his connection of history with elite interests would come as a surprise to most historians. he university discipline has a pedigree from the European Enlightenment and the reaction against all traditional authority, whether of the church or of canonical secular texts, which were thought to have kept western thought in a straitjacket. In the nineteenth century, the concern for scientiic respectability led many historians to join the positivist programme of Auguste Comte (d. 1857), which posited “the laws of sociology” as the highest order of discovery, as humanity inally emerged from its prolonged infancy.13 Positivists looked for these laws in historical periods, eschewing the “great man” model of the Romantics. Within a few decades, following a sharp turn from such speculative approaches, “history from below” (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1960), 1–45. he Coins of the Jewish War of 66–73 c.e. (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1960). 12 he Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2002), 4–5. 13 A. Comte, he Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte (2 vols.; trans. and ed. H. Martineau; London: Chapman, 1853). 10 11 © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 162 steve mason became the mantra of the Annales school, founded in Paris by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, later led by Fernand Braudel. For nearly a century now, social history has provided the dominant themes of the discipline. Families, women, children, gender, slaves, the periphery, and the Other remain prominent concerns of many or most professional historians. In general the lives of average people, whether recovered from medieval church records or the excavation of ancient dwellings, or studied in the aggregate (demographically or economically), are for many scholars the stuf of history.14 Writers on historical method have recognized that for study of the remote past, the study of material culture provides the crucial window into these matters.15 he nineteenth century already witnessed an explosion of discovery and on that basis the comprehensive rewriting of Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern history, in manuals whose value has endured to the present.16 Although no one could disagree with Magness about the importance of reconstructing ordinary life, then, that concern is central to history. It does not seem possible to distinguish archaeology from history according to their interests in diferent social classes. My own view, inluenced by Collingwood and Bloch, is that material and literary remains alike furnish potential evidence of the past, depending on our questions. Such greats as Arnaldo Momigliano (d. 1987) and Sir Ronald Syme (d. 1989) remain models of the ancient historian, equally concerned with the interpretation of literary evidence (Tacitus or Sallust) and of relevant material remains.17 14 Cf. G. G. Iggers, he German Conception of History: he National Tradition of Historical hought from Herder to the Present (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1968); idem, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientiic Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England [for] Wesleyan University Press, 1997). 15 M. Bloch, he Historian’s Crat (trans. P. Putman; New York: Vintage, 1953; repr. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1992), 57. 16 We need only consider E. Schürer, Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu Christi (2d. ed.; 2 vols.; Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1886); T. Mommsen, he Provinces of the Roman Empire from Caesar to Diocletian (trans. W. P. Dickson; 2 vols.; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1887); A. H. M. Jones, he Cities of the Eastern Roman Provinces (Oxford: Clarendon, 1937); and M. I. Rostovtzef, he Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World (3 vols.; Oxford: Clarendon, 1941). 17 For fascinating insights into the Syme-Tacitus connection see M. Toher, “Tacitus’ Syme,” in he Cambridge Companion to Tacitus (ed. A. J. Woodman; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 317–29. © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 163 I.1.iii. History Is About Conclusions: Are You a Maximalist or Minimalist? Especially in biblical and religious studies, whose professors are among those most interested in Roman Judaea, there is a notable tendency to see history as a matter of conclusions or beliefs, no matter how those conclusions are reached. Do you believe that the Pharisees were the most inluential pre-70 sect, that there was a standing Sanhedrin, that the James ossuary is genuine or a forgery, or that Essenes lived at Qumran? hese kinds of questions one encounters all the time, though it is diicult to imagine similar camps forming in other areas of ancient history: over the reasons for Tacfarinas’ revolt in Africa or debating whether Boudica was motivated more by inancial or sexual outrage. I do not know where this inclination comes from, but it seems to me inappropriate to history and indeed anti-historical, for reasons I shall try to explain. To avoid singling out examples from individual scholars’ work, I cite programmatic statements from a recent survey in our ield: Leo Sandgren’s Vines Intertwined: A History of Jews and Christians from the Babylonian Exile to the Advent of Islam. his ambitious and admirable 864-page history synthesizes a vast range of scholarship. Sandgren’s relections on the state of the ield are worth pondering precisely as a diligent scholar’s perceptions. For example, on the distinction I have raised here he writes: here are two contemporary and competing approaches to historical investigation that require an introduction. One is called minimalism, the other maximalism. he approaches involve the question of what constitutes evidence, and the quest for certainty of knowledge. he minimalist applies the so-called hermeneutic of suspicion to our sources. Every witness has an ulterior motive, or may be outright lying, unless it can be proven otherwise. As in Jewish law, two witnesses are required; a single source is not a source. he minimalist has a high standard of proof and is reticent to airm a statement about history unless it is certiiably factual. Minimalists tend to be bold revisionists of what we thought we knew by undermining previous assumptions and the gullible acceptance of testimonies. he maximalist leans in the other direction, though hopefully well shy of gullibility. Some call this approach a hermeneutic of trust. People (especially religious people?) are prone to tell the truth and not perpetrate falsehood that in their own times can be exposed. Memory may fail our witnesses, but it is an honest failure. Ater we have stripped away the miraculous, the accouterments of legend and hyperbole, our witnesses, even one, should be accepted, unless they can be proven in error. Burden of proof lies with the historian, not the hapless source. © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 164 steve mason Acceptance of witnesses does not ensure we have understood them, but it qualiies their statements as evidence. Maximalists are keenly aware that life is always full, even if the evidence is thin, and a regulated historical imagination may add sinews and lesh to the skeleton, based on what we know of antiquity and humanity. Both types of historian otherwise use the tools of the discipline evenhandedly (in theory), to seek out what can be known, and that means what can be proved to our satisfaction. Satisfaction and knowledge, however, are precisely the dispute: to use the adage (and book subtitle) of Jacob Neusner, ‘What We Cannot Show, We Do Not Know.’ It is a fact, however, that some people see things that others do not. Intuition and reading between the lines is a common practice in all forms of knowledge. he truth cannot be known from pottery shards and provable declarative statements only. Maximalists err on the side of credulity; minimalists err on the side of caricature.18 No doubt Sandgren is right about the prominence of this debate, and he fairly relects much of the underlying rationale. My perception is that many of those tagged as minimalists (perhaps also maximalists) would reject that label, but that is typical in all labeling exercises. At any rate, as a historiographical division the maximalist/minimalist construction presents many problems. Here are three. First, if I declare myself a minimalist or maximalist, what question am I answering? It is not a historical question of the sort: “How was the Jerusalem area administered in the eighth century b.c.e.?” or “Who minted the bronze coins of the Judaean revolt in 69 to 70 c.e.?” I cannot reply to such questions, “Well, since I am a maximalist, I believe. . . .” Surely, the distinction has to do with the kind of conclusions I prefer. But if I conigure my inquiry beforehand so as to produce maximal or minimal results, I forfeit any claim to be taken seriously.19 Although Sandgren describes the choice as one of both method and conclusion, it is diicult to see how “maximal” or “minimal” can be predicated of one’s method. I cannot say that I will ignore germane evidence because I take a minimalist approach, or that I will accept more than is necessary because I am a maximalist. I must consider all 18 L. D. Sandgren, Vines Intertwined: A History of Jews and Christians from the Babylonian Exile to the Advent of Islam (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2010), 3–4. 19 An extreme example is the banner of a website for “Associates of Biblical Research” (www.biblearchaeology.org): “Demonstrating the historical reliability of the Bible through archaeological research and related apologetic investigation.” But what do research and investigation mean where conclusions are determined in advance? © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 165 relevant evidence, and justify on public grounds my criteria for inclusion, exclusion, and weighting. Second, the “hermeneutic(s) of suspicion” rejected by Sandgren seems to be adapted from Paul Ricoeur, who made the phrase famous. In Ricoeur and those inluenced by him, however, it has to do not with (doubting) the referential accuracy of biblical or other texts, but with the meaning and philosophical assessment of claims made by religious and other authorities. Ricoeur’s “masters of suspicion” were Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud, who saw a chasm between what the church claimed and its true motives.20 hey were not concerned with the accuracy of texts. Historians are by deinition (see below) suspicious of their sources: their authenticity, transmission, rhetorical efects, motives, character, style, possible duplicity, and so on. Systematic doubt lies at the heart of the enterprise.21 If suspicion were not necessary, we would not need history; tradition could bring its versions of the past to our door. Here is Collingwood addressing history undergraduates in 1926: It is puzzling and rather shocking to face the fact that the writers whom one has regarded as authoritative and incorruptible channels of truth are completely misapprehending the events which they describe, or deliberately telling lies about them; and when experienced historians assure us that all sources are tainted with ignorance and mendacity, we are apt to ascribe the opinion merely to cynicism. Yet this opinion is really the most precious possession of historical thought. It is a working hypothesis without which no historian can move a single step. . . . [W]e are by now agreed that all witnesses are discredited, in the sense that we are never justiied in merely transcribing their narrative into our own without modiication, and we are dealing with the question how to extract the truth from a witness who does not know it or is trying to conceal it.22 hird, Sandgren’s proposition that some (religious?) people are predisposed to be truthful sidesteps irst the diiculty that we do not know the people who created our textual and material evidence, and the more basic problem that even slightly complex narratives, lacking neutral 20 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 32. Cf. D. Stewart, “he Hermeneutics of Suspicion,” Journal of Literature and heology 3 (1989): 296–307; B. Leiter, “he Hermeneutics of Suspicion: Recovering Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud,” in he Future for Philosophy (ed. B. Leiter; Oxford: Clarendon, 2004), 74–105. 21 Bloch, he Historian’s Crat, 66–113 makes many incisive observations. 22 Collingwood, he Idea of History, 378. Emphasis added. © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 166 steve mason language, cannot be merely truthful no matter how well-intentioned their authors may be (further below). Outside the worlds of biblical and religious studies it would be hard to ind maximalism and minimalism recognized as “two approaches to historical investigation.” Profound diferences among historians are plentiful. hey turn on the old tensions between idealist and positivist inclination; on the suitable objects and appropriate methods for history (e.g., personal, institutional, social; event-or condition-based; intellectual-interpretative or statistical); and on the evidence that should be included in a particular investigation and where the weight should rest. Degrees of suspicion are not real issues. Should a historian be accused of not being critical enough in relation to some piece of evidence—not an infrequent charge in reviews—the complaint means only that the author has not been suiciently rigorous but has let her guard down in some particular case. he historian cannot say in response, “But I take a more trusting approach.” I.1.iv. History as Value-Free, Factual Record Many confusions in the ield seem to be the legacy of historical positivism, which sought value-free facts and laws to derive from them. his gave rise to what Collingwood disparaged as “scissors-and-paste” history, wherein it seemed possible to cull facts of diferent provenance and assemble them into a larger picture: a few statements from Josephus could be combined with some lines from Tacitus, or perhaps rabbinic sayings, and annotated with archaeological remains to create a coherent picture of some event or institution. In popular publications these accounts may arise from an unrelective “high-school” approach to history, which assumes that the facts are all recorded somewhere, from which loty heights they call out and impose themselves on unhappy students as names, dates, and places to be learned. In our professional ield the great manual by Emil Schürer, published in several editions from the 1860s, entrenched something like the same outlook. Although it found new life ater its revision by an Oxford-based team in the 1970s—the makeover consisted largely in a massive updating of the notes—and remains a irst-rate collection of references and critical discussion of problems in the notes, its original approach is still visible in the main body. We read in Schürer’s narrative such statements as these: “Antipater was now all-powerful at court and enjoyed his father’s [sc. Herod’s] absolute conidence. But he was not satisied. He wanted total power and could hardly wait for his © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 167 father to die.” Or, “But Sabinus, whose conscience was uneasy because of the Temple robberies and other misdeeds, made of as quickly as possible.”23 But how can we know that these men from two thousand years ago thought and felt these things, when we cannot hope to describe even the thoughts and feelings of our own contemporary leaders? Schürer simply took them over from literary sources, mainly from Josephus. Schürer is by no means a unique example. Geofrey A. Williamson, the accomplished scholar who translated Josephus’ War for Penguin in the 1960s, wrote he World of Josephus to provide students with relevant historical background.24 He described the Judean-Roman war in simply factual terms: “On the other [Judean] side was a motley host, torn by dissension and bloody strife, and led by rival self-appointed chietains lusting for power.” For Williamson, Gessius Florus was “heartless, dishonest, disgusting; he illed Judea with misery, accepting bribes from bandits.” But this all merely borrowed Josephus’ dramatic narrative, translating the ancient writer’s highly charged literary choices into the truth of the matter. he same practice was common in manuals, surveys, and New Testament-background studies. Josephus’ narrative, notwithstanding the usual caveats about a “need for caution,” was considered—except where he described his own life or lattered Romans—a more or less neutral record. I.1.v. Josephus as Research Assistant? A more oblique manifestation of this master-record approach is the expectation that if something signiicant happened in irst-century Judaea, it should have been mentioned by “our sources.” Because “we do not hear of X in our sources,” we may deduce either that X did not exist or that its existence was suppressed by an ancient author. If something was once real, that is, it should have been picked up by some source, and we may then exploit this presence or absence to write historical narratives. Greg Woolf has identiied the generic problem: Modern historians who specialize in the Roman provinces have a bad habit of treating ancient authors as if they are research assistants. . . . he objections to this procedure are well known, if oten forgotten. No E. Schürer, he History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ (175 b.c.– a.d. 135) (3 vols.; rev. ed.; ed. G. Vermes, F. Millar, and M. Black; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1973–1987), 1:324, 332. 24 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1964). Quotations here are from pp. 17, 145. 23 © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 168 steve mason list of witnesses could ever be comprehensive. Worse, more information does not always lead to greater understanding. . . . Worst of all, our ‘witnesses’ are not colleagues, their texts are not responses to our research questions, and at least some apparent resemblances between their texts and the products of modern scientiic research are profoundly misleading.25 If we ask what “our sources” for pre-70 Judaea might be, the shadow falls invariably on Josephus. A widespread assumption is that, as our chief historian of the period, it fell to him to record everything important (to us), and in a conveniently proportional chronology. What he did not mention either did not happen or, if we have some reason to suspect that it did, he suppressed it for some reason. he same methodological assumption turns up frequently, for example in an earlier volume of essays on the subject of the present book. he editors write in their introduction (emphasis added throughout): Phillip and his brother Antipas, Herod’s middle son, enjoyed quite successful reigns. . . . Neither were characterized in antiquity as either particularly brutal or prone to suppression, again as opposed to Herod.26 Whom from antiquity should we expect to have characterized these Herodians? Josephus is the only plausible candidate. But he says hardly anything about the nearly four decades of Antipas’ and Philip’s reigns—and incidentally, the little he reports of Antipas does happen to include a story of repression (A.J. 18.116–119; cf. Luke 3:19–20). How could we know about the lived reality of those decades? Josephus gives Philip an obituary that praises his good government (A.J. 18.106–108), it is true, but the content is formal—the tetrarch punished ofenders and kept the peace—and tells us nothing about realities on the ground in particular years and months of those several decades. Philip must have had some disafected subjects, and there must have been some disturbances, because every ruler faces some such problems. What they were in his case we have no way of knowing. 25 G. Woolf, “Pliny’s Province,” in Rome and the Black Sea Region: Domination, Romanization, Resistance (ed. T. Bekker-Nielsen; Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2006), 93–108 (93). 26 A. M. Berlin and J. A. Overman, eds., he First Jewish Revolt: Archaeology, History, and Ideology (London: Routledge, 2002), 4. © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 169 Later in the same volume, Seán Freyne ponders: he question remains as to why Galilee would appear to have been the theatre for many of the incidents of brigandage that Josephus reports. . . . By contrast we do not hear of any acts of brigandage in Idumea.27 Although Freyne distances appearance from reality, his phrase “we do not hear” seems to mean that Josephus does not say it, and so there is no evidence of it, and so Galilee alone appears to have been the theatre of banditry. he issue is what appears to have been the real past, not the nature of the evidence that is being used to make this determination. But of course Josephus says little about any conditions in Idumaea, and much about Galilee (in both the War and the Life). hat is where he held his command and made his mark, not least through an allegedly brilliant manipulation of the bandits there. Why should he talk about other commanders’ brilliance or their areas? He says little or nothing about the districts commanded by his peers: Peraea, hamna, Gophna, Jericho, Acrabetene, or Lydda (B.J. 2.567–568). Can we draw any conclusions at all from what he did not write about? Richard Horsley goes the farthest, positively nailing down Josephus’ literary choices as sociological data: In Galilee banditry was of relatively greater importance in the developing social turmoil, in contrast to Judea, with its diverse types of popular resistance, such as prophetic movements and [NB: Josephus’ characters] ‘dagger men.’28 Writing about Sepphoris in the same volume, Eric Meyers remarks: Surprisingly, Josephus is silent about the period between the reign of Herod Antipas and the onset of the Great Revolt in 66 c.e.29 But why is this surprising? Where and why should Josephus have described Galilean events in the 40s and 50s, long before his arrival there? What role could that have played in his account of the war? Should he also have described Samaria, the coastal cities, or the Decapolis during those years? For what purpose and in what contexts? 27 S. Freyne, “he Revolt from a Regional Perspective,” in he First Jewish Revolt (ed. Berlin and Overman), 43–56 (53). 28 R. A. Horsely, “Power Vacuum and Power Struggle in 66–7 c.e.,” in he First Jewish Revolt (ed. Berlin and Overman), 87–109 (99). 29 E. M. Meyers, “Sepphoris: City of Peace,” in he First Jewish Revolt (ed. Berlin and Overman), 110–20 (113). © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 170 steve mason Where is our justiication for burdening him posthumously with a responsibility to provide for our interests? hese last examples illustrate our wish to rely on Josephus’ narrative as some kind of ready-made authority, and oten enough to complain when he fails to live up to the bargain we have unilaterally imposed on him. his phenomenon was identiied by Horst Moehring in his Chicago dissertation30 and by Per Bilde in his article on the causes of the Judaean war in Josephus. Bilde insisted on the need to distinguish the interpretation of Josephus from the reconstruction of the actual past: Generally, the historians of the Jewish war do not explicitly analyse the reasons for the war, stated by Josephus. . . . they just follow, more or less strictly, the account given by Josephus in the Bell. and he Antiquities (Ant.).31 Nearly a century ago, Collingwood framed the problem in methodological terms: [I]t is the very ease and success with which the historian interprets his sources that lead him to fancy that he is not interpreting them at all— that they interpret themselves, have their meaning written large on their faces, require, to be understood, nothing but bare inspection. Hence the sources become falsely identiied with the history which can be written from them; and when so misconceived, history is regarded as the simple transcription of sources. From this point of view the sources become authorities, or collections of statements which the historian accepts and transplants into his own narrative. . . . Most histories that are built on a large scale and cover a considerable extent of ground show traces of this defect: the narrative seems to change its key in a curious way when one authority takes the place of another; thus every history of Greece undergoes a change of tone when Herodotus gives way to hucydides, and it is very diicult to study the history of the early Roman Empire without falling a victim to Tacitean melodrama.32 We might make the same observation about the pre- and post-70 history of Judaea, when it leaves the safety of Josephus’ dramatic coniguration. 30 H. Moehring, “Novelistic Elements in the Writings of Flavius Josephus” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1957); idem, “Joseph ben Matthia and Flavius Josephus: he Jewish Prophet and Roman Historian,” ANRW 2.21.2:864–917. 31 P. Bilde, “he Causes of the Jewish War According to Josephus,” JSJ 10 (1979): 179–202 (181). 32 Collingwood, he Idea of History, 371. © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 171 I.1.vi. I have said that it is not easy to ind historical method articulated in our ield. Jacob Neusner’s vast output includes important observations, and no one has done more to pose new questions of the evidence and explore them systematically. But his oeuvre involves many periods, genres, and methods. An impressive example of Neusner-like method applied to our period is Lester Grabbe’s handbook, Judaism from Cyrus to Hadrian. Rejecting the naive pursuit of simple facts already existing somewhere, Grabbe structures the book in a way that relects the kind of method I discuss below. He speciies problems within a period, ofers a bibliographical guide, surveys and interprets the relevant primary sources, summarizes other studies while highlighting the most signiicant issues of debate or uncertainty, and inally ofers his own attempt at synthesis where possible. With refreshing candour, he oten concludes that we lack suicient material to decide a matter, no matter how important it may seem.33 Especially welcome is his refocusing of attention from conclusions, with few exceptions, to methodological clarity.34 I.2. A Model of History for Studying the Judaean War So we turn to the problem of constructing a robust model for historical work on Roman Judaea. I proceed through three steps: choosing a general direction among various historiographical options; isolating what is most basic to the idea of history; and outlining a programme based on these considerations. 33 L. L. Grabbe, Judaism from Cyrus to Hadrian (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress, 1992), e.g., 93, 98, 111, 268, 281. See also Grabbe’s Judaic Religion in the Second Temple Period: Belief and Practice from the Exile to Yavneh (London: Routledge, 2000), 7–8, for a concise statement of his historical method. 34 My only criticism is that Grabbe’s important chapter (8) on “religious pluralism” abandons the general method. here, Grabbe becomes conident about “actual historical incidents,” about the meaning of silences in Josephus’ narrative, and even about an interpretation of Pliny on the Essenes that rests on a misapprehension. See Grabbe, Judaism from Cyrus to Hadrian, 470 (actual incidents), 476 (on the omissions), and 492, 494 on the reading of Pliny, thus (emphasis added): “he approximate location of the Essenes’ habitation is made clear by Pliny’s geographical description. . . . he statement of Pliny regarding the location of the Essene community seems incompatible with any interpretation other than Qumran and perhaps one or two other sites on the northwest shore.” Yet more forceful is Judaic Religion, 70. For the problems here see my forthcoming essay, “he Historical Problem of the Essenes,” in Celebrating the Dead Sea Scrolls: A Canadian Collection (ed. P. W. Flint and K. Baek; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011). © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 172 steve mason Because my approach has sometimes been considered odd or simply misunderstood (see Excursus below), I would point out that it has a decent pedigree. I fall in with those who have seen the humanities as seeking knowledge of what is human, including individual thought, who emphasize the need for active inquiry, and who regard speciic events and individual actions as part of history’s remit.35 Among philosophers of history I have found Collingwood the most proitable, partly because he was an accomplished archaeologist and historian before becoming a philosopher. His trenchant theoretical relections are tied to the actual work of the historian, and elegantly expressed. He died young, and we must be grateful to his student homas M. Knox, more recently to Jan van der Dussen, for bringing his unpublished manuscript pages to light in successive editions of he Idea of History. Two directions in historical method leave me out in the cold because they exclude the free investigation of particular events and past actors. On one side is a commitment to a certain kind of social history as the only kind possible or worth doing; on the other is the assumption that history is or requires the construction of a narrative. In his G. M. Trevelyan Lectures at Cambridge in 1961, which quickly became the inluential handbook What is History?36 Edward 35 E.g., Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) on the humanities as knowledge of what is produced by humans; Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) on intellectual autonomy (e.g., in What is Enlightenment?) and the principle of active inquiry; Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) on distinguishing the natural from the human sciences; Mussolini’s nemesis Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) on inquiry and the study of the mind; Bloch (1886–1944), victim of the Gestapo, on the essential principles of historical criticism; Bloch’s contemporary Collingwood (1889–1943), on history as autonomous investigation and intellectual construction; Collingwood’s younger contemporary Michael Oakeshott (1901–1990) on history as a particular kind of knowledge of the past; and Leon J. Goldstein (1927–2002) on history as argument. Among many surveys, cf. J. R. Hale, ed., he Evolution of British Historiography from Bacon to Namier (London: Macmillan, 1967); Iggers, German Conception, 136–41; C. R. Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 138–51. Accessible surveys include the review in Collingwood, he Idea of History, 14–231; well-chosen excerpts in F. R. Stern, he Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Present (rev. ed.; New York: Vintage, 1973); summary analysis in M. HughesWarrington, Fity Key hinkers on History (2d ed.; London: Routledge, 2008); juxtaposition of modernist historians with post-modernist perspectives in K. Jenkins, On “What is History?” From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White (London: Routledge, 1995). A superb critical overview is Gilderhus, History and Historians. 36 E. H. Carr, What is History? he George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures Delivered in the University of Cambridge, January–March 1961 (London: Macmillan, 1961). © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 173 Carr made two propositions that would preclude the kind of history I wish to pursue. First, he saw only social forces, emphatically not individual actions or thoughts, as history’s proper object. In keeping with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s deinition of the great person as the one who embodies and actualizes the spirit of his age, Carr rejects the study of individuals and their actions.37 Here are some representative quotations:38 But I think we are entitled by convention—as I propose to do in these lectures—to reserve the word ‘history’ for the process of inquiry into the past of man in society. he facts of history are . . . facts about the relations of individuals to one another in society and about the social forces which produce from the actions of individuals results oten at variance with, and sometimes opposite to, the results which they themselves intended. One of the serious errors of Collingwood’s view of history . . . was to assume that the thought behind the act, which the historian was called on to investigate, was the thought of the individual actor. his is a false assumption. What the historian is called on to investigate is what lies behind the act; and to this the conscious thought or motive of the individual actor may be quite irrelevant. What seems to me essential is to recognize in the great man an outstanding individual who is at once a product and an agent of the historical process, at once the representative and the creator of social forces which change the shape of the world and the thoughts of men. A history of the Judaean war built on Carr’s assumptions might be something like Heinz Kreissig’s study of social factors and class struggle, some of Richard Horsley’s work,39 Neil Faulkner’s quasi-Marxist synthesis,40 or any study that treats the causes of the war in terms of social conditions lasting over many years and spanning various locales.41 Such studies are welcome. At least they have heuristic value, Ibid., 54. Ibid., 48, 52, 55. Emphasis mine. 39 E.g., R. A. Horsley and J. S. Hanson, Bandits, Prophets, and Messiahs: Popular Movements at the Time of Jesus (New York: Harper & Row, 1988); R. A. Horsley, Archaeology, History, and Society in Galilee: he Social Context of Jesus and the Rabbis (Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity, 1996). 40 N. Faulkner, Apocalypse: he Great Jewish Revolt against Rome AD 66–73 (Stroud: Tempus, 2004). Faulkner analyzes many speciic events in concrete detail, but class struggle remains ever present as interpretative grid. 41 H. Kreissig, Die sozialen Zusammenhänge des judäischen Krieges: Klassen und Klassenkampf im Palästina des 1. Jahrhunderts vor unserer Zeit (Berlin: Akademie, 1970); Cf. P. Brunt, “Josephus on Social Conlicts in Roman Judaea,” Klio 59 (1977): 149–53. 37 38 © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 174 steve mason suggesting questions to us. he problem lies in inding appropriate data: they tend to borrow items from Josephus’ tragic-literary account and convert them into past facts. his kind of history cannot clearly address Cestius Gallus’ invasion of Judaea, the legate’s personal standing and social connections, or his political and military aims or plans. Nor can it deal with Titus’ destruction of the temple. Equally diicult is Carr’s view that only what is important and enduring from a given age is worthy of historical investigation. Agreeing with Jacob Burckhardt that history is “the record of what one age inds worthy of note in another,”42 he does away with chance events, for what happened as a result of chance cannot by deinition be worth studying as a relection of major social forces: Just as from the ininite ocean of facts the historian selects those which are signiicant for his purpose, so from the multiplicity of sequences of cause and efect he extracts those, and only those, which are historically signiicant; and the standard of historical signiicance is his ability to it them into his pattern of rational explanation and interpretation. Other sequences of cause and efect have to be rejected as accidental, not because the relation between cause and efect is diferent, but because the sequence itself is irrelevant. he historian can do nothing with it; it is not amenable to rational interpretation, and has no meaning either for the past or the present. It is true that Cleopatra’s nose, or Bajazet’s gout, or Alexander’s monkey-bite, or Lenin’s death, or Robinson’s cigarettesmoking,43 had results. But it makes no sense as a general proposition to say that generals lose battles because they are infatuated with beautiful queens, or that wars occur because kings keep pet monkeys, or that people get run over and killed on the roads because they smoke cigarettes.44 Carr’s ultimate criterion is, then, that history should produce general statements or laws about how things work. He ofers an anecdote. In a northern English industrial town in 1850 “a vendor of gingerbread, as the result of some petty dispute, was deliberately kicked to death by an angry mob.” He asks: Is this a fact of history? In his view it cannot be so, by itself, though it may yet become such (more than a century ater the event) if historians can show why it is important for some larger Carr, What is History? 55. Carr had used this ictional igure to illustrate chance: a man who walked out of his home to buy cigarettes is struck by a car. 44 Carr, What is History? 98–105 (104–5). Emphasis added. 42 43 © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 175 synthesis of social forces in nineteenth-century England. Failing that, it must “relapse into the limbo of unhistorical facts about the past.”45 Paradoxical here is the conservative framework ofered for an avowedly progressive-Marxist view of history. Where would these criteria leave the pioneering historians who have pressed uncomfortable questions about the lost voices of the past—of women, slaves, and children, who could never have been spokesmen for their ages? he notion that ages have representative voices its with speculative approaches such as Hegel’s or Oswald Spengler’s, but is hard to sustain in our time. Again, how should we undertake to study Cestius’ failed expedition, which owed so much to individual circumstances, his defeat perhaps to chance, under such a priori constraints delimiting what is historical? Carr’s fourteen-volume History of Soviet Russia met forceful criticism on just this point.46 Just before Carr gave his lectures, Braudel published the essay that gave currency to the now-standard distinction between traditional history of events (l’histoire événementielle) and the social historian’s concern with the long span (de la longue durée). He too argued the importance of studying social factors and movements as a corrective to any exclusive focus on events and particular moments. But Braudel recognized the dialectical relationship between these two: the general and the particular or even unique.47 And Bloch, co-founder of the Annaliste school that Braudel had come to lead, had insisted against the purely sociological history of Émile Durkheim, which was inluential at his time: he word [history] places no a priori prohibitions in the path of inquiry, which may turn at will toward either the individual or the social, toward momentary convulsions or the most lasting developments. It comprises in itself no credo; it commits us, according to its original meaning, to nothing more than ‘inquiry.’48 Ibid., 12–13. E. H. Carr, A History of Soviet Russia (14 vols.; London: Macmillan, 1950–1978). E.g., Hugh Trevor-Roper forcefully objected to Carr’s “ruthless dismissal” of all those who did not succeed in history’s ongoing progression: see R. J. Evans, In Defence of History (London: Granta, 1997), 224–33 (227–28). 47 F. Braudel, “Histoire et science sociale: La longue durée,” Annales: Économies, sociétés, civilisations 13 (1958): 725–53. Translated in Stern, he Varieties of History, 404–29. For the dialectic, see 406–8, 417–19. 48 Bloch, he Historian’s Crat, 17. 45 46 © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 176 steve mason Note incidentally Carr’s recurring appeal to a vast range of existing facts from which the historian may select, and his proposal that “history means interpretation” of those selected facts.49 We return to facts below. A very diferent conception of history is associated with the name of Hayden White (1928–), in a series of studies beginning in the 1970s, though many others have followed similar paths.50 he label “postmodernist” is oten too vague to be useful, but since White has accepted it we may use it for convenience.51 his approach takes to a logical end the “linguistic turn” in the humanities from about the 1960s: the recognition that everything we think and say exists in linguistic constructions, that there is no neutral or factual language. Many real problems of perception and representation arise from such relecting. But if we assume that history is the construction of narratives about the past, we might quickly conclude that all histories indivisibly mix realitycorrespondence with literary construction, and that all histories are therefore more or less on the same plane with respect to objectivity. he histories considered best by particular groups will be those written by authors with social standing and power in their constituencies, who thereby control the discourse concerning the past. Because White draws such close connections between iction and historical narrative, and a quasi-technical language of literary formalism pervades his work, it is easy to understand him as equating the writing of history and the production of iction. In his later writings he has rejected this charge, Carr, What is History? 23–24. An eicient way to meet a gallery of postmodern theorists of history is to read R. J. Evans’ engagement with them (and others) throughout his In Defence of History. For some of their arguments see, e.g., K. Jenkins, Re-thinking History (London: Routledge, 1991); idem, ed., he Postmodern History Reader (London: Routledge, 1997); A. Munslow, Deconstructing History (London: Routledge, 1997). 51 White’s important works include Metahistory: he Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973)—especially the introduction; Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); and he Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). For a sympathetic recent appraisal, beginning with a new essay by White himself, see K. Korhonen, ed., Tropes for the Past: Hayden White and the History / Literature Debate (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006). White’s treatment of history as narrative may be driven by his early focus on the great nineteenth-century historians who took stands in favour of history as narrative against contemporary demands for a “scientiic” approach: homas Babington Macaulay, homas Carlyle, Jules Michelet, and George Macaulay Trevelyan. But it continues with his essay in the 2006 volume, relecting on Primo Levi’s narrative, Survival in Auschwitz, in relation to history. 49 50 © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 177 but mainly by distinguishing iction from literature while maintaining the bond between the latter and history.52 Certainly he has tapped a rich ancient vein. In Josephus’ day history was indeed a branch of literature, written and judged chiely on rhetorical and moral grounds.53 History as grand, moralizing narrative remained a ixture in the West, or became one again, under the anticlerical, philosophically speculative, Romantic, and positivist impulses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But it is doubtful whether most working historians today see their main task as the construction of narratives. I do not, for the reasons given below. White’s relections on historians’ lack of attention to their language and rhetoric sometimes hit the mark, but his harsh critique of their naive search for given facts, insensitivity to irony or to the messiness and lack of causality in real life, antipathy to literature, and assumption of its own linguistic neutrality, and above all his reduction of history to narrative, seem to many historians too schematic (concerning the ield) and unconnected with their actual work.54 If they have largely ignored his arguments, it is because they do not ind them helpful for their daily labours. We can readily agree that there is no such thing as neutral language, and that we all write with a rhetoric of some kind, and yet still imagine that we regularly communicate ideas with suicient overlap of language to be understood—not objectively, but understood nonetheless. Further, if history is not essentially narrative or discourse, as postmodernists tend to assume,55 and its open inquiry and argumentation are not merely rhetorical tropes, but an expressed mode of reasoning, then much of the rest of White’s analysis (e.g., of conventions for analyzing emplotment, argument, ideology, and trope, each with four possible structures) would seem beside the point. 52 H. White, “Historical Discourse and Literary Writing,” in Tropes for the Past (ed. Korhonen), 25–33. 53 Cf. Woodman, Rhetoric in Classical Historiography. 54 E.g., A. Momigliano, “he Rhetoric of History and the History of Rhetoric: On Hayden White’s Tropes,” in Comparative Criticism: A Yearbook, Vol. 3. (ed. E. S. Shaffer; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 259–68; C. Ginsburg, “Checking the Evidence: the Judge and the Historian,” Critical Inquiry 18 (1991): 79–92; Evans, In Defence of History, 100–102, 124–26. 55 See also Jenkins, Re-thinking History, 6–7: “history is one of a series of discourses about the world”; “history is a discourse about, but categorically diferent from, the past.” © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 178 steve mason I turn to the conception of history that I ind most productive for studying such event complexes as the Judaean-Roman war. We begin with the obvious proposition that history has to do with the past. In what I have caricatured as the high-school view, which is widely assumed in popular culture, history simply is the past. A slightly more sophisticated version imagines that diferent interest groups compete in claiming the correct version of this past, or history. But as soon as we consider the relationship between history and the lived past we must make several qualiications. First, history concerns itself with the human past; other avenues to the past (astronomy, zoology, biology, geology) are not history.56 Is history, then, the human past? If so, we are in a predicament because what gives the past its name is that, like the future, it does not now exist. Since history does exist, in the activity and debates and products of those who work in History departments, it cannot be the past. Everything turns, then, on the question, “Where do we ind history?” As soon as we recognize that history is not the past itself, and that we ind it only in the minds and literary expressions of historians, we realize that history must be something like the study of, or thinking about, the human past. How, then, can we encounter the human past? People have claimed to know the past in at least four ways: through divine revelation, through the memory of personal experience, through the heritage handed down from previous generations (tradition), and by means of systematic investigation. he irst three of these, though they are diferent from each other, ater a generation or two, fuse in the single category of tradition. Moses might have claimed to know what happened at creation by revelation, as Josephus implies (C. Ap. 1.37), but once he passed that story on to Joshua, it was no longer revelation: to Joshua and all successors it was something handed down, a tradition. Josephus understands the need to prove, though his means could never be up to the task, the reliability of that tradition (C. Ap. 1.30–41; cf. paradosis at 1.39). Our grandparents personally experienced many things, but once they told our parents, who then related the stories to us, those memories became familial traditions. Tradition has been with humans as long as we have been able to communicate, parent to child, and in some forms it may be found with other animals. It comes unbidden, with seniors ready to impart 56 Cf. Bloch, he Historian’s Crat, 19–20. © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 179 a legacy to children as soon as latter attain consciousness. Far from being undesirable, tradition fulills necessary socializing functions. Our families, communities, voluntary associations, religious denominations, and legal and political institutions all preserve elements of the past that will acculturate new members of the group and inculcate its values. We are schooled by parents, teachers, political leaders, and preachers in the deining moments of our past. Tradition abstracts moments from the past that embody key features of our group identity, providing exempla for us to follow and avoid, and reminding us of what it really means to belong to this group. his process is clearest in national traditions of war or other trauma—London’s response to the Blitz or the European resistance movements during the Second World War.57 Traditions normally have a solid core of collective memory, but they inevitably shed complicating factors, which would detract from the socializing function and moral use of the past. Tradition does not invite inquiry, questioning, or the recovery of original context; it uses the past to preserve group values. It need not, however, be narrowly ideological. A group that prides itself on pluralism and open debate may develop (and backdate) a corresponding tradition, as when contemporary North American religious communities ind their present (post-Enlightenment, post1960s) values clearly indicated in their ancient sacred texts. From this perspective, the history taught in schools comes normally in the form of tradition, or what the elders wish the young to absorb, and not as the sort of history (i.e., open inquiry) practised by historians. In recent years the eforts of the Texas School Board to create a patriotic history curriculum have highlighted this issue. A supporter of the revisions frames the principle thus: “But our schools’ job is not to be neutral reporters. . . . It is a culturist truth that all schools serve to socialize youth with the values of the society they happen to have 57 On the resistance see M. Burleigh, Moral Combat: A History of World War II (London: Harper Collins, 2010), 268–86; on the Blitz, “Remembering the Blitz: was it an avoidable tragedy?,” Guardian G2 special supplement, September 7, 2010; J. Gardiner, he Blitz: Our Cities under Attack 1940–1941 (London: Harper Collins, 2010); G. Mortimer, he Blitz: An Illustrated History (Oxford: Osprey, 2010), e.g., 119–25. hese historical inquiries, while providing abundant evidence to ground the traditions of selless courage, balance and texture that portrait with less admirable realities from the same period. © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 180 steve mason been born into.”58 School systems under totalitarian regimes are only extreme examples;59 the principle that group tradition uses the past to socialize initiates holds generally for political, religious, or even familial tradition, wherever the maiores expect the minores to internalize cherished values. Although historians are all too easily drawn into debates about which version of the past (i.e., which conclusion) is correct or more accurate, even sometimes buying into the misguided contrast between accepted results and revisionism, the issue is really, I suggest, the categorical diference between tradition and history. What I am calling tradition is what Michael Oakeshott described as the didactic, living, or “present” past—the only one that most people seriously encounter, even in school. He observes that this “ ‘past’ is not signiicantly past at all”: It is the present contents of a vast storehouse into which time continuously empties the lives, the utterances, the achievements and the sufferings of mankind. As they pour in, these items undergo a process of detachment, shrinkage, and desiccation which the less interesting of them withstand and in which the rest are transformed from being resonant, ambiguous circumstantial survivals from bygone human life into emblematic actions and utterances either entirely divorced from their circumstances or trailing similarly formalized circumstances.60 58 So J. Press, “Texas School Board controversy could impact our solvency,” American hinker blog, May 26, 2010 (http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/05/ texas_school_board_controversy.html, accessed October 2, 2010). See also M. Birnbaum, “Historians speak out against proposed Texas textbook changes,” Washington Post, March 18, 2010, reporting in part: “Discussions ranged from whether President Reagan should get more attention (yes), whether hip-hop should be included as part of lessons on American culture (no), and whether President of the Confederacy Jeferson Davis’s inaugural address should be studied alongside Abraham Lincoln’s (yes). Of particular contention was the requirement that lessons on McCarthyism note that ‘the later release of the Venona papers conirmed suspicions of communist iniltration in U.S. government.’. . . Also contentious were changes that asserted the Christian faith of the founding fathers. Historians say the founding fathers had a variety of approaches to religion and faith; some, like Jeferson, were quite secular.” 59 Cf. R. J. Evans, he hird Reich in Power (London: Penguin, 2005), 263: “History, ruled a directive issued on 9 May 1933 by the Reich Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, had to take a commanding position in the schools. . . . he purpose of history was to teach people that life was always dominated by struggle, that race and blood were central to everything that happened in the past, present and future, and that leadership determined the fate of peoples. Central themes in the new teaching included courage in battle, sacriice for a greater cause, boundless admiration for the Leader and hatred of Germany’s enemies, the Jews.” 60 M. Oakeshott, “On History” and other Essays (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999), 43–44. Emphasis added. © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 181 Oakeshott’s reference to the “practical” past sets up a contrast with history. For him, it is only in the university that scholars may pursue history, as well as philosophy, pure science, and mathematics without intrusion from the incessant demand of practical results. At this time of severe budget cuts we might remember his view that only the university can host the kind of systematic, disinterested, relective, rigorously critical inquiry whose goal is nothing other than better understanding. For Oakeshott, “An historically understood past is, then, the conclusion of a critical enquiry of a certain sort; it is to be found nowhere but in a history book.”61 We leave Oakesthott here to recall that this understanding of history as inquiry goes back to the very roots of the enterprise in ancient times. his is familiar, but I recall it here in order to stress what is essential to the conception of history. Herodotus was known in antiquity as the “father of history.”62 Since he did not beget either the past or discussion about it, the history that he sired cannot mean those things. He was well aware of the stories and traditions (mythoi) about the past, in their many conlicting forms. When he decided to write about the Persian-Greek wars he pressed the question of the basis of our knowledge: How can we know that events happened this or that way? He wanted to get past mere stories retailed by the logographers to real knowledge. hat is, he would undertake an inquiry, perusing his own questions, for which narrow-minded Greek views of the Persian defeat did not answer, using open standards of proof. His most valuable tool would be the interviewing and crossexamination of living witnesses (elenchos; cf. 1.24.7; 2.22–23). Typical passages in Herodotus are these:63 “I have acquired knowledge about the Persians, as follows” (1.131.1); “None of the Egyptians could give me any information, when I inquired of them, as to what power the Nile possesses” (2.19.3); “I did learn as much as I could by travelling to the city of Elephantine and seeing it for myself, but I investigated the region beyond that point through hearsay alone” (2.29.1–2); “All that can possibly be learned about its [the Nile’s] course from Oakeshott, “On History,” 36. So Cicero (Leg. 1.1.5), apparently citing a commonplace in the mid irst century b.c.e., which he turns ironically by claiming that Herodotus’ narrative is full of fabulous tales. 63 Translations are those of A. L. Purvis, he Landmark Herodotus: he Histories (New York: Pantheon, 2007), slightly adapted with emphasis added. 61 62 © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 182 steve mason inquiry has been stated here” (2.34.1); “he Egyptians tell this story. . . . When I asked them how they knew that this had really happened, they replied . . .” (2.54.1); “Up to this point, what I have said about Egypt has been the result of my own observation, judgement, and research, but from here on I am going to report the words of the Egyptians just as I heard them” (2.99.1); “When I inquired into the stories in regard to Helen, the priests told me . . .” (2.113.1). Such passages expose the diference between Herodotus’ historia and tradition. he word-group on which he most characteristically falls back, represented by “inquiry, inquire” in the translation above, is Ionic historiē (or the verb historein). Although his accounts owe much to predecessors, from Homer to the ethnographer Hecataeus of Miletus, he was the irst surviving writer to apply this term for empirical research to the human past. he concept was important enough that he used it in his opening sentence as a title (1.1.1): “Here is the presentation of the inquiry ( ἀ ) of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, [written] so that what has occurred among people should not fade with time.” Just as his Athenian contemporary Socrates (according to Plato) was insisting that he knew no truth in advance, but could only acquire it by means of rigorous questioning, testing, or proving (also elenchos),64 Herodotus undertook to base his knowledge on inquiry. Herodotus’ method required him, in principle at least, to abandon preconceptions and also to remain unattached to conclusions where the evidence was insuicient to support them. A product of Asia Minor, which had long been under Persian inluence, he undertook to explore all sides of the great conlict with a curious, open mind. Here is something essential to historia as inquiry: to be worthy of the name, it must be open-ended. Even where we think that our evidence allows us to take a irm position—favouring the traditional 66 c.e. rather than Nikos Kokkinos’ 65 for the outbreak of revolt, or preferring Werner Eck’s 74 c.e. to the 73 for its conclusion65—in ancient history we are limited to expressing what seems to be the best explanation of currently available evidence. So Collingwood: E.g., heaet. 165d; Gorg. 458a; Symp. 201e with 216e. W. Eck, “Die Eroberung von Masada und eine neue Inschrit des L. Flavius Silva Nonius Bassus,” ZNTW 60 (1969): 282–89; N. Kokkinos, he Herodian Dynasty: Origins, Role in Society and Eclipse (Sheield: Sheield Academic Press, 1998), 387–95. 64 65 © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 183 When we say ‘it was so,’ we are in reality talking not about the past but about the present, because we cannot ever say what the past in itself truly was, but only what the evidence now at our disposal enables us to say that it was; and, as we have seen, it is quite certain that this evidence is always fragmentary and inadequate.66 Herodotus’ non-committal posture did not win him universal admiration. Some ancients accused him of purveying tales rather than getting at the truth. His critics, however, were concerned less with factual error than with his moral biases—the central concern of all ancient literature.67 Some would denounce him as a philobarbaros for his openness to foreign perspectives (Plutarch, Mor. 857a). His perceived shortcomings inspired others to do better, notably hucydides, whose terse, authoritative analysis of the Peloponnesian war would become the gold standard for history-writing.68 hucydides did not name Herodotus, but apparently saw himself as the Halicarnassian’s successor and reiner of his methods.69 With a stinging rebuke of the gullible who accept native traditions uncritically (1.20.1, 3) and dismissal of both poetic exaggeration and the repetition of untestable claims (1.21.1), he insisted on rigorous principles for the collection and testing of evidence. He avoided Herodotus’ Collingwood, he Idea of History, 409. Plutarch’s essay On the Malice of Herodotus, though written centuries later, illustrates widespread assumptions. As the traditional title suggests, he was concerned not so much with factual inaccuracy as with Herodotus’ character: especially his putative partiality toward Athenians and hostility toward Plutarch’s ancestors—Corinthians and Boeotians. Compare Polybius’ earlier rejection of Phylarchus as a source for the Cleomenic war on account of that writer’s too great sympathy with Sparta, nemesis of Polybius’ home city of Megalopolis. Polybius will exclusively follow the morally correct (hence “true”) Aratus of Sicyon, champion of the Achaean League (2.56–63). Later Polybius rejects Fabius Pictor for supposedly misrepresenting the motives of the Carthaginians (3.8.1–11)—again, not because he has found his data defective: he realized already that there was no way to liberate the data from a morally shaped narrative. 68 Josephus himself says as much (C. Ap. 1.18) while obliquely demonstrating his own learning, in a general disparagement of Greek historiography. He claims that some have even accused the great hucydides, reputedly the most accurate historian. On the Athenian’s unique standing in later times see Dionysius, huc. 2–3; Diodorus 1.37.4; and Lucian, Hist. conscr. 15, 18–19, 39, 42. hucydides was undoubtedly an important model for Josephus, in both the War and the Antiquities. On the former see G. Mader, Josephus and the Politics of Historiography: Apologetic and Impression Management in the Bellum Judaicum (Leiden: Brill, 2000). he Antiquities is not so obviously in the hucydidean mould, but in books 17–19 Josephus makes an unfortunate attempt to imitate the master’s style. 69 See S. Hornblower, hucydides (London: Duckworth, 1987), 7–33. 66 67 © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 184 steve mason language, perhaps to distance his work from his predecessor’s taint but also showing that the word had not yet become identiied with the study of the past. hucydides nevertheless employed a rich vocabulary , for eyewitness testimony, evidence, and cross-examination (μ 70 μ ,ἔ ). For the “writing up” of his results he borrowed a verb ([ ] ω) from the technical writing of manuals: he would avoid the frills of drama and stick to the facts.71 Forms of this root would, along with Herodotus’ , come together as the common property of later historians such as Josephus. hucydides’ account is undeniably impressive in its exacting socialpsychological analysis, though his chosen form of authoritative narrative rarely hints at the means by which he obtained his knowledge. Exposing his procedure might have invited challenge. hucydides, on completing his inquiries to his own satisfaction, pulled up the ladder and severed the mooring-lines, launching his work as a self-contained vessel and leaving audiences to be persuaded or not by his authority. hough more than successful in winning admirers across the millennia, he has been accused of not being a true historian at all, given his penchant for diagnosing political ills according to immutable laws of human nature rather than focusing on change, and for composing speeches with little regard for their concrete situations.72 But conidence is attractive, they say. hucydides’ apparent rigour, exclusion of ostentatious drama and embellishment, and cold assessment of political realities made his work the acknowledged standard. his is not the place for a review of history’s fate, either over the long trail from antiquity or from its establishment as a university discipline in the modern world. It is enough to observe that the root conception of history as active inquiry into the human past remains fundamental, though the tension between methodological openness and authoritative narrative has been present from the start. When 70 Martyrion: 1.8.1, 33.1, 73.3; 3.11.4, 53.4; 6.82.2. Tekmērion: 1.1.3, 20.1, 21.1, 34.3, 73.5, 132.5; 2.15.4, 39.2, 50.2; 3.66.1; 6.28.2. Elenchos and cognate verb: 1.132.1, 135.2; 3.38.4, 53.3, 61.1, 86.1. For analysis see Hornblower, hucydides, 100–107. 71 hucydides 1.1.1; 2.70. 4, 103.2; 3.25.2, 88.4, 116.3; 4.51.1, 104.4, 135.2; 6.7.4, 93.4; 7.18.4; 8.6.5, 60.3. he verb is distinctively characteristic of his work: in these fourteen cases, including the decisive opening sentence, it is used formulaically with the subject “hucydides.” He predicates it only three times, two of these in nonhistorical senses, of others. 72 So Collingwood, he Idea of History, 30: “hucydides is . . . the man in whom the historical thought of Herodotus was overlaid and smothered beneath anti-historical motives.” © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 185 writers ancient or modern have retailed old stories in an uncritical spirit, critics have jumped up to insist that this is a betrayal of history.73 Josephus already postured as such a critic, when he thundered against his contemporaries: “he industrious man is not the one who merely remodels another person’s arrangement and order, but the one who, by speaking of recent things, also establishes the body of the inquiry as his own” (ἀ ᾿ ὁ μ ῦ μ ω ἴ ; B.J. 1.15). In amongst all the modern debates, the basic notion of relentless and rigorous probing for answers to our questions, in contrast to the passive reception of what has come down to us unbidden, remains basic to the name of history—and accounts for whatever prestige the discipline may have. Because of its nature as inquiry, history can be unsettling to tradition and to those with interests in perpetuating familiar stories. Like science, history has oten seemed threatening. hat is why so many historical studies of sensitive subjects were published anonymously or posthumously in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and some authors found themselves in prison.74 It can be a dirty business rummaging through old texts and material evidence, asking questions about matters on which tradition has imposed a trustworthy narrative. Even within academia, scholars may become pariahs by asking questions about what others regard as settled. We come, then, to the programme or procedure of historical investigation. Collingwood, though a great philosopher of history, disarmingly found the essential principles of historical method embodied in the work of detectives, who every day are called upon to launch inquiries into the human past, work through the evidence, imagine and fairly weigh all possibilities, and produce a careful accounting—all without investment in a particular conclusion.75 he historian is not like a detective in all respects, of course, as he fully conceded. Criminal inquiries have their own hierarchies of personnel, rules of evidence, and relationships among investigators, prosecutors, defence attorneys, and judges, which vary from one jurisdiction to another. His point Lucian of Samosata’s second-century How to Write History is illed with criticisms of contemporary historians for their lack of true knowledge based on exacting inquiry. 74 One example is the British apostate clergyman, Rev. Robert Taylor (1784–1844). In the Oakham Gaol while serving his irst imprisonment for blasphemy he wrote he Diegesis: Being a Discovery of the Origin, Evidences, and Early History of Christianity (London: R. Carlile, 1829). 75 Collingwood, he Idea of History, 266–82. 73 © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 186 steve mason was that a proper criminal investigation is an application of sound historical principles. Because its practical stakes are higher when the liberty or lives of people are in the balance, criminal investigation may even ofer checks on the way history is practised in more sophisticated academic circles. I.2.i. Our Default Position is Not Knowing As the autonomous investigation of the human past, history begins from the premise that we do not know the past except by means of the impending investigation (i.e., through historia), and that ignorance remains our default position. Should our methodical inquiry prove inconclusive or altogether unsuccessful, we cannot advance from the position of not knowing. his is the truth captured in Neusner’s dictum, “What we cannot show, we do not know.”76 he point may seem obvious but it is widely ignored. Scholars frequently claim that they are entitled to believe X unless someone can disprove it, which is almost always an impossible task, or someone has a better explanation of the (meagre) evidence, or even because some surviving account is the only story we have.77 And so the burden of proof is tossed about indiscriminately. But this is one point on which we may be clear. If history is the methodical inquiry into the human past, without which we cannot know it, then the burden rests always, entirely and exclusively, on the investigator who has the courage to conduct the inquiry and try to establish a case. No one has required them to do this. If other scholars ind their case weak or the evidence insuicient, or see explanatory possibilities other than those they have considered, the case fails and we return to not knowing—until and unless another attempt is made. To suppose that critics must themselves have worked out a 76 Neusner used this ot-repeated saying as the subtitle of his Rabbinic Literature and the New Testament (Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity, 1993). 77 I ofer one old and one recent example: “In any case we cannot proitably abandon all the traditional history of this early period as legendary merely because we are unable to check its accuracy in more than one source or because the sources themselves are much later in date. Such action, though perhaps based on better historical method, would leave the ancient historian a small framework upon which to build in future years” (N. C. Debevoise, A Political History of Parthia [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938], xxvii); “But unless or until fresh evidence emerges, we must make a choice [among Plutarch, Suetonius, and Tacitus as sources for Otho]” (G. Morgan, 69 A.D.: he Year of Four Emperors [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006], 290). © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 187 more convincing case is a category-mistake. History does not require us to believe something, anything. Such a quasi-religious expectation would be anti-historical. Our task is to pursue problems only as far as we can with available evidence, then to report honestly on the state of afairs. We might as well accept that, of the untold millions of questions we might pose about the lived reality of the ancient world, even within the conines of Roman Judaea during a given decade, we shall only be able to explore a tiny proportion of them with any signiicant evidence, and even in those few fortunate cases (say, the ten- or eighteen-year prefecture of Pontius Pilate) that evidence will be severely limited and full of problems. We mainly do not know what happened. hat is our reason for being historians, the starting point of any investigation, and the wolf that remains always at our door. I.2.ii. In the Beginning is the Question In order to launch an investigation, then, like the detective the historian must irst specify the problem to be investigated. his is crucial because the problem determines the shape of the inquiry, the scope and nature of the evidence to be examined from this perspective, and the operative criteria. If my problem concerns Pilate’s reported construction of an aqueduct for Jerusalem and the opposition it created, I will construct the inquiry—for example, studying ancient aqueducts in general, material evidence for Jerusalem’s aqueducts, other local evidence for Pilate’s tenure—in a very diferent way from one that sought to recover how Josephus’ Roman audiences would have understood his accounts of the prefect. Identifying a problem for inquiry also demonstrates the autonomy of the historian. We may think up any questions we wish, and these are unlikely to correspond closely to the prepossessions of ancient authors such as Tacitus and Josephus (examples in Part II). he need for a generative question is oten overlooked. We see this in the student who wishes to explore a topic in a research essay: Hammurabi, say, or Alexander. “What about him?” we might ask. he student assumes that the facts are all out there to be gathered and summarized, and that this is research. Here is Collingwood on the importance of the question: Francis Bacon, lawyer and philosopher, laid it down in one of his memorable phrases that the natural scientist must ‘put Nature to the question.’ What he was denying . . . was that the scientist’s attitude towards nature © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 188 steve mason should be one of respectful attentiveness, waiting upon her utterances and building his theories on the basis of what she chose to vouchsafe him. . . . Here, in a single brief epigram, Bacon laid down once for all the true theory of experimental science. It is also, though Bacon did not know this, the true theory of historical method. In scissors-and-paste history the historian takes up a preBaconian position. His attitude towards his authorities, as the very word [‘authorities’] shows, is one of respectful attentiveness. He waits to hear what they choose to tell him, and lets them tell it in their own way and in their own time. . . . he scientiic historian reads them with a question in his mind, having taken the initiative by deciding for himself what he wants to ind out from them.78 Or as Momigliano put it, the historian “has to assess the value of his evidence not in terms of simple reliability, but of relevance to the problems he wants to solve.”79 Scholars discover inscriptions, ossuaries, building and pottery remains, coins, and so forth, then classify, draw, photograph, and catalogue them. But the items do not sit there talking to us from their storage facilities. It is only when an investigator comes along with a question, say on the relevance of the inscriptions from Urbs Salvia (modern Urbisaglia) for the important dates in Flavius Silva’s career, that they become evidence and begin to yield up their secrets. he investigator gets nowhere by staring at the stones and waiting for them to speak. he Urbs Salvia inscriptions did not tell us anything until Werner Eck brought his skillful questions to them, reasoning from his knowledge of both epigraphical conventions and the conditions of Roman elite careers that Flavius Silva could only have gone to Judaea in 73 c.e., too late for Masada to have fallen in April of that year.80 he generative question deines not only the shape of the inquiry, but as importantly the inquiring mindset of the historian. Because we are perpetual inquirers, we must never be invested in conclusions. he early twentieth century was a time of great certainties. héodore Reinach showed that the beautiful silver coins proclaiming Jerusalem “holy,” in a dated series of “year one” through to “year ive,” must have come from the last ive years of Simon the Hasmonaean’s rule Collingwood, he Idea of History, 269. A. Momigliano, “Historicism Revisited,” in Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), 365–73 (368–69). 80 Eck, “Die Eroberung von Masada”; idem, Senatoren von Vespasian bis Hadrian (Munich: Beck, 1970), 93–111. 78 79 © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 189 (139–135 b.c.e.)—not from the war with Rome, as we must now conclude.81 Scholars of that time knew an enormous amount about the Pharisees, without hesitation assigning to them works ranging from the Psalms of Solomon and Jubilees to the Damascus Document that had been found in the Cairo Geniza. hey knew that the war against Rome ended in 73 c.e. and that the Diaspora Revolt began in 115, and could cite all the evidence for these conclusions. Nowadays their certainties have evaporated—though, to be sure, others have sometimes rushed in to take their place. Were they wasting their time because their conclusions turned out to be wrong? Of course not. Pursuing inquiries, interpreting evidence, and trying to explain it is the essential work of history. But conclusions come and go. hey erred in claiming too much for their reconstructive hypotheses. We do well to remember, when we ind ourselves becoming attached to some conclusion or other, that our reconstructions have not even the tiniest efect on the actual past. I.2.iii. Finding Evidence Once we have a productive problem in hand, we begin to identify and gather relevant evidence. We never know in advance—or ever—all of the potential evidence. But we must follow a method. he case of the Pharisees is cautionary, for when scholars used to regard everything from the Psalms of Solomon and the Damascus Document to the Babylonian Talmud as primary evidence for the Pharisees, they got nowhere collectively as each worked from private or parochial assumptions. A publicly accountable method requires that we begin with evidence undoubtedly bearing on the problem under investigation, moving to other possible evidence only when we have some working hypotheses in place based on this control material. In the case of the Pharisees, this meant resolving to begin with the evidence of the New Testament, Josephus, and the earliest rabbinic literature.82 T. Reinach, Jewish Coins (trans. M. Hill; London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1903). his change came in the 1970s when the very diferent studies by J. Neusner (From Politics to Piety [Englewood Clifs: Prentice-Hall, 1973], 4: “But for now, the only reliable information derives from Josephus, the Gospels, and rabbinical literature, beginning with the Mishnah”) and E. Rivkin (A Hidden Revolution [Nashville: Abingdon, 1978], 31: “Josephus, the New Testament, and the Tannaitic Literature are the only sources that can be legitimately drawn upon for the construction of an objective deinition of the Pharisees”) began from a shared premise. 81 82 © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 190 steve mason I.2.iv. Interpreting Evidence—For What It Is Next we must try to understand our evidence for what it is, by itself and in its own contexts, without yet trying to exploit it in answer to our historical questions. D. A. Russell wrote concerning Plutarch’s Lives: And yet it should be obvious that, for the very historical purposes for which the book is now chiely studied, it is misleading and dangerous to use what is plainly one of the most sophisticated products of ancient historiography without constant regard to the plans and purposes of its author.83 he same could be said of Josephus’ works or any ancient narratives— the need to interpret Pausanias’ Description of Greece before exploiting it historically has also been a relatively late development84—as of material survivals from antiquity. Whether it is literary or material, as we have seen, potential evidence does not speak for itself. It always requires interpretation by criteria relevant to its kind and nature. his step of interpretation is the most important part of academic history, I venture to suggest, because (a) we cannot go further until we understand our evidence and (b) this is the only part of our investigation over which we enjoy some control, with the prospect of veriication. It is also what distinguishes the discipline from tradition, on the one hand, and a naive “scissors-and-paste” construction of the past on the other. Neither of those recognizes evidence-interpretation as a separate step, distinct from the forming of judgements about the past. Since the point is important and yet easily misunderstood, I elaborate. Collingwood writes: We no longer think that in reading Livy or Gibbon we are face to face with the early or late history of Rome; we realize that what we are reading is not history but only material out of which, by thinking for ourselves, we may hope to construct history. From this point of view, Livy and Gibbon are no longer authorities, but sources merely: they are not to be followed, but to be interpreted.85 D. A. Russell, “On Reading Plutarch’s Lives,” GR 13 (1966): 139–54 (139). A watershed was Christian Habicht’s 1982 Sather Lectures, published as Pausanias’ Guide to Ancient Greece (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). See now the exploratory essays in S. E. Alcock, J. F. Cherry, and J. Elsner, Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 85 Collingwood, he Idea of History, 382–83. Emphasis added. 83 84 © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 191 Oakeshott concludes a section on interpreting evidence, as diverse as “the Gospel according to St Mark, a Persian carpet, Hobbes’ Leviathan, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the score of Figaro, a parish register of marriages, Fountains Abbey [a twelth-century monastic base in Yorkshire], a ield path or a song,” with this: Historical enquiry, then, begins in a present composed of objects recognized as exploits which have survived; each is a fragment of a bygone present. . . . he immediate concern of the enquiry is to understand performances recognized as survivals in terms of the transactional relationships which constitute their characters as performances, to discern their conditionality [i.e., the concrete conditions of their character as sources] and thus to determine the ‘authenticity’ of their utterance. How arduous an undertaking this may be will depend on the opacity of the object. . . . [N]o object which has survived yields its authentic character to mere observation, and its worth in further historical enquiry depends upon an understanding of its authentic character.86 Applied to Roman Judaea these observations remind us that all of our evidence, material and literary, greets us as a mystery, and if we imagine that we understand it intuitively we should think again. Just as material objects were created for speciic purposes that had nothing to do with us, so Philo, Pliny, Josephus, Tacitus, and Dio wrote in their own languages and for their own reasons, not to serve our needs. heir work cannot be taken over for our purposes, therefore, without careful prior exploration of their own aims, interests, and perspectives in writing. Collingwood illustrates the need to interpret evidence with a fable based on his detective analogy. A detective is investigating the death of John Doe. A young woman comes forward and declares “I killed John Doe.” Although she was not a person of interest, her assertion immediately becomes relevant evidence. But what does the detective do with her plain assertion of guilt? he wrong, if tempting approach would be to conclude the investigation and say “We have our culprit!” Rather, the investigator must relect: “his woman is telling me that she killed John Doe. Why is she telling me that? What does her statement mean?” here are many reasons why a person might confess to a crime, only one of which is that she did it. She might be shielding the culprit. She might have a mental disorder that causes her to 86 Oakeshott, “On History,” 56. Emphasis added. © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 192 steve mason confess what she has not done. In a jurisdiction with capital punishment, she might be looking for a way to end her life. She might have been coerced. Since these are all possible explanations of a confession, it cannot simply be taken to mean what it says. It is another datum that asks to be understood irst by itself, in its own context apart from the question of who killed John Doe. For the ancient historian, interpreting the evidence is necessary in relation to physical and literary remains alike. Coins, inscriptions, and bones are no more self-interpreting than literary texts. To take a famous case involving Herod’s coins, iguring out which year is represented by his large “year three” issue (37 b.c.e., 34, or later?) and the correct identiication of the symbols on it—a hemispherical, brimmed military helmet with crest, straps, and cheek-pieces, or a conical Dioscuri cap associated with cult of Kore?—are obviously prior conditions for investigating relevant aspects of Herod’s reign.87 With literary evidence, problems of interpretation are no fewer or easier. Where did Josephus get his Herod material from, in the rather diferent versions of the War and the Antiquities, and what might have been the interests of his various sources? Why and how does Josephus write about Herod in each of his major works? How did he reshape his sources to serve his varied literary interests (not assumed to be theses)? And so forth. All evidence needs both interpretation and explanation before it can be used proitably for the historical Herod. Excursus: Apologia pro vita sua It seems that my work has occasionally been misunderstood precisely on this point. In the study of Roman Judaea many scholars do not seem to see the 87 Favouring the Dioscuri interpretation are, for example, J. Magness, “he Cults of Isis and Kore at Samaria-Sebaste in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods,” HTR 94 (2001): 157–77 (165–70); D. M. Jacobson, “Herod the Great Shows His True Colors,” Near Eastern Archaeology 64:3 (2001), 100–104; idem, “Military Helmet or Dioscuri Motif on Herod the Great’s Largest Coin?” Israel Numismatic Research 2 (2007): 93–101; M. Bernett, Der Kaiserkult in Judäa unter den Herodiern und Römern: Untersuchungen zur politischen und religiösen Geschichte Judäas von 30 v. bis 66 n. Chr. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 95–97. Dissenters include Y. Meshorer, A Treasury of Jewish Coins from the Persian Period to Bar Kokhba (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 2001), 64 (augur’s hat), 220 (military helmet) and S. Brenner, “Coin of Herod the Great: Star or Crest?” he Celator 14:10 (2000): 40–41 (47); idem, “Herod the Great Remains True to Form,” Near Eastern Archaeology 64 (2001): 212–14; D. Hendin, A Guide to Biblical Coins (5th ed.; New York: Amphora, 2010), 229–32. © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 193 need for interpreting evidence in its own right, or know where to place it in their scheme of history. Most of my work to date has been at the bottom end of the historical pyramid, dealing with the interpretation of potential literary evidence and questions of method. I regard the historical interpretation of major literary texts (especially Josephus) as formally comparable to the work of archaeologists, papyrologists, epigraphers, and numismatists. We all work in the “auxiliary disciplines” that provide the basis for historical reconstruction, by trying to understand our material irst for itself. Whether our objects are ancient sites, pottery, coins, inscriptions, or historical narratives, we try to understand them according to the operative conventions, comparing like with like and classifying our material accordingly. Although my views have changed on many things in the past quarter-century, my dissertation and irst book resulting from it were already written in this framework, as historical philology in the service of history and invoking a Collingwoodian approach.88 he problem of the historical Pharisees, then much discussed, would require a thorough examination of Mark, Matthew, Luke–Acts, John, Paul, and early rabbinic literature, but that was beyond the scope of my study. As I explained in the introduction and repeated in the conclusion:89 he purpose of the foregoing study has been to develop a framework against which to interpret Josephus’s testimony about the Pharisees. . . . And since Josephus is probably our most valuable witness to the history of the Pharisees, an interpretation of his evidence and his biases is already a major preliminary step toward the recovery of that history. Interpreting evidence in its literary and historical contexts remained basic to my approach, as my preface to the Josephus commentary from Brill indicates:90 he commentary aims at a balance between what one might, for convenience, call historical and literary issues. ‘Literary’ here would include matters most pertinent to the interpretation of the text itself. ‘Historical’ would cover matters related to the hypothetical reconstruction of a reality outside the text. For example: How Josephus presented the causes of the war against Rome is a literary problem, whereas recovering the actual causes of the war is the task of historical reconstruction. 88 S. Mason, Flavius Josephus on the Pharisees: A Composition-Critical Study (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 1–17. 89 Ibid., 372, 375 (emphasis added). J. Neusner and B. Chilton, eds., In Quest of the Historical Pharisees (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2007), now ofers in-depth studies of each account separately as the basis for historical reconstruction. 90 E.g., in S. Mason, Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary, Volume 1b: Judean War 2 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), xi. © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 194 steve mason Although the commentary cannot anticipate various scholars’ inquiries in the latter connection, the thousands of notes in the volumes on the post-biblical periods include a large number discussing the historical signiicance of the passage in question. So too in the excursus preceding the commentary on the Essene passage (B.J. 2.119–161) it seemed important to emphasize this point:91 Before proceeding with the commentary, it seems helpful to pause and consider the function of this famous passage in Josephus’ work. his is especially so because the standard treatments of War’s Essenes begin from the assumption that the people in question were the group(s) who produced and cherished the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS), found in the vicinity of Khirbet Qumran from 1947 onward. Such studies therefore understand the meaning of Josephus’ text to be discernible only by comparison with the DSS. . . . Since that procedure ignores literary-contextual clues to Josephus’ meaning . . ., it conlicts with the interpretative principles that underlie this commentary. Consistently, my goal was to interpret Josephus’ evidence contextually without yet asking about the historical Essenes, much less assuming conclusions about them. In essays on Josephus’ Essenes I have made the same point: I do not imagine that trying to understand Josephus’s Essenes could possibly settle the historical problems of either Essene or Qumran identity. hose are much larger investigations: this is a very limited and preliminary study of one part of one author’s evidence, ofered as an example of the much larger problems, though limited to one stage of the historical process. Nevertheless, it turns up some preliminary problems that must be dealt with by those who embark on those larger investigations.92 Although this has been clear in my mind and I tried to state my aims unambiguously, some scholars have been entirely puzzled. Some have understood me to be abandoning history from some purely literary and narrowly Josephan interests, while others have imagined me trying to settle historical problems on the cheap, focusing only on Josephus as though his account were free of bias and therefore settled the past—though I believe that I have done as much Ibid., 84. S. Mason, Josephus, Judea, and Christian Origins (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2009), 241, reprinting a 2007 essay: “he Essenes of Josephus’s Judaean War: From Story to History,” in Making History: Josephus and Historical Method (ed. Z. Rodgers; Leiden: Brill, 2007), 219–61. I had made similar comments in my irst efort on this subject (http://orion.huji.ac.il/orion/programs/Mason00-1.shtml): “My principal aim in this essay is not to meddle in such a famous . . . [Qumran-Essene] marriage. I want to ask, very simply, what Josephus says about the Essenes in the Judean War. I want to ask this chiely because the question has not yet been answered, or even been unambiguously posed to my knowledge. We need to read Josephus’s Essenes in the contexts he provides. As a corollary (only), I shall ask how any fair reading of Josephus’s Essenes in the War bears on the Qumran-Essene question.” 91 92 © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 195 as anyone to undignify that approach. I can only understand these criticisms on the assumption that my interlocutors have no place for the independent interpretation of evidence such as Josephus. Of those who have doubted my historical interests altogether, Freyne concludes a frankly disappointed Review of Biblical Literature review of my book on historical “methods and categories” (emphasis added): Yet not everyone, I suspect, will be prepared to accept Mason’s artful and literary Josephus to the exclusion of any interest, however partisan, in the historical events that his texts evoke and relect.93 Of course I nowhere suggest that Josephus was not interested in events. To the contrary, I devote several chapters to exploring his position as a historian. Precisely because he was an ancient historian, however, it would be diicult to show that he was ever interested in clarifying events for their own sake, absent their moral meaning. Does Josephus ever get embroiled in discussions of dates, locations, events, motives, or sequences for the sake of getting the facts straight, and not for moral purposes? Does he not, between the War and the Antiquities-Life parallels, show a cavalier disregard for the mere details of what actually happened, rewriting stories at will? As for my own interests, a basic problem I addressed throughout that book was what we as historians can do with Josephus’ narratives, given that he demonstrably felt such great freedom in rewriting events to suit his rhetorical-moral agendas, and where his accounts are uncorroborated. With reference to my chapters on Josephus’ Pharisees and Essenes, Freyne elaborated his conclusion (emphasis added): A discussion as to how these sources [sc. the other accounts of Pharisees and Essenes] corroborate or difer from Josephus’s accounts would have provided Mason with the opportunity to formulate hypotheses about the historical realities that could be tested with appeal to both literary and (at least in the case of the Essenes) archaeological evidence. Yet he is so intent on his new perspective that, disappointingly, he chooses not to go down that route, one suspects, because in his view this would be entering a blind alley. Not necessarily a blind alley, but a diferent one. My inquiry concerned the historical understanding of Josephus’ descriptions: their audiences, structures, language, and contextual interpretation. hose were my stated problems. here is no way to move from what Josephus says or does not say to conclusions about real Pharisees or Essenes. hat sort of inquiry would be diferent, with its own kind of evidence and criteria. For the Essenes, it would require a thorough treatment of all Josephus’ portraits (not only in B.J. 2) as well as 93 Review of Biblical Literature 11/27 2009: http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail .asp?TitleId=7010&CodePage=4130,6945,7010,1649,4648,481. © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 196 steve mason the interpretation of Philo, Pliny, and perhaps Synesius’ Dio on the Essenes.94 Bringing Qumran into the picture (assuming a particular conclusion about Essenes?) would require a study of that site as well as relevant issues in the Scrolls. he investigator would need to weigh possible interpretations of each of those bodies of evidence separately before assessing possible connections among all three (Qumran site, Scrolls, and Essene portraits). Should I have done all of that in an essay? I do not understand why, if I had something new to contribute concerning the Essenes in the context of B.J. 2, a question on which no one else had worked in any detail, it should be so terribly disappointing that I decided to publish that instead of joining the army of scholars who have worked on Qumran-Essene assumptions and connections. In the same general vein Monika Bernett, who cites a number of my publications without engaging any, imagines me studying Josephus in reductively literary ways and thereby marginalizing his importance for the history of Judaea.95 I am alleged to represent a movement holding that “alle Geschichte Konstrukt sei”96 and so one inds in Josephus only another story, to be interpreted in itself but not for the realities of ancient Judaea. I supposedly depend upon doubtful propositions about Josephus’ Roman situation (she does not discuss actual issues or arguments) and so I am compelled ( gezwungen) to reduce the complexity and inner tensions of Josephus’ narratives to certain narrow theses. What those might be she does not say. In any case, these dismissive charges expose a rich confusion. a. It is true that part of my research programme involves trying to understand Josephus’ narratives in the context of Flavian Rome. I have done that because it was a neglected and promising line of inquiry. But my aim has been to help us to understand Josephus better, not least for the study of Roman Judaea. Such research does not prevent or inhibit that use. b. Over against all “thesis” approaches to Josephus’ narratives—e.g., that he was a Flavian mouthpiece or wanted to protect priests from war guilt or promoted the Pharisees-rabbis in his later works, or that the diferences between his works could be explained by a comprehensive biographicalpolitical criterion—which were the dominant scholarly views as I was writing, I have always argued for the complexity and rhetorical freedom of his work, on the basis of many examples and comparanda from his ancient environment. Instead of looking for theses, I have traced various thematic 94 I have for the irst time attempted to sketch such a historical study, which should appear in P. W. Flint and K. Baek, eds., Celebrating the Dead Sea Scrolls: A Canadian Collection (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011). 95 Bernett, Der Kaiserkult in Judäa, 20–21. 96 It is undeniable that all history, as I have deined it, is a process of mental construction. Herodotus’ and hucydides’ work, and Bernett’s own study, are of course constructs. What else could they be? But none of this makes history less than a serious efort to get to grips with the real past, as far as possible, on the basis of surviving evidence, in which some arguments are better than others. © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 197 clusters that run through it while allowing for all sorts of ironic, digressive, and subsurface possibilities yet to be explored. c. For such reasons, I have rejected simple attempts to extract historical facts or identify untouched source material on the basis of tensions in Josephus—precisely because he writes complex narratives. d. All of this has not only been historical investigation in itself (embedding Josephus in a realistic ancient environment, trying to understand how he “published,” using only appropriate emic categories, and looking to ancient rather than modern political values); it has also been oriented toward the use of his narratives for our inquiries about Roman Judaea.97 e. In this last regard I have tried to establish at least three main points. First, Josephus is oten corroborated by archaeology, but mostly in connection with scenic elements and not for speciic events, actors, and motives. Second, these latter issues are more likely to ind corroboration, if at all, in other literary sources (e.g., Tacitus, Suetonius, Dio). Where we have such independent perspectives we might hope to make some limited progress in reconstructing what really happened. But third, we are mostly dealing with Josephus alone, and the artistry and malleability of his narratives (i.e., where he tells the same stories diferently) drive home what we should know as historians anyway: that uncorroborated evidence must leave us uncertain about what really happened. While writing oten about the complexity of Josephus’ narratives, I have been assuming the incomparably greater complexity of real human life, and that is the reason for rejecting any simple connection between Josephus’ story and the lost reality of lives actually lived. Let me be clearer, then. When I observe that uncorroborated evidence does not give us a sound basis for drawing conclusions about the real past, this is not an abandonment of historical interest. On the contrary, it is the cold steel of historical method. History has no mandate to provide consoling stories, and there is no point in pretending that ingenuity can compensate for our profound lack of knowledge. Monika Bernett, having dismissed my call for interpreting Josephus’ narratives as though this were a purely literary pursuit, 97 E.g., “Contradiction or Counterpoint? Josephus and Historical Method,” Review of Rabbinic Judaism 6 (2003): 145–88; “Flavius Josephus in Flavian Rome: Reading On and Between the Lines,” in Flavian Rome: Culture, Image, Text (ed. A. J. Boyle and W. J. Dominik; Leiden: Brill, 2003), 559–89; “Of Audience and Meaning: Reading Josephus’ Bellum Iudaicum in the Context of a Flavian Audience,” in Josephus and Jewish History in Flavian Rome and Beyond (ed. J. Sievers and G. Lembi; Leiden: Brill, 2005), 70–100; “Figured Speech and Irony in the Works of T. Flavius Josephus,” in Flavius Josephus and Flavian Rome (ed. J. Edmondson, S. Mason, and J. Rives; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 243–88; “he Greeks and the Distant Past in the Judean War of Flavius Josephus,” in Antiquity in Antiquity (ed. K. Osterloh and G. Gardner; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 93–130; “Of Despots, Diadems, and Diadochoi: Josephus and Flavian Politics,” in Writing Politics in Imperial Rome (ed. W. J. Dominik, J. Garthwaite, and P. A. Roche; Leiden: Brill, 2009), 323–49. © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 198 steve mason proceeds to use those narratives without visible constraint. To take only the most surprising example, she quotes a speech that Josephus writes for King Herod a century later as though it were the King’s Greek, illuminating his real aims and outlook.98 here are sound historical reasons for interpreting our evidence before we use it for other purposes. On the opposite pole, the assumption that in treating Josephus’ evidence I was trying to settle larger historical questions: I met this perplexing criticism ater the appearance of Flavius Josephus on the Pharisees. Because that study, in trying to understand Josephus’ portraits of the Pharisees, challenged certain readings of Josephus that had been used to restrict the Pharisees’ real inluence on society (e.g., the notion that his later works promote the Pharisees in light of Yavneh), some scholars understood me to be supporting the position they were writing against, that the historical Pharisees ran everything in pre-70 Judaea. But this modern problem played no role in my efort to understand Josephus.99 In a similar way, Kenneth Atkinson and Jodi Magness have recently devoted a Journal of Biblical Literature article to challenging my putative efort to undo the Qumran-Essene hypothesis, missing my stated purposes (above). hey imagine that I wish to speak for “the opponents of the Qumran-Essene hypothesis” and present my argument thus: “he criticizes the use of Josephus’s accounts of the Essenes to establish the identity of the Qumran sectarians.”100 hey suppose that when I argue from contextual clues for interpreting Josephus, I do so in order to show that the Scrolls and Josephus’ Essenes should not be linked. On that basis they devote most of their article to confronting their readers yet again with Qumran archaeology and the helpful observation that not everything Josephus says should be taken as representative of reality.101 98 Bernett, Der Kaiserkult in Judäa, 153. Key Herodian terms include eudaimonia, Bernett proposes, on which see Mason, Flavius Josephus on the Pharisees, 85–89. 99 I had interpreted Josephus’ statement about having returned to the polis of Jerusalem to engage in public life (politeuesthai), deferring to the school of the Phariμ Φ ω ; Vita 12), on sees ( strictly literary-contextual and philological grounds—grammatically meaning that this public life entailed some deference to the Pharisees, contextually matching his earlier claim that even Sadducees, though of high social standing, were unable to follow their own programme but “whenever they reach positions of leadership they must therefore embrace what the Pharisee says, albeit unwillingly and by necessity, because otherwise the masses would not put up with them” (A.J. 18.17). his was all interpretative, with backing and warrants from Josephus’ narrative alone. E. P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 bce–66 ce (London: SCM, 1992), 532 n. 9 responded, however: “his [reading] is based on the common assumption that the Pharisees ran everything. Becoming a Pharisee in order to seek public oice, however, would have made Josephus unique.” But I had made no such assumptions, for to do so would have vitiated my entire project of understanding Josephus’ accounts contextually before using them to settle problems concerning the real Pharisees. 100 K. Atkinson and J. Magness, “Josephus’s Essenes and the Qumran Community,” JBL 129 (2010): 317–42 (318). Emphasis added. 101 Ibid., 319. © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 199 (No kidding!) his is “the nature of the debate” in which they believe we are engaged. But this is all upside-down and backward. It is upside-down because the studies of mine that they cite were emphatically not about sorting out the Qumran-Essene (or any other Qumran-X or Y-Essene) hypothesis. It should be clear by now that I consider devotion or opposition to any particular reconstruction a religious kind of activity and antithetical to historical thinking, which must always remain open-minded about conclusions. In ancient history, conclusive cases will be extremely rare. he real inhabitants of irstcentury Qumran either were or were not Essenes. I do not know whether they were and doubt that anyone else knows, and for the time being I prefer to talk about the nature of our evidence. Since larger tasks such as the Josephus commentary have required me to deal with the Essene passage of B.J. 2, that is the piece of evidence about which I have had the most to say, as I have striven for a better historical-contextual understanding of it. I have pointed out the diiculties it poses for the Qumran-Essene hypothesis, but only because (a) those particular diiculties arise from a kind of contextual study that has not been undertaken before and so (b) these particular problems have not been addressed before. But I have always invited scholars to address those problems and let entirely open (as far as my work goes) the larger problems of Essenes, Qumran, and the Scrolls. heir analysis is backward, then, because they mistake the direction of my concern. I do not mention diferences between Josephus’ account of the Essenes and the Scrolls in order to undermine the Qumran-Essene hypothesis. Any such hypothesis (like one identifying CD with Pharisees or Qumranites with John the Baptist) could only come later on, ater we have irst interpreted each kind of evidence, including Josephus. Since the establishment of the hypothesis, the study of Josephus’ Essene passage in B.J. 2 has nearly always depended on the Scrolls (especially 1QS 6–7) as its interpretative key.102 As 102 E.g., O. Michel and O. Bauernfeind, Flavius Josephus, De bello judaico: Der jüdische Krieg, Griechisch und Deutsch (3 vols.; Munich: Kösel, 1962–1969), 1:430–39 nn. 30–85; F. M. Cross, he Ancient Library of Qumran and Modern Biblical Studies (New York: Doubleday, 1961), 70–106; M. Black, he Scrolls and Christian Origins: Studies in the Jewish Background of the New Testament (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1961), 25–47; A. Adam, Antike Berichte über die Essener (2d ed.; ed. C. Burchard; Berlin: De Gruyter, 1972); T. S. Beall, Josephus’ Description of the Essenes Illustrated by the Dead Sea Scrolls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); G. Vermes and M. D. Goodman, he Essenes According to the Classical Sources (Sheield: JSOT, 1989); Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief, 342–79; Grabbe, Judaism from Cyrus to Hadrian, 494–95; R. Bergmeier, Die Essener-Berichte des Flavius Josephus: Quellenstudien zu den Essenertexten im Werk des jüdischen Historiographen (Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1993); R. Gray, Prophetic Figures in Late Second Temple Jewish Palestine: he Evidence from Josephus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 82–110; T. Rajak, “Ciò che Flavio Giuseppe vide: Josephus and the Essenes,” in Josephus and the History of the Greco-Roman Period: Essays in Memory of Morton Smith (ed. F. Parente and J. Sievers; Leiden: Brill, 1994), 141–60; J. C. VanderKam, he Dead Sea Scrolls Today: Second Edition (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2010), 116. © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 200 steve mason a historian and commentator on Josephus, I was not permitted to make that grand assumption but was obligated instead to pursue a contextual reading. here was no possibility of giving myself a weekend pass for the Essene passage of B.J. 2—to read it alone by the light of a lamp borrowed from Qumran. Did Josephus expect to be understood in such a light? I seem not to have been clear in these essays,103 so let me try again. (a) My general position is that Josephus’ evidence for anything, including Essenes, should be understood irst in its own literary and historical contexts—according to his language, themes, and structures, in view of his plausible audiences and their shared literary world (the “discourse” of his texts)—before we attempt to exploit it for whatever inquiries we may conduct into the real events behind the stories. (b) I have written both about Josephus’ works in general, in their historical/historiographical contexts (e.g., models and inluences, manner of publication, audiences, ongoing themes and resonances), and about speciic sections in word-by-word detail (mostly B.J. 1–2 and the Vita published). On all of this I welcome critical responses. I can only imagine that the misunderstandings mentioned above arise from approaches to history that have no place for the separate interpretation of evidence, aside from commitments to conclusions about the real past. I.2.v. Running Scenarios, Testing Hypotheses Once we have tried to understand each piece of evidence we move to testing hypotheses concerning the main problems of our inquiry. his means imagining as many possibilities as we can about that lost X and weighing each reconstruction according to its explanatory power. In ancient history, again, we shall rarely be able to reach certainty or See also J. S. McLaren, “he Coinage of the First Year as a Point of Reference for the First Jewish Revolt (66–70 CE),” Scripta Classica Israelica 22 (2003): 135–52 (150–51). He includes me with scholars who consider Josephus’ account of the war essentially reliable on the basis of my introduction to Josephus’ Life in the commentary volume Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary, Volume 9: Life of Josephus (Leiden: Brill, 2001), xliii–xlvi. But that essay aims “to provide the reader with a context (or set of contexts) for approaching Josephus’ Life” (xiii). It was an efort at contextual interpretation. In a section subtitled “Advice to the Public Figure”— ater “Rhetoric” and “Autobiography” under the main heading “Historical and Literary Contexts”—I compare Josephus’ Life to Plutarch’s Precepts for the Statesman and show that his statements about the strains, contradictions, and games of political life were well known to men of his class. Many other scholars had thought that the tensions in Josephus’ writings (e.g., that he claimed not to desire war and yet ended up commanding ighters in Galilee) exposed his clumsy lies: if he led the ighting he must have been a convinced rebel. Without deciding anything about Josephus’ real state of mind, I argued that he was not that clumsy as a writer, and that the real tensions he portrays in public life made plausible sense in his ancient context. But this has nothing to do with the reliability of his accounts. hat entire volume, from the detailed notes to the overview in Appendix C, insisted time and again on Josephus’ freedom as a writer and the consequent diiculty of reconstructing anything from his writings alone. 103 © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 201 great conidence about the vanished past. Even with several lines of evidence the problem lies in the large number of possible explanations for any single piece, and the consequent diiculty of explaining all of it together in a compelling way. More oten, especially in connection with speciic events or individual actions, we have only one literary account: that of Josephus. In principle, but especially because it is such a carefully wrought story, a wide range of possible underlying events might have happened that would still allow us to understand how Josephus produced his story. To narrow the range of possibilities we need independent evidence. We simply do not know the limitations of the writer’s knowledge, the sources of that knowledge, the unconscious biases that necessarily limited perception, or the conscious choices that shaped the literary product. Since I have been misunderstood as a historical sceptic, I want to emphasize the other side of the picture. Where we do have independent evidence of the same event or conditions, we have promising starting points for thinking about the real past. Where two or more truly independent authors agree that something was said or done at a certain time, it is diicult to explain their agreement without positing that things happened as they both perceived or at least in a way that would explain their divergent perspectives. Even this principle must be qualiied by the recognition that multiple witnesses may share distorted impressions in certain circumstances.104 Nevertheless, independent evidence is a bedrock principle of both historical and forensic investigation. Strangely enough, in the rare cases where we have it in our ield it is sometimes marginalized—as in the seemingly independent portraits of the Essenes in Philo and Josephus. To remind ourselves of the kind of overlap that would be necessary to truly limit variables and produce a controlled account, we might turn to modern history. In exploring events of the Second World War, or even the First, we can still ind such abundant evidence. For example, 104 here has been a good deal of psychological study of the laws in eyewitness evidence, for example G. L. Wells and E. F. Lotus, Eyewitness Evidence: Psychological Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); C. Chabris and D. Simons, he Invisible Gorilla, and Other Ways Our Intuition Deceives Us (New York: Crown, 2010). he crucial points about “observation” and its limitations were made long ago by Bloch, he Historian’s Crat, 40–50. © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 202 steve mason investigating the battles between advancing Allied Forces and defending Germans in Italy, in the irst half of 1944, historians could draw on a wealth of independent and overlapping information. In addition to their personal participation in many cases—which, they realized, gave them very limited insight into what was going on—plentiful material was available for their research. In the 1950s through 1980s they could easily interview hundreds of soldiers who had fought on both sides. hey had access to valuable accounts by non-combatants caught up in the conlict. hey could revisit the site to retrace their wartime movements and supplement this by reading the records of each nation’s armed forces, both the real-time war diaries and the oicial histories composed aterward. hen there were the personal memoirs of commanders, both German and Allied.105 Crucially, historians could consult a plethora of precisely dated documents: memoranda, telephone logs, oicial and private correspondence, press reports, propaganda lealets, and other testimony to speciic moments on particular days.106 Finally, they could use the diaries and letters taken from the enemy’s dead or prisoners of war, which might give uniquely personal insight into the ordinary soldier’s psychology at each point. Some letters intended for home viewing revealed young German soldiers at their breaking point from exhaustion and stress, even as they seemed indomitable to the frustrated Allies living the same events. Only such an array of evidence makes possible the detailed histories of the Cassino campaign that we now possess. Historians can slow their accounts to a day-by-day, even hour-by-hour reconstruction, moving from one vantage-point to another, showing tactical changes dictated by improbably poor weather, unexpected enemy actions or reactions, large casualty tolls, suddenly isolated units, missing or disobeyed orders, failed supply lines, unintended consequences (e.g., a smokescreen for one’s own troops works to enemy advantage), or the 105 he latter exist for such important voices as Field Marshall Albert Kesselring (Supreme Commander, Italy) and General Frido von Senger und Etterlin (Commander, Fiteen Panzer Division) on the German side, American Generals Mark W. Clark (Commander, U.S. Fith Army) and Lucian K. Truscott (Commander, U.S. hird Infantry Division, then VI Corps at Anzio beachhead), French General Alphonse Juin (Commander, French Expeditionary Corps), and the New Zealand Generals Bernard C. Freyberg (Commander, II NZ Corps) and Howard C. Kippenberger (Commander, Second NZ Division) from the Allies. Predictably each author, while tending to justify his own actions, includes revealing criticisms of the others. 106 Cf. the iteen pages of sources listed in John Ellis’ exemplary Cassino, the Hollow Victory: he Battle for Rome, January–June 1944 (London: Aurum, 1984), 515–29. © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 203 unexpected collapse of morale in a given unit. Even with this massive amount of evidence, however, controversies remain about individual generals’ motives, ambitions, and plans (see below on Titus and the temple). And even here the evidence does not speak for itself. Each investigator comes with a unique set of questions and their various reconstructions look very diferent in focus, scope, and interest. his comparison furnishes a serious caution for us who study Roman Judaea. We oten write conidently about the motives and intentions of various groups and leaders, or of commanders in the war, on the basis of the single narrative of Josephus: If he said X, and we know that his motives were Y, then we may conclude Z. But where is that wealth of evidence for real conditions on the ground that would permit us to make such reconstructions? We have in Josephus’ War one account by a commander of one sub-theatre in the earliest phase of the war (to July 67), who became a remote observer of the main campaigns in Judaea ater his quick surrender (67–70). It is simply not possible to extract from this dramatic literature (or indeed from a less dramatic chronicle) a realistic, multi-sided picture of facts on the ground. Fortunately, this limitation on the conidence of our conclusions does not inhibit the practice of history as I am presenting it. History is above all a method for exploring the past, and historians must place their primary emphasis on the investigation itself: establishing the problem, gathering potential evidence, interpreting it, and inally trying to explain it by imagining the realities that brought it into being. A clear narrative of what really happened, understood from all relevant perspectives, is in no way essential to the task of history. his is just as well, or ancient historians would ind themselves in a largely hopeless situation. I.2.vi. Writing Up Arguments Once we have concluded our inquiry into the problem we have pursued, we write up our results. he natural form for writing up an inquiry is not a narrative of events, it seems to me, but rather an argument laying out the problem, its investigation, and its conclusions. Our aim is to communicate a process that others, familiar with the evidence and issues, will be able to follow and check at each stage. It is oten said that history difers from science in being unrepeatable, but that diference is easy to overstate, for we can indeed communicate the results of our inquiry, inviting our readers to walk through it with us. We cannot repeat the past, of course, but we were not studying the past itself. We © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 204 steve mason invite others to work through the problems we have posed, the evidence for them, and our reasoning processes. hat is why we labour to reine our arguments, for repetition by others, and the better kind of review (for example, the Bryn Mawr Classical Review) most oten takes just this form of retracing and then criticizing others’ arguments. Admittedly, we face relentless pressure to champion particular conclusions and write comforting stories, without due regard for the limitations of that evidence, all the possible ways of interpreting it, and the fundamental problem of our profound ignorance of daily realities. At least the email I receive from members of the public presses this kind of question most oten (“What do you believe about X?” “What do scholars say about Y?”). Popular magazines can be preoccupied with authors’ conclusions, commitments, discoveries, and beliefs. All of this historians must resist out of professional responsibility. Because we do not know what happened in all of its complexity, and there are likely to be competing possibilities, our arguments must relect our true state of uncertainty, even where we ind one synthesis most appealing. Now I hasten to qualify my rejection of narrative as the proper mode of historical communication, in two ways. First, constructing provisional narratives can be a helpful heuristic tool in the course of a historical inquiry. For example, if we took it as a working hypothesis that Pilate had something to do with building an aqueduct for Jerusalem, and that this caused a riot for some reason (so Josephus, B.J. 2.175), thinking narratively would force us to ask about what came before and ater. Knowing on a longue-durée basis that Roman aqueducts were usually public benefactions by prominent local men, facilitated by permission of the authorities and with inancial aid and perhaps Roman technical skill provided, issues not addressed (and not excluded) by Josephus, we could pursue each of those matters and possible scenarios. Was there perhaps an initial benefactor who could no longer fund the project, requiring greater dependence on the temple treasury? What sort of cooperation did Pilate have from Jerusalem authorities? At what point and why could the protests have begun, and who led them? Casting the episode as one event in a lost sequence would require us to think seriously about each possible point in the story with all its variables. Each of these matters becomes for a moment the focus of its own small inquiry, speculation, and provisional argument in turn. All such questioning exposes our ignorance of the real-life issues involved. Second, narrative has a long and distinguished pedigree in historical writing, from the ancient historians through the modern greats as © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 205 Gibbon, Macaulay, and Trevelyan. It continues on more modest terms in popular accounts of the ancient world. his form of writing, linking the results of inquiries in a substantial continuum, can be helpful to both scholars (for prompting new questions) and the reading public, if it is viewed as one stage in a pedagogical process, to furnish an introductory map schematizing a large territory. But we must be clear that such a joining of the dots from one argumentative peak to another only gives the illusion of a coherent whole and a real past. Writing in this way is perfectly acceptable as long as we emphasize (a) that many of these conclusions ofered (the peaks of the arguments) are actually unsettled and (b) that much of the iller material, which we supply to prepare a straight narrative highway, is not yet the assured result of methodical inquiry. If it is merely borrowed from Josephus or Tacitus, or even guessed at so as to complete a coherent story, we should give some signal that this is so. Whether we are speaking about narratives or the conclusions of proper inquiries, the historical past (i.e., what we can construct through methodical investigation) is separated by an unbridgeable chasm from the lived past two thousand years ago, which must have been no less messy, complex, and insusceptible of capture than our own existence in the world. But it is easy to see how history comes to stand in for the once-real past. And what about the language we use to write up our inquiries? In proposing that the proper form of historical writing is the argument, it may seem that I am ignoring a fundamental problem: that our language cannot be simply neutral or factual. To write in sentences and paragraphs is to make constant decisions about diction, arrangement, and intended efect. his observation we can only embrace. We cannot pretend and should not strive to write neutrally. But our daily experience of reading newspapers, periodicals, monographs, and the kind of book review I mentioned above shows that ideas can be conveyed and debated, even in irreducibly personal styles, if authors make an efort to transcend themselves and to argue publicly, in ways crated to invite participation from as many others as possible. “I think that this happened because Scripture [or Tacitus or Gibbon] says it did” is not a historical argument because it lacks publicly accessible backing or warrants. All historians would recognize such an obviously intramural argument, though we may succumb to subtler kinds of parochialisms by assuming warrants recognizable only to fellow-travellers. We may quietly lean on both ancient authorities (“Why should we not believe Tacitus here?”) or modern ones (“I assume that the war began in 66 © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 206 steve mason because this is the view of experts whom I trust”). What ought to distinguish university disciplines from popular interest groups is precisely that we make our arguments on open and debatable grounds. Arguing publicly need not, however, overlook the very real and thorny problems of language. I.2.vii. To Imagine Human Experience Finally, I basically concur with perhaps the most controversial of Collingwood’s proposals, that history—as one of the humanities, concerned with the possibilities of being human—is ultimately concerned with the thoughts and intentions behind actions in the past. Of course it is important to try to get the events themselves, what Collingwood called their outside, as straight as possible: for example, that Caesar crossed the Rubicon in January of 49 b.c.e. But since countless people have crossed the Rubicon, and historical investigations might also be constructed of each event, if Caesar is my interest then I shall be most interested in his intentions and those of various Senate constituencies in response to him. Moreover, since things oten do not work out as planned, especially in the turmoil of war, to understand particular players we must consider what they were thinking apart from what actually happened. his includes imagining the motives of those who pursued such entirely unsuccessful actions as the revolt against Rome, deiance at the siege of Jerusalem, or the light to Masada. In practising history, that is, we are ultimately concerned with what is human about events: what we can rethink, re-imagine, or “re-enact,” as Collingwood put it, from our predecessors. For certain kinds of history, dealing mainly with social and economic conditions or demographics, the thoughts of individual actors may be irrelevant. But for such event-complexes as the Judaean war we are dealing with actions initiated by individuals who thought and planned. Whether their intentions were ever realized, or frustrated by others’ intentions or by chance, and whether or not we can reconstruct precisely what happened, the fact that they must have had outlooks, ambitions, and aims invites us to investigate and imagine just these things in their plausible ancient contexts. I.4. Summary of Part I I have been advocating a view of history as a distinctive way of knowing the human past, which produces not the real past but an imaginative mental image, resulting from a speciic inquiry into some problem. In © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 207 contrast to tradition, which brings to us unbidden those abstracts from the past that authoritative igures have deemed useful and continually reshape for purposes of socialization, history is investigator-driven, systematic inquiry. It is conceptually diferent from the lived past, partly in the same way that any efort to represent our lives now (in art, literature, reporting, photography) is diferent from the constantly moving and interacting reality, but with the serious added problem that the ancient past ofers no possibility of direct representation now. Although the past that interests us is long gone, history ofers us a process of disciplined inquiry into it, which takes place in our minds. he inquiry is methodical. We begin by specifying the problem and the sub-problems that would need resolution in order to produce a solution. We gather the most obviously relevant evidence (that which clearly bears on the question), try to interpret each kind and item in its own right, without requiring it to speak directly to our inquiry (so as not to skew its meaning), and consider various ways in which this evidence might have come into being. All along we remain open to considering other kinds of evidence whose possible relevance emerges in the course of investigation. Finally we make our best efort at solving the larger problem of the inquiry. With due regard for the contingencies afecting our interpretation of each piece of evidence, we venture hypotheses to explain all of it. he best hypothesis is the one that leaves the smallest remainder of unexplained evidence. Whether we can reach conident conclusions on the available evidence is not our problem. It is above our pay grade: we bear no responsibility for the force majeure by which our evidence has survived. Our task—what historia is—is the responsible investigation of problems in light of available evidence. Part II. Historical Inquiry into the Judaean-Roman War: Two Examples To illustrate the application of these principles, we now consider two important episodes in the Judaean-Roman war. II.1. Campaign of Cestius Gallus Tacitus (Hist. 5.10), Suetonius (Vesp. 4.5), and Josephus agree that a Syrian legate in the mid-60s, C. Cestius Gallus, intervened militarily to stile the growing Judaean revolt and attendant regional disturbances. © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 208 steve mason Suetonius has the notion that the Judaeans killed their governor (Gessius Florus), which was what brought Cestius to the rescue, and that he lost a legionary eagle in defeat. Tacitus imagines Cestius making repeated but unsuccessful eforts to quell the unrest. Josephus refers almost formulaically to Cestius’ mistake, screw-up, failure, or blunῖ μ ) in his prologue (B.J. 1.21), obliquely at der ( Κ B.J. 3.1–3, and at Vita 24–25. His detailed account of the episode in B.J. 2.499–562) has normally been considered the place for historians to begin. We should read his story irst and then ask whether and to what extent it is reliable. If it is mostly reliable, we have much of the real past in hand. In keeping with the method described above, however, I would suggest that Josephus’ account, though it will need to be explained by any hypothesis about the real past, is not the place to start. We ought rather to open a historical inquiry based upon our independent problems, then turn to all the available evidence to consider the possible solutions. he diference is enormous. As soon as we lay aside Josephus’ narrative, a number of historical problems quickly present themselves to us, and we realize that their solution would be necessary if we wanted to recover a realistic framework for understanding Cestius’ campaign. It was not among Josephus’ interests to address these problems, but that is no fault of his and no ground for accusing him of either sloppiness or suppression. To understand the legate’s Judaean expedition, for example, we should irst like to know something about the man, his relationship with the princeps who had sent him to this important province in 63 c.e. or the next year, his ambitions and senatorial connections, and especially his connection with Cn. Domitius Corbulo. his hero of the Parthian settlement was active around Syria until the end of 66, when he was recalled by Nero. In spite of (or because of ) his historic achievement, the loyal 70-year-old was summoned by Nero to Cenchraeae, where he obviated execution by suicide.107 Corbulo’s special command 107 On the political context see for example J.-P. Rey-Coquais, “Syrie Romaine, de Pompé à Dioclétien,” JRS 68 (1978): 44–73; J. Nicols, Vespasian and the Partes Flavianae (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1978); K. R. Bradley, “he Chronology of Nero’s Visit to Greece A.D. 66/67,” Latomus 37 (1978): 61–72; idem, “Nero’s Retinue in Greece, A.D. 66/67,” Illinois Classical Studies 4 (1979): 152–57; R. Syme, “Governors Dying in Syria,” ZPE 41 (1981): 125–44; V. Rudich, Political Dissidence under Nero: he Price of Dissimulation (London: Routledge, 1993); F. J. Vervaet, “Domitius Corbulo and the Senatorial Opposition to the Reign of Nero,” Ancient Society 32 (2002): 135–93; idem, © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 209 in the east had subsumed Cestius and his legions until perhaps 65.108 At least, Cestius’ apparent independence of military action throughout 66 suggests that Corbulo’s power had been reduced by then, since the commander of proven toughness and efectiveness might have been the logical choice to deal with the eruption in the south. And he must have remained a towering presence, for the troops and others, as long as he remained in the region—until about the time of Cestius’ failed campaign, it seems. From a wide range of independent evidence it appears that 65 to 66 c.e. was a period of extreme turbulence in high Roman politics, as the failed Pisonian conspiracy of 65 and the energetically loyal actions of Nero’s Praetorian Prefect, Ofonius Tigellinus, produced dozens of high-ranking victims and then morphed into the obscure Vinicianian conspiracy of August 66. his later conspiracy is normally connected, on the basis of the name Suetonius gives it (Ner. 36.1), with Corbulo’s son-in-law Annius Vinicianus. Annius was in Rome that summer because he had accompanied the Armenian king-designate Tiridates as he received his diadem from Nero, under an agreement that promised detente between Rome and Parthia ater the century of struggle over Armenia. Since late 66 was also the time when Nero was recalling the apparently loyal legates of upper and lower Germany, the Scribonii brothers, on charges levelled by a senatorial informer (Tacitus, Hist. 4.41; Cassius Dio 63.17), Cestius as legate of the greatest eastern province could not have been an island of unconcern. Having been sufect consul in 42, just seven years ater his father’s consulship (apparently), he must have been nearly the same age as Corbulo (born 3 b.c.e.– 1 c.e.)—perhaps in his late 60s. He held one of the empire’s most prestigious commands, with four legions, perhaps two dozen auxiliary cohorts, and (de facto) the forces of several allied kings in the region, under his command. Although we would need to know a good deal about Cestius’ political context to understand his interests and actions, we know virtually nothing. Josephus says not a single word about Corbulo, about events “Domitius Corbulo and the Rise of the Flavian Dynasty,” Historia: Zeitschrit für Alte Geschichte 52 (2003): 436–64. 108 Tacitus, Ann. 15.25–27. Cf. F. J. Vervaet, “Tacitus, Ann. 15.25.3: A Revision of Corbulo’s So-called imperium maius (AD 63–65?),” in Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History (ed. C. Deroux; Brussels: Latomus, 2000), 260–98. © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 210 steve mason in northern Syria, about Cestius’ relationship with Nero or Tigellinus or possibly suspect senators or groups, or indeed about the whole momentous Parthian settlement. He surely knew about this last, for he alludes to the settlement in the speech he writes for Agrippa II (B.J. 2.388–389), but his Roman audiences also knew about it, having recently witnessed the grand spectacle built around Tiridates’ presence (May of 66 c.e.), and so he had no need to rehash it. A second swath of contextual information that remains uncertain, though we have many partly conlicting clues, concerns the structural relationship between Syria and Judaea. his is a complicated matter. Suice it to say here that in the War, where the story of Cestius’ expedition reposes, Josephus usually writes as though Judaea were a distinct province from 6 c.e., with an independent equestrian governor based in Caesarea (2.118, 220). In the Antiquities, by contrast (17.355; 18.1–2), he claims that Judaea was annexed to Syria ater Archelaus’ incompetent rule. Tacitus is under the impression that Judaea became a province only under Claudius, ater Agrippa I (Hist. 5.9). he language of “province” (provincia, ) allows a fair bit of slippage, and it is increasingly clear that Roman administrative arrangements were messier than textbooks would prefer. I share the view of several scholars that, although we cannot be sure, the range of available evidence (including particular episodes in both the War and the Antiquities, Strabo’s description of the area, and roughly parallel situations elsewhere) is most adequately explained on the hypothesis that Judaea became an independent province only in 44, 67, or 70/71, of which I incline toward the last possibility.109 It matters for a historical understanding of Cestius’ involvement in Judaea—and of the dynamics among the legate, the procurator, King Agrippa II, and the Jerusalem elite—whether he was entering someone else’s province under an emergency provision, with either standing or special instructions from Nero, or whether he was normally responsible for Judaea’s peacefulness because it lay within his province of Syria. 109 See M. Ghiretti, “Lo ‘Status’ della Giudea dall’età Augustea all’età Claudia,” Latomus 54 (1985): 751–66; H. M. Cotton, “Some Aspects of the Roman Administration of Judaea/Syria-Palaestina,” in Lokale Autonomie und römische Ordnungsmacht in den kaiserzeitlichen Provinzen vom 1. bis 3. Jahrhundert (ed. W. Eck; Munich: Oldenbourg, 1999), 75–92; Bernett, Der Kaiserkult in Judäa, 188–89; W. Eck, Rom und Judaea: Fünf Vorträge zur römischen Herrschat in Palaestina (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 1–52. © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 211 Related to both of these, a third kind of missing contextual information concerns Cestius’ relationship with the varied elements of leadership in Judaea: the equestrian governor Gessius Florus, King Agrippa II, who had signiicant responsibilities for Jerusalem (he reportedly kept a palace there, visited oten with his sister Berenice, and had also sent troops to suppress the revolt [2.421]), and Jerusalem’s aristocratic elite, including the likes of Josephus. Agrippa reportedly went to Cestius in Antioch to plan the expedition (B.J. 2.481). he most intriguing part may be Cestius’ relationship with Gessius Florus and related personal-social connections. According to A.J. 20.252–253 Florus had received his posting to Caesarea because of his wife’s friendship with Poppaea Sabina, by now dead (65 c.e.)—according to hostile reporters from a violent act by Nero. Many questions arise. For example, did Nero’s alleged remorse and longing for Poppaea have any efect on his view of her former friends? More importantly, did Nero have a particularly strong bond with his equestrian governors in these years—over against an increasingly obstructive senatorial class—as men who would more reliably do his bidding, especially in raising needed funds? In the early empire many senators had felt ofended by the growing power of lower ranks, even freedmen, under the principes. But in the 60s the relationship between young Nero (still only 21 in 59 c.e.) and the Senate seems to have come under great strain (cf. Dio 63.15). here are indications that Nero was instructing his procurators to extract all the funds they could from the provinces to remedy a treasury crisis. In Britain it was reportedly the procurator Catus Decianus’ ruthless exactions, on the premise that Claudius’ earlier lavish gits to the tribal chiefs were actually loans repayable immediately, that inspired Boudica’s ferocious revolt, ater her royal husband’s estate was seized (Dio 62.2). Seneca had recalled his extensive personal loans on an immediate basis. Whatever inancial need Nero had by the early 60s could only have been exacerbated by the ire of 64 and the construction of his massive Golden House. Tacitus describes the emperor’s dispatch of agents at just this time, including freedmen, across Italy, Greece, and Asia Minor, to seize whatever assets they could, even if this involved the plundering of temples and their costly divine images (Ann. 15.45.1–2). here is evidence that at least some of Nero’s procurators were protected by Nero as they worked independently of his senatorial legates. Catus and his successor Iulius Classicianus in Britain, and then those of the western empire, against whom Plutarch reports that the © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 212 steve mason patrician legate (and future emperor) S. Sulpicius Galba felt powerless to intervene (Galb. 4.1), ofer suggestive parallels with Nero’s reputed temple-robber Gessius Florus in Judaea. We know to ask such questions only by thinking about reported events outside Judaea at about the same time as Cestius’ problems in southern Syria, and by imagining that he could not have remained unafected. If we wish to recapture some slice of past reality involving Cestius Gallus and his actions in relation to Gessius Florus and the Judaeans, we need to know the answers to these and many related questions. Alas, we know none of those answers, and Josephus shows not the slightest interest in discussing them. What does he discuss, then? In recounting the build-up to war, for his own narrative purposes, Josephus ofers a few items suggestive of the Syrian legate’s relationship with Judaea. hese assume that Cestius indeed felt personally responsible for the south, notwithstanding Florus’ presence there. We irst meet the legate in Josephus when he visits Jerusalem for Passover of 66 c.e. on the standard chronology. Already then, with Florus at his side, Josephus alleges that three million (!) people surrounded Cestius and shouted complaints about Florus’ rapacious ways (B.J. 2.280–282). Interesting here is Cestius’ alleged promise to ensure Florus’ restraint in the future (2.281). It was the most basic task of senatorial governors to maintain the peace in their provinces, by building a political consensus with local elites. In the past, Syria’s Roman governors had placed a premium on this relationship, most notably Petronius in the afair of Gaius’ statue. Other legates had dispatched Pilate and Cumanus to Rome, to give an account of themselves ater complaints from both Judaeans and Samarians. he question that imposes itself here, then—a problem ignored by Josephus—is why Cestius, though energetic enough to cultivate relations with the Judaean elite through visits to Jerusalem, should be unable or unwilling to restrain Florus—if indeed he was recognized as a problem, as both Josephus and Tacitus declare. Cestius’ second reported intervention comes ater both the Judaean leadership and Florus write to him, each complaining of the other. According to Josephus, and in keeping with the caution we expect of senatorial legates, Cestius rejected the advice of his legionary commanders to march on Judaea, punishing ofenders if there were such or securing the situation if not (2.334). Instead he sent a trustworthy tribune named Neapolitanus on a reconnaissance mission. He did not send a senatorial colleague, perhaps because (in the story’s © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 213 narrative logic) the legionary legates had already played their hand. One of them might have provoked incidents or reported the situation in a skewed way. he tribune, however, met up with Agrippa and they toured the city together. hey satisied themselves that the populace, though enraged at Florus, was committed to peace with Rome and with Cestius (2.336–341). But ater the tribune’s departure the masses demanded from King Agrippa an embassy to Nero, to insist on their loyalty and to accuse Florus (2.342). he king, unable to oblige, responded with a brilliant if irrelevant speech on the folly of undertaking war with Rome (2.344–404). Some false moves by Agrippa, however, forced him to lee the city and send back an elite cavalry force, to suppress those now becoming openly rebellious (2.421). hings rapidly go from bad to worse, when this force is trapped along with the regular auxiliary garrison (the hated Florus’ military muscle) by newly conident rebels. At the very moment when the rebels massacre this garrison, Josephus claims dramatically, the Judaeans of Caesarea—as a result of a separate and long-standing dispute—are slaughtered by the majority gentile population. hat event ignites Judaean retaliatory raids against many Greek cities, whose citizens in turn act against their internal Judaean populations, viewed as a ith column, and all hell breaks loose in southern Syria. It is at this point that Cestius launches his expedition. And now come many more questions, prompted by Josephus’ story (without our making any assumption that it relects the real past). What was Cestius’ aim in undertaking this military campaign? How did his force coniguration—the mix of infantry (about 11,000?), cavalry, and allied specialists such as archers—suit his strategy? Why did he choose the legions he did: the Twelth along with 2,000-man contingents from each of “the others”? he Legio XII Fulminata had sufered enormous disgrace (along with the IIII Scythica) just three years earlier, under the command of L. Iunius Caesennius Paetus when he was Syrian legate—father or uncle of the Caesennius Gallus now commanding the Twelth—and these legions had been disowned by Corbulo for running scared from the Parthians (Tacitus, Ann. 15.7–17). Further, who were the mysterious new recruits with little training whom Cestius picked up along the way? How were they supposed to serve the strategy and contribute with professional soldiers (2.502)? Josephus does not explain anything we would like to know about these matters. he only motive he gives Cestius is that he could no longer remain idle (2.499). he legate had to act, but to what end? Was © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 214 steve mason he planning to show force so as to strengthen the hand of Judaean and other local leaders, or to punish particular groups he had already deemed guilty? (If so, which ones?) What was his plan for Jerusalem? A siege? Destruction? What would he do with such a large army (totalling about 35,000) inside the old walled city, which may have had a population of only 40,000–75,000? Or was the army mostly to be used elsewhere? Josephus’ narrative of the campaign itself may be divided for convenience into three parts. First, the army marches rapidly and with brutal eiciency down the coast as far as Ioppa, thrusting inland against western Lower Galilee, Narbata, and points east toward Judaea. In some of these places his soldiers are in burn-and-pillage mode, but Cestius spares Sepphoris ater trapping and dispatching hundreds of would-be rebels at Mt. Asamon. his section concludes, ater a march inland up the Beit-Horon pass, with the establishment of camp at Gabaon (Givʿon, Gibeon), about 10 km north of Jerusalem (2.500–516). he second phase comprises Cestius’ move from Gabaon to Jerusalem, his camping for several days on Mt. Scopus, and his apparent expectation of being admitted to the (western and upper-class) upper city—which very nearly happened (2.533–534, 538). When it did not happen, he had a small part of his force make a desultory efort against the northern wall of the temple, from which they quickly withdrew and headed back to Gabaon (2.517–544). Josephus repeatedly laments Cestius’ failure to take the city during this brief visit, whether by force or by missing chances to be let in, which would have ended the revolt and spared the temple (2.531–534, 538–541). he third phase turns into complete disaster for Cestius and his troops, and a crucial early victory for the rebels that convinced them of divine support. Finding his army trapped in the camp at Gabaon, with an alarmingly large guerrilla force hiding in hills familiar to them (but not to him) all around, he abandons equipment and makes a run for the Beit-Horon pass, to reach the open plain as quickly as possible. Cestius’ forces had already sufered signiicant losses while ascending the Beit-Horon pass and in withdrawing from Jerusalem to Gabaon (2.517–19, 543–44). But now in this desperate rush to escape they are ambushed and, according to Josephus, lose another 5,800 men (2.555). I have said that this account does not address the basic issues we need to know about for historical analysis. What it does, however, is contribute to the building tension of Josephus’ dramatic story, as we © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 215 might expect, in his characteristic language. Major themes of the War are developed here, some of them for the irst time in anticipation of the years-long conlict to come under Vespasian and Titus: a general mood of unavoidable tragic fate (if only Cestius had . . .); abrupt reversals of fortune (a powerful force destroyed); the thematized diference between highly trained and superbly equipped, disciplined Roman forces and Judaean irregulars, the former imposing and efective when ighting in formation but lacking versatility or personal resourcefulness, the latter unspeakably courageous, contemptuous of death, and resourceful with negligible resources; and the strength of Jerusalem’s walls, in which rebels will trust to the end (inally in vain). In particular, Josephus emphasizes Cestius’ alleged failure—to take Jerusalem when he had the chance. But such a lament obviously comes from his later perspective as writer. Did Cestius’ strategy really involve a military assault on Jerusalem? Josephus does not address that issue as such. Before responding to that question, we should recognize that Josephus’ account brims with problems, if we set out to analyze it historically and geographically—in a way that he could not have expected his Roman audiences to do. Leaving aside its crucial omissions, we may also ask, of the narrative as it stands, such questions as these. At 2.516–521 Josephus describes the Judaeans, who are celebrating the Feast of Booths in Jerusalem, learning of the Roman advance only when the force reaches Gabaon. But how could they not have heard of the force’s arrival or the two weeks of massive destruction in Galilee and along the coast? How could a marching column of more than 30,000—10 km long if three abreast so as to manage the narrow passes, and counting infantry alone, perhaps 15 km long with cavalry and baggage train—simply be at one place or another, when Beit-Horon is only about 9 km from Gabaon? How could the Judaeans attack both frontally and at the rear (i.e., how did they get so quickly to the rear, 10 km away at Beit-Horon), as Josephus claims? And why would the Judaean guerrillas attack an extremely powerful Roman column frontally? Once he reached the interior, ater such a relentless attack in the countryside, why did Cestius wait so long, both on Scopus and then outside the upper city, only to make a cursory assault—during one aternoon?—on the northern wall, which he must have known to be impregnable (2.535–537)? What becomes of King Agrippa in all this: Cestius’ knowledgeable guide and ally, who has quietly disappeared from the story? As for the disastrous return trip, Josephus’ description of the terrain has baled interpreters, with Bezalel Bar-Kochva and © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 216 steve mason Mordechai Gichon each proposing ways of relocating the ambush to better it the actual topography, which does not boast the alpine features Josephus implies. Minor criticisms aside, scholars have nevertheless taken Josephus’ narrative as a reliable starting place, even for military analysis. On that basis they agree that Cestius’ strategic aim must have been to capture Jerusalem, and that he failed in this key objective. S. G. F. Brandon (1970) saw Cestius as planning a decisive strike on the mother-city, delaying only to secure his supply lines along the way. But when he got there he failed: he crux of the problem lies in the legate’s decision to withdraw from the siege of Jerusalem. hat this decision was sudden . . . rests on the statement of Josephus. . . . we can only accept it or reject it on grounds of our general evaluation of the testimony of Josephus and the internal probability of such a happening. . . .110 Bar-Kochva saw Cestius assembling a larger force “to try and subdue the Jews,” but failing, and so withdrawing from Jerusalem suddenly “from logistic diiculties.”111 Gichon, in the most detailed assessment to date, declared that Cestius’ “aim obviously was to make a quick and direct move on Jerusalem, . . . to quench the uprising in its bud.” But “Instead of the swit move on Jerusalem demanded by the circumstances, Cestius interrupted his progress.” he reason for failure was that Cestius became too cautious and risk-averse. “he attack was called of, and to the astonishment of the besieged, Cestius decided on a general retreat.” Gichon inds much to admire in the early phase of Cestius’ campaign, but “he chief criticism . . . is that he was easily diverted from his primary objective [Jerusalem].”112 Finally, Adrian Goldsworthy also ponders realistic military reasons to explain Cestius’ abrupt withdrawal, in place of the religious ones given by Josephus, namely: he found he had unreliable troops in the new recruits of the Twelth Legion and inadequate supplies. But surely Cestius knew all that in advance? Echoing Josephus, Goldsworthy remarks: 110 S. G. F. Brandon, “he Defeat of Cestius Gallus, A. D. 66,” History Today 20 (Jan. 1970): 38–46 (44). 111 B. Bar-Kochva, “Seron and Cestius Gallus at Beith Horon,” PEQ 108 (1976): 13–21 (18). 112 M. Gichon, “Cestius Gallus’ Campaign in Galilee,” PEQ 113 (1981): 39–62 (42, 60). © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 217 Although areas passed through en route were investigated briely, the army marched straight to the head of the rebellion and country. If Jerusalem had fallen switly, . . . the revolt would have collapsed.113 Taking Josephus’ dramatic narrative as their starting point, then, scholars have tried to infer political and military strategy from it, while qualifying its areas of unreliability. he Judaeans were perceived to be in revolt and Cestius’ aim was to crush them. His objective was to reach and punish Jerusalem. What happened before Jerusalem was (or should have been) preliminary: to secure supply lines and destroy any possibility of ighting behind the lines. I would point out, by contrast, that quite diferent scenarios might explain the evidence at least as well, though we can imagine these only in the context of a diferent kind of inquiry: one that begins with our own questions (as above) and does not regard Josephus’ story as our avenue to the real past. All the scenarios described here deal only with the expedition itself, ignoring everything that has gone before as well as the larger issues in Roman politics. If we took that earlier narrative seriously, with its implication of Cestius’ close relationship with Agrippa and receiving of intelligence from him, we might well conclude that the legate never had any intention of attacking Jerusalem. Even within the larger framework of Josephus’ narrative, Cestius had recently received letters from the Jerusalem leadership protesting about Florus, whom he may personally have been keen to remove if he could have done so with impunity—though at this sensitive point in Roman afairs that may have been impossible. He had been assured by his trusted tribune and the king together, as recently as two or three months earlier, that the city remained loyal and welcoming. At any rate, having visited Jerusalem himself at least once and observing its layers of walls, and having taken as much information as he needed from Agrippa and his tribune, it does not seem altogether plausible that he would have planned a siege of the fortress-like city to begin during Jerusalem’s harsh and wet winter (he reportedly arrived only in mid-October or so). here is nothing in Josephus’ story to suggest that he did plan a siege. If we want to test hypotheses in response to our historical questions about Cestius’ aims (above), making the minimal assumption that his 113 A. K. Goldsworthy, he Roman Army at War: 100 BC–AD 200 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 90. © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 218 steve mason mandate in Syria followed the standard lines for legates (keeping the province quiet and productive of revenue, liaising with local elites to ensure that this happened), and drawing in the other considerations mentioned concerning late Neronian politics, we might explain Josephus’ evidence rather as follows. (NB: I am not speaking of that account as an authority, but of evidence that needs to be explained by any hypothesis about the real past.) Cestius found himself in a predicament with Gessius Florus, whom he believed on the basis of trustworthy information from Agrippa, Berenice, and Jerusalem’s elite, to be the main aggravator. But his own position was too precarious, in the autumn of Corbulo’s recall,114 to allow a decisive move against Nero’s trusted agent. Cestius had to do something to deal with the unrest in the south, but even if he had reason to think that he could defeat the Judaean irregulars leading their side of the unrest he might not have desired a major military victory. A victorious Cestius might well be seen as a threat and too suitable for rule (capax imperii), like his contemporary Corbulo. Ater all, as we know, the Flavians would soon declare themselves it for rule largely on the basis of a victory in Judaea. What was Cestius to do? Since all diplomatic avenues were failing and the neighbouring Greek cities were becoming volatile, decisive action was necessary. But this should come with the lowest risk to his forces and himself, as well as minimal destruction for the Judaeans, especially for his allies among Jerusalem’s elite. His ultimate goal was to restore calm, not to create a festering sore. So he settled on a strategy that would combine various elements. He would begin with a highly visible march in force down the coast, with some exemplary burning and pillaging, even of villages and small towns that had shown no hint of an intention to revolt, such as the Judaeans’ only seaport at Joppa. He included a large allied cavalry contingent, with many archers, precisely for this phase: he wanted to range widely, rapidly, and visibly down the coastal plain. his coastal campaign might serve two purposes at once. First, he would show the lag and dispel any notion that Judaea, though two weeks’ march from Antioch, was beyond his reach. Second, by inlicting a carefully circumscribed amount of wanton destruction on small population centres, he might hope to draw out anyone who was keen on ighting Romans. Once they came out into the open, as at 114 Corbulo seems to have let Syria near the end of 66 c.e., arriving at Corinth’s port of Cenchraeae early in 67. See Vervaet, “Domitius Corbulo and the Senatorial Opposition,” 170. © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 219 Mt. Asamon, they could be dispatched without endangering or further provoking the major cities, such as Sepphoris, which Cestius needed to keep calm and loyal as far as possible. On this hypothetical scenario Cestius’ violence was all to be directed to small and open places, where the Romans had clear control. It would have been foolish to take the same ight into the Judaean hills, where his cavalry would be immediately neutralized, his infantry exposed, and things in general would become much less predictable. Cestius had no intention of doing so. On the contrary, he hoped to have removed the most energetic rebel leaders in the open countryside. Continuing in the same vein: Cestius’ purpose in going up to Jerusalem ater this efective lightning raid was (let us imagine) to conclude the whole operation in a suitably peaceful and respectful way by strengthening the hand of the city’s leaders. He still had every reason to think they were unwavering in their loyalty, and of course he would punish any remaining troublemakers they identiied. Such a motive would explain why he irst moved his force up to Scopus and waited there for three days, and then, when there was no movement to admit him, brought the army into the new city and camped there, outside the upper city, burning and destroying as he went. hat is, he had expected to be admitted while still sitting above the city, as his legions’ armour lashed brilliantly in the Mediterranean sun, thoroughly intimidating any would-be rebels in the city while giving his friends the encouragement they needed to open the gates. When no one came out to invite him in, he moved right up against the upper city’s wall, where the wealthier residents lived. Surely, this would stifen the spines of those leaders, now just tens of metres away from him, and put the rebels to light. Josephus claims indeed that the city’s leaders came very close to letting him in at this moment, and that he could have entered if he had seized the moment, but there was some miscommunication and the rebels took the opportunity to prevent this from happening. On this scenario, then, Cestius was simply shocked to discover that things had deteriorated so rapidly, and that he was not to be admitted ater all. In that case he did not fail as a commander, but carefully constructed and executed a plan based on what he had every reason to think was reliable current intelligence. he rapid strengthening of the resistance may even have been an unintended consequence of his troops’ arrival outside the city, ater their indiscriminate bloodshed along the coast, combined with the rebels’ initial successes in attacking his force on its ascent. Perhaps the rebels were able to move many of © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 220 steve mason those who were wavering with outrage at the recent bloodshed, threats that Cestius would bring more on them, and evidence of divine support for their resistance. Rather than feeling good will towards the thousands of Romans arrayed on Scopus, perhaps large numbers of people had become instantly radicalized against them as they got word of the atrocities, and the daring successes of the rebels combined with Jerusalem’s thick walls to make them deiant. Against such a surge of popular feeling, those who did want to admit the Romans may have been in a perilous position as perceived traitors. If something like this happened, though we have no evidence of any of it, it would not be diicult to imagine Josephus producing the account we have. His story would not be wrong, but nor would it tell much of the story that interests us, in response to our questions. For his Roman audience and given his narrative interests, he saw no need to explore Cestius’ political situation under Nero or his relations with the Senate and Corbulo (if he knew much about them), and there was no reason for him to be concerned with Cestius’ political and military strategy. Nor yet did he think it signiicant to describe the terrain around Beit-Horon with precision, allowing himself perhaps to exaggerate the peril—real enough though it was—of falling from the road. He was interested in portraying this pivotal event in his story of key moments that constituted the beginning of the war. It was all tragic in the classical sense, as the best-prepared soldiers executed a wellplanned campaign but were dramatically undone in an aternoon by ) making forces utterly beyond their control. his was Fortune ( her dreaded presence felt. From his later perspective, understandably enough, Josephus could not get over the opportunity that was lost, if only Cestius had known how close those inside the city had come to admitting him. If only he had persevered and been ready to move instantly when his moment came (and quickly passed). Josephus will make a similar comment about Titus, when he quickly takes Jerusalem’s second wall just a few days following the irst: if only he had pressed his advantage immediately he could have destroyed the city “by the law of war” (5.332; see further below) and ended things there, without further loss—perhaps to the temple. Histories of the First and Second World Wars are illed with such “if only” moments, which are entirely predictable in hindsight but were not understood by those acting at the time. So there is no great problem understanding how Josephus came up with his story, and we have no reason to doubt its sincerity. But it is © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 221 surely a mistake to try to transform it into a mirror of real events, to make it the starting point for a historical understanding of Cestius and his campaign in Judaea, to spend our time debating whether this wonderful story is “reliable” or the opposite. Certainly it does not answer the questions that we would need to answer to make historical sense of the episode. he alternative scenarios I have suggested are only that: alternatives to show how diferently the same evidence might be both interpreted and explained, against readings that draw military conclusions from Josephus’ dramatic story. he process of thinking these through is history. Since we have only Josephus’ story, we lack the means of narrowing our options. Any number of things might have happened to motivate Cestius and shape his campaign. We have no idea of all of those possibilities. II.2. Titus and the Destruction of the Temple A consequential example of the importance of method concerns Titus’ role in the burning of the temple. Even scholars who have found it unproblematic to treat Josephus’ narrative as basically factual have made exceptions when it comes to his portraits of either his curriculum vitae or his Flavian patrons in action. His alleged prediction of Vespasian’s rise to power (B.J. 3.399–408) seems the most pungent of these bad-smelling passages, as it fuses a highly controversial moment in his career with obsequious regard for his patrons—with a claim to supernatural gits in the bargain. In the case of Titus, Josephus tells the story of a war council in which the Roman commander latly rejects his subordinates’ call for the temple’s destruction, insisting that he will spare the sacred site no matter what (B.J. 6.238–643). Critical minds have oten doubted this version of events, on the assumption that it supports one of Josephus’ obvious biases: to absolve his young patron of guilt for the shrine’s destruction. Here is where the methodological stakes get interesting, for doubters have in this case been able to lee to the arms of another account, which has Titus eager to destroy the temple—even if it was composed by a Christian monk of the early ith century. I shall argue that beginning a historical inquiry with the question of whether we may rely on Josephus, or on someone else instead, is misguided. Nevertheless, we need to begin with a survey of the standard approaches and the reasons for them. In a passage that should invite source criticism because of the doublet in its irst and last sentences, Josephus describes how Titus came © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 222 steve mason to order the extinguishing of the ires around the temple gates that he himself had recently authorized, ater abandoning his earlier inclination to spare the shrine (B.J. 6.228, 232). Charting the twists and turns—or carrots and sticks—in Titus’ eforts to conquer Jerusalem, he gives the irst half of a μ . . . construction at 6.235: the ordered ires burned for one day and the following night. hen comes the other half: (236) But on the next day Titus directed a part of his force to extinguish the ire and to clear a path for the easier access of the legions up through the gates, while he himself assembled the commanders. (237) And when they had gathered—six of the highest-ranked: Tiberius Alexander, prefect of all the forces, Sextus Cerealius leading the Fith Legion, Larcius Lepidus the Tenth, and Titus Frigius the Fiteenth, (238) and with them Fronto Haterius, camp commander of the two legions from Alexandria as well as Marcus Antonius Iulianus, procurator of Judea; ater these were assembled the various procurators and tribunes—he established a consilium concerning the shrine. (239) To some of them it seemed itting to resort to the law of war, for the Judaeans would never stop their rebellious activities as long as the shrine remained, to which they were rallying from everywhere. (240) Some advised, on the other hand, that if the Judaeans should abandon it and place no weapons in it he should preserve it, whereas if they climbed up on it to wage war he should burn it down, because then it would be a fortress and no longer a shrine—and in the sequel the impiety would belong to those who had forced [this outcome], and not with themselves [the Romans]. (241) But Titus declared that even if the Judaeans should climb up on it and wage war he would not take vengeance on the inanimate objects instead of the men. And there was no way that he would burn down such a great work as this ( ῦ ἔ ), because that would only bring harm to the Romans themselves, even as it would be an ornament to their power [or imperium] as long as it remained. (242) Full of conidence now, Fronto, Alexander, and Cerealius quickly sided with this opinion. (243) So he dissolves the council and, ater directing the commanders to rest the other forces, so that he would have reinvigorated men at his disposal in the battle lines, he ordered the select men of the [auxiliary] cohorts to clear a path through the ruins and to extinguish the ire. Josephus’ presentation no doubt suits his literary aims, but we should take care in assessing those aims. he War cannot be understood, for example, as a simple expression of commissioned Flavian propaganda.115 115 his view was widely assumed in the late nineteenth century and seemingly established early in the twentieth (R. Laqueur, Der jüdische Historiker Flavius Josephus: Ein biographischer Versuch auf neuer quellenkritischer Grundlage [Giessen: Münchow, © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 223 Josephus consistently asserts both that Titus destroyed the temple, as everyone knew anyway, and that he did not wish to do so. Both claims appear together in the War’s prologue (1.10, 27–28; cf. 5.444; 6.266; A.J. 20.250). In Josephus’ account it was really the Judaean God who had purged his shrine of the bloodshed arising from the civil strife (stasis) that had polluted the sanctuary in the inal phases of the war—a principle any ancient audience could understand. Far from being impotent, as the destruction of his shrine might suggest, this God had used the Roman legions as his cleansing agents, and this is what Titus’ unsuccessful eforts to save the temple from destruction demonstrate.116 Titus did destroy it, as advertised in Rome, but there was more to the story. He could not have destroyed the ediice by his own force even if had wished to do so.117 Stubbornly distancing the young Flavian from the thing for which he was most famous, Josephus makes Titus admit that the victory was not his own doing (6.410–413; cf. 1.10–11). Josephus’ Titus is not merely prudent and strategic, as Cestius was in rejecting his commanders’ relexive call for harsh treatment of the Judaeans (above); he thematizes “the clemency of Titus,” not always to lattering efect. When the temple inally does go up in lames he portrays Titus resting in his quarters, then impotently lailing about and yelling at soldiers who blithely ignore his orders (6.254–258). his is not easy to match with any image that Titus could have wished to present in Rome. It does it with Josephus’ line that his young friend was extraordinarily kind and forgiving. If also capable of harsh punishment at times, he was not as wily as the Judaeans or, indeed, as our writer himself.118 he language of the story is also typically Josephan. He likes to describe councils (cf. that of Cestius above and 2.25), and another such council convened by Titus at the siege of Jerusalem has also been described (5.491–501). Josephus is the biggest known user of the 1920], 126–27; W. Weber, Josephus und Vespasian: Untersuchungen zu dem jüdischen Krieg des Flavius Josephus [Berlin: Kohlhammer, 1921]; H. St. J. hackeray, Josephus: he Man and the Historian [New York: Jewish Institute of Religion, 1929], 27–28) and has remained remarkably durable. he single most important study laying the groundwork for its demise was T. Rajak, Josephus: he Historian and his Society (London: Duckworth, 1983), e.g., 180–85. 116 B.J. 6.249–266, 346. 117 E.g., B.J. 6.220–228, 411. 118 Cf. Mason, “Figured Speech and Irony.” © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 224 steve mason phrase “law of war” invoked by some of those present at the council (6.239).119 It was an 1861 study by Jacob Bernays, the brilliant philologist of Bonn and Breslau, that inally gave respectability to the late alternative narrative. In a comprehensive analysis of Sulpicius Severus’ Sacred Chronicle (ca. 400 c.e.), Bernays argued that Severus’ very diferent version of this war council (Chron. 2.30.6–8) was more reliable than that of Josephus, even that it originated with a participant in that council. Here is that account. Please note the italicized phrases. (2.30.3) Meanwhile the Judaeans, hemmed in by the siege—since no opportunity for either peace or surrender was given them—were perishing in desperation from famine, and the streets began to be illed with corpses everywhere, for the duty of burying them had been overridden. Why, having dared to eat everything of a disgusting kind, they did not spare even human bodies, except those in which decay had precluded their use as food. (4) So the Romans broke in on the exhausted defenders [note word-play: defessis defensoribus]. As it happened, everyone had assembled at that time, from the countryside and from the other towns of Judaea, for the day of the Pascha [Passover]: no doubt it pleased God that this impious people should be given over to destruction at the very season in which they had put the Lord on a cross. (5) For a while the Pharisees held their ground bravely before the temple until at last, with minds bent on death, they lung themselves into the lames of their own accord. he number of those killed is related to have been 1,100,000, with fully 100,000 captured and sold. (6) Ater calling a consilium, Titus is said to have deliberated, irst, whether he should bring down a sanctuary of such extraordinary construction [an templum tanti operis]. For it seemed to some that a consecrated shrine more famous than all human works ought not to be wiped out: preserved, it would furnish evidence of Roman restraint; demolished, an enduring relic of Roman cruelty. (7) Others by contrast, also Titus himself, reckoned that the temple above all must be brought down, with the result that the religion [religio] of the Judaeans and Christians would be eliminated more completely. [He/they said:] “In fact these religions [religiones], though opposed to each other, nevertheless proceeded from the same ancestors [or originators]. he Christians emerged from the Judaeans [Christianos ex Iudaeis exstitisse]. So, with the root eliminated, the ofshoot will quickly vanish.” (8) hus, with God’s approval and everyone’s minds being inlamed, the temple was demolished, three hundred and thirty-one years ago. his latest overthrow of the temple 119 Cf. also B.J. 2.90; 3.363; 4.260, 388; 5.332; 6.346, 353; A.J. 1.315; 6.69; 9.58; 12.274; 14.304; 15.157. © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 225 and harshest captivity of the Judaeans, which sees them refugees from their ancestral land and scattered across the circle of the earth, are a daily proof to the world of their having been punished for nothing other than the impious hands they laid on Christ. Although they have oten been reduced to captivity at other times because of their sins, nevertheless they have never faced a punishment of slavery for more than seventy years. Bernays’ argument for tracing this to a contemporary source was along these lines. First, he denied that Severus used Josephus’ War, though it was widely circulating in Greek, in a fourth-century Latin translation, and in a Latin paraphrase. Bernays could not see why Josephus’ account, which attributed the temple’s fall to God, would not have been preferable for this Christian writer, or why he would make the Romans so hostile to Christians in the early ith century, when some Christians had made the emperor Tiberius an admirer of the faith.120 Second, Bernays assumed Josephus to be a Flavian mouthpiece, helping out his patrons with a revisionist account. He imagined that the Flavians had a problem on their hands, ater the irst lush of uninhibited triumphalism, when they settled down to rule. Why had they destroyed an ancient sanctuary, which they could have taken by other means and garrisoned? Josephus showed that they had not planned the temple’s destruction; it happened accidentally.121 As for Severus’ source, Bernays noted that two earlier passages borrowed from surviving sections of Tacitus’ Annals, concerning Nero’s persecution of Christians ater the great ire and his marriage to a man ater Poppaea’s death (Chron. 2.28–29). So it seemed likely that Severus took also this version of the council from the Roman historian, who hated both Judaeans and Christians.122 Finally, Bernays proposed that Tacitus received his information from a participant in the council named by Josephus, M. Antonius Iulianus (B.J. 6.238), given that the late second-century Christian writer Minucius Felix (Oct. 33) mentions that a certain Antonius Iulianus wrote something On the Judaeans.123 As for philology, he isolated a few phrases that Tacitus could not likely have written—calling Judaism and Christianity religiones rather than supersitiones, or failing to name the individuals at the council as Josephus 120 Bernays, Ueber die Chronik des Sulpicius Severus: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der klassischen und biblischen Studien (Berlin: Wilhelm Hertz, 1861), 48–61 on the war council (52–53 on this point). 121 Ibid., 48–52. 122 Ibid., 55–56. 123 Ibid., 56. © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 226 steve mason had done—but he also felt that some phrases—calling the temple consecrated rather than sacred, or using quippe (“in fact”) in indirect speech—were typical of Tacitus rather than Severus.124 Within a year Bernays was answered by Harvard’s German-educated Professor of Latin, Charles (Karl) Beck. In a scrupulous review, Beck doubted Bernays’ crucial premise and supposition that the Flavians ever felt a need to seem mild or to apologize for Jerusalem. Why and to whom? Beck made a general case for Josephus’ reliability and evenhandedness, but also the speciic one that Josephus could not have dared to name powerful Romans present at the council, who were in Rome with him ater the war, and attribute to them positions they all knew to be inaccurate.125 Further, given Severus’ demonstrable freedom in rewriting his biblical sources, which Bernays had admitted, Beck saw no reason to prefer the late Christian writer’s account to the fuller contemporary version by Josephus.126 On our methodological question, however, Beck agreed with Bernays: “the accounts of Josephus and Severus contradict each other; they cannot be reconciled . . .; we must choose one and reject the other.”127 Bernays and Beck thus established the terms of the debate, which have remained in place until today. It is about the reliability of one account over the other. Tommaso Leoni’s excellent survey, though it omits this early exchange, demonstrates the rigid polarity. Most scholars have come to prefer Sulpicius/Tacitus, whereas Leoni sees himself standing nearly alone in 2007, with Tessa Rajak, in valuing Josephus’ testimony more highly than the “inextricable tangle of inconsistencies and distortions” in Severus.128 Not long before Leoni’s article, two essays in a 2005 volume built upon Bernays’ arguments in other consequential ways. T. D. Barnes had earlier shown emphatic support for Bernays in the context of recovering lost fragments from Tacitus: “he proof was irst formulated by Jacob Bernays in 1861, and the only attempt Ibid., 57–58. C. Beck, “Bernays’s Chronicle of Sulpicius Severus,” Christian Examiner (Cambridge: Welch, Bigelow, and Co.: January, 1862), 22–40 (27–40 for these arguments). 126 Ibid., 25–26. 127 Ibid., 38 (emphasis added); cf. 40, reprising Bernays: “Whom do you believe, readers?” 128 T. Leoni, “ ‘Against Caesar’s Wishes’: Flavius Josephus as a Source for the Burning of the Temple,” JJS 58 (2007): 39–51. See the compact survey in L. H. Feldman, “A Selective Critical Bibliography of Josephus,” in Josephus, he Bible, and History (ed. L. H. Feldman and G. Hata; Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 330–448 (391–93)—Feldman himself favouring Severus. 124 125 © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 227 to gainsay it [he does not notice Beck] must be pronounced a hopeless failure.”129 In the 2005 piece, provocatively entitled “he Sack of the Temple in Josephus and Tacitus,” he used this basis along with other evidence to chart diferent moments in Flavian self-representation.130 he following essay is by James Rives, who seeks the policy behind what he accepts (via Bernays) was the Flavians’ determination to destroy the temple.131 Before proceeding with what I have argued is a more properly historical approach to Titus and the temple, I must point out that Bernays and the scholars who support his arguments appear to have overlooked some basic problems. First, it seems clear from the earlier section of the passage quoted above (Chron. 2.30.3–5) that Severus in fact knew Josephus’ War, books 5 and 6, the recognized authority for that conlict, whether directly or indirectly.132 he famine, piles of corpses, cannibalism, being trapped in Jerusalem at Pascha, jumping into the ire, and the numbers of prisoners and dead obviously come from Josephus.133 Second, rhetorical freedom meant that historians felt free to rewrite stories for their own purposes. Josephus himself does this routinely in recasting the War’s material in the Antiquities-Life. If he himself had given another account of the war council, we would expect it to be as diferent from the War’s version as the Life’s version of his Galilean command is from the War parallel. he fourth-century text we know as Pseudo-Hegesippus, while following Josephus’ narrative closely, changes the war-council story so that Titus, facing a solid wall of opposition from his commanders over his new inclination to spare the temple, simply delays any decision on the matter (Excid. 5.42). Josephus’ text was authoritative but not sacred: it was there to be manipulated by later authors. hird, contra Bernays, both the general persecution of the righteous by worldly powers and speciically Roman 129 T. D. Barnes, “he Fragments of Tacitus’ ‘Histories,’ ” CP 72 (1977): 224–31 (228). 130 T. D. Barnes, “he Sack of the Temple in Josephus and Tacitus,” in Flavius Josephus and Flavian Rome (ed. Edmondson, Mason, and Rives), 129–44. 131 J. Rives, “Flavian Religious Policy and the Destruction of the Jerusalem Temple,” in Flavius Josephus and Flavian Rome (ed. Edmondson, Mason, and Rives), 145–66. 132 See most obviously Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 1.5.3,6.9; 3.9.1–3, 10–11, 10.8. 133 E.g., B.J. 6.197–219, 259, 280, 420, 431. © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 228 steve mason cruelty (crudelitas) toward the Christians, are prominent themes in Severus, announced in his prologue and programmatically pursued.134 Fourth and crucially, it was Severus’ own view that Jews and Christians were barely distinguishable to Roman rulers until the time of Hadrian, and that Romans acted against Jews to harm Christians. He thus distinguishes Hadrian’s later war against the Judaeans (i.e., the Bar-Kokhba war), which he mentions as an understandable police action (2.31.3), from the same emperor’s building of Aelia Capitolina. Of the latter event he writes: At this time Hadrian [Adrian], supposing that he would eliminate the Christian faith by means of an outrage in that place, set up likenesses of demons both in the temple and in the place of the Lord’s sufering. And because Christians were thought to come mostly from the Judaeans [Christiani ex Iudaeis potissimum putabantur]—for the church at Jerusalem had no priest except from the circumcision—he ordered a cohort of soldiers to maintain a constant guard so as to prevent all Judaeans from approaching Jerusalem. Just as in the story of Titus and the temple, for Severus it is all about the Christians all the time. Titus’ determination to wipe out the Christians by excising their Judaean root is fully at home in his narrative, and there is nothing to suggest that it is evidence contemporary with the events of 70. So much for the merits of Josephus, Pseudo-Hegesippus, and Severus. But my argument is that we ought not to be asking which account is reliable. None of them can be reliable for us. We begin a historical inquiry, as with Cestius’ campaign, by asking our own problems. For example, we might simply ask: “How did the temple come to be destroyed? What is the range of real-life possibilities that would explain the surviving evidence?” In broaching that question we shall want to consider the broadly known context, the nature of the existing sources, and standard strategic issues. To bring all of these into focus, and help break our habit of leaning on authoritative accounts, we might consider the much better-attested destruction of another sanctuary in wartime as a tonic for our histori- 134 Chron. 1.1 (excidium Hierosolymae vexationesques populi Christiani et mox pacis tempora); 2.28–29, 31, 32, 33.1; on rulers’ cruelty and bloodthirstiness, 1.13.3, 35.2, 5, 37.2, 54.3; 2.16.8, 23.5, 27.4, 28.2, 29.2, 30.6, 50.7. © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 229 cal imagination: the Allied campaign for Monte Cassino in 1944.135 A detour into that episode will require some detail, precisely to illustrate the complexity of real-life decision-making in wartime. On the morning of February 15, 1944, Allied forces trying to oust German divisions from the heavily fortiied Gustav Line, destroyed the ancient Benedictine monastery on Monte Cassino in a massive aerial bombardment. hey dropped 576 tons of bombs, such force being required to demolish the roof and upper walls of this fortresslike structure, with its 3 m thick walls, though such destruction still let the lower structures intact. In fortifying their line, since their arrival in the autumn of 1943 to replace Italian troops ater their capitulation, the Germans had determined not to use the monastery, even though it occupied an enviable position overlooking the valleys through which the Allies had to pass. hey were dug in, however, on the slopes all around it, and so controlled the valleys below by observation and interlocking ields of ire. he Vatican’s Secretariat of State had reached an agreement with both German and Allied commanders to respect religious structures of historic importance. Accordingly, Field Marshall Albert Kesselring ordered that the monastery be excluded from German defensive positions. His subordinate, Tenth Army commander General Heinrich von Vietinghof, was a devout Catholic, and he assured the seventy monks living there that he would not use the site, thus depriving the Allies of any reason to bomb it. General Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin, commander of the Fourteenth Panzer Division, who was initially tasked with defending the Cassino area, was not only a Catholic but also a lay member of the Benedictine Order to which the site was especially sacred (as it housed Benedict’s remains). He claims in his memoirs to have made his orders clear and to have posted military police to prevent soldiers from entering the site. A number of his junior oicers also seem to have been observant Catholics. 135 What follows is drawn from M. W. Clark, Calculated Risk (New York: Harper, 1950); F. Majdalany, Cassino: Portrait of a Battle (London: Cassell, 1957); Ellis, Cassino, the Hollow Victory (see n. 106); F. von Senger und Etterlin, Neither Fear nor Hope: he Wartime Career of General Frido von Senger und Etterlin, Defender of Cassino (London: Macdonald, 1963); D. Hapgood and D. Richardson, Monte Cassino: he Story of the Most Controversial Battle of World War II (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo, 2002); E. P. Hoyt, Backwater War: he Allied Campaign in Italy, 1943–1945 (London: Praeger, 2002); L. Clark, Anzio: Italy and the Battle for Rome—1944 (London: Headline, 2006). © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 230 steve mason On the Allied side the American Lt.-Gen. Mark Clark, commander of the Fith Army, always claimed that he had been against bombing the abbey, for several reasons—paradoxically not for the religious reasons that may have been dearer to the defenders. He was sure from reconnaissance that it was not being used militarily, that bombing it would be a tactical hindrance to the American advance (virtually requiring the Germans, who had kept out of the functioning abbey, to exploit its ruins as shooting positions), that stray bombs would kill innocent civilian refugees (as they did), and that the inevitable propaganda defeat for having bombed a famous holy place would not help the Allied cause. Clark’s original plan had sought to avoid a frontal attack on Cassino altogether by outlanking it on the right and the let. His superior, British General Harold Alexander (Commander-inChief in Italy), had also ordered that the abbey be spared, with the qualiication that “Consideration for the safety of such areas will not be allowed to interfere with military necessity.”136 On the basis of stated German and American policies and intentions, then, we might have guessed that the site would never have been bombed. Yet it was destroyed. Why? he picture is not perfectly clear even ater extremely intensive investigation of ample personal and documentary resources. But the main lines have emerged from the work of historians carefully piecing together bits of evidence. It was a complicated series of events, afected also by chance. Plans for the monastery changed dramatically with the arrival of new divisions to relieve the badly depleted and demoralized US hirtyFourth and hirty-Sixth, which had sufered horrendous casualties in the irst battle for Cassino, when their lanking eforts had failed catastrophically. Clark now adjusted his plan to include a direct assault on the Cassino massif. Fresh divisions (from the British Eighth Army) were formed into a New Zealand Corps under Gen. Bernard C. Freyberg, a First World War hero with enormous prestige. His corps comprised a New Zealand division (Second) under a General Kippenberger and a British-Indian division (Fourth) under General F. I. S. Tuker. But Freyberg and Tuker soon requested from Clark that, if they were now to be ordered to make an assault on the massif, the abbey irst be sotened up by air strikes or artillery bombardment. Clark refused for the reasons given above. For the New Zealanders it did 136 Cf. Hoyt, Backwater War, 133–34. © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 231 not matter whether the site was being occupied for military purposes: it was the psychological centre of the German line. In his view, given the extraordinary number of Allied casualties sufered in the previous unsuccessful assaults, he could not ask his men to do to the same thing again under the same conditions. he monastery loomed ominously above them, fortress-like, and it was imperative on grounds of morale that the hated “monster in the sky” be removed before another assault was tried. Air power was the only area in which the Allies enjoyed overwhelming superiority, and the only plausible way to provide the troops evidence of hope. (When the bombs eventually dropped, many in the trenches reportedly cried for joy.) So Tuker persuaded his superior Freyberg, who tried to secure Clark’s authorization, as the order would need to come from him. But as chance would have it, Clark was visiting the new beachhead at Anzio to the north and could not be reached. Since time was short, Clark’s Chief of Staf called the headquarters of C-in-C Alexander for advice, while assuring him that Clark would resolutely oppose the bombing. Alexander inclined to defer to the divisional generals, recognizing their need to inspire their troops, and so informed Clark’s oice that, although the order must come from Clark, Alexander agreed with Freyberg and Tuker. When Clark learned of Alexander’s directive he felt trapped, indeed set up by Freyberg, though he now had little choice but to order the bombing. He would later insist that if they had been American subordinates he would have latly refused, but in a coalition army he had to tread carefully. When bad weather postponed the bombing, Clark tried again to dissuade irst Alexander and then his own foreign subordinates, to no avail. As chance would have it Tuker had been abruptly forced by a recurring tropical disease to relinquish his command, though from his sickbed he maintained pressure for the bombing. he massive aerial assault was supposed to kick of a concentrated push against the Gustav Line: the “second battle” for Cassino. he Fourth Indian Division in the hills above Cassino would exploit the expected shock and occupy the mountain top, as the balance of the Fith Army poured through Cassino town below, secured by the New Zealanders, ater which the forces would join up in the Liri Valley and continue on to Rome. But it was not to be. he remarkably precise bombing runs did indeed destroy the monastery. But the air attack was not coordinated with the ground forces, who were more surprised than the enemy and not ready to exploit the opening. he Germans, on the other hand, © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 232 steve mason quickly recovered and occupied the ruins, as Clark had feared, turning the loty site into an even more lethal defensive position. he bombing of Monte Cassino suggests many cautions for historians of the Judaean war. First, it shows that we can never assume a static policy with respect to tactical objectives, impervious to changing conditions. Many factors, from natural conditions—the Air Force chose their bombing day, surprising the army, because it was the only one for which there was a favourable weather forecast—to psychological perceptions afect and even determine tactical decisions. Second, one cannot draw inferences about the intentions of historical actors from their actions or even from the orders they give. As the diaries of modern politicians that come to light only ater their deaths demonstrate, we may not assume that leaders personally support even the operations they directly order, much less actions in which they merely cooperate. We require detailed and independent evidence— diaries are helpful, though they are not infallible—to reconstruct the real feelings of individuals, if indeed the individuals could honestly say that they knew their own clear views in such periods of stress. In Clark’s case we have the possibility of a reality check on his literary memoir in the form of his own diary, his post-war interviews, and the reports of those who worked alongside him. In real time he had objected strenuously to accepting British Eighth-Army divisions under his charge (“No use giving me, an American, British troops”), especially when these would be commanded by the famous General Freyberg (“a prima donna . . . to be handled with kid gloves”). But in his more diplomatic memoir he emphasizes Freyberg’s heroic status: although he realized that the British had to handle New Zealanders tactfully, he claims to have been proud to welcome Freyberg with his troops.137 his kind of comparison reminds us again how much we cannot know about ancient daily realities. hird, and most importantly, the Cassino example shows how complicated a decision such as this can be, and how defective any single source is. Clark’s memoir, for example, entirely omits Tuker’s crucial role. Placing the blame squarely on his bête-noir Freyberg, whose motives he simply claims never to have understood, he creates a picture that would have thrown historians completely of the trail if it 137 he more candid remarks are quoted in Ellis, Cassino, the Hollow Victory, 161; for the memoir see Clark, Calculated Risk, 190, 238. © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 233 had been the only surviving account. Tuker’s role changes everything. Instead of the bombing being an unwelcome distraction motivated by the eccentric insistence of a lone general whom no one wanted to cross for diplomatic reasons (Freyberg), it appears to have arisen—much more understandably—from another general’s concern for his men’s morale. here is also the fascinating question of the motives that play a role in explaining events ater the fact. Given the worldwide consternation that followed the abbey’s bombing, one might have assumed that the main concern of apologists would be to delect responsibility for destroying such a holy or cultural site. In the case of Jerusalem, as we have seen, it has been assumed that Josephus wrote to clear Titus of the stigma of having destroyed a sacred site. But in both contexts the situation is more complicated. With Monte Cassino, although German propaganda did indeed exploit the bombing, German commanders in the area and Allied generals understood that the Allies would of course bomb it if military considerations required that. Churches had been destroyed by both sides without much hesitation, the lives of soldiers and the larger mission taking priority over brick and stone. No one was about to blame Clark for ordering the monastery destroyed on grounds of military necessity—once the inhabitants had been warned to leave, via a leaflet drop the preceding day. His own account of his opposition to the bombing has nothing sentimental about it, and expresses no embarrassment. He would have called for the abbey’s destruction, he says, if he had considered it a tactical need, but he did not. For him, the bombing resulted from interpersonal struggles in the higher command and diferences of military judgement. In the case of Titus, our easy assumption that Josephus must have wished to shield him from blame needs closer examination. Against whom would the Flavians wish Titus’ reputation defended? he world that mattered belonged to them. As for tactical necessity, Tacitus echoes Josephus in describing the temple as a virtual fortress (Hist. 5.12: templum in modum arcis propriique muri, labore et opere ante alios) occupied by the (Zealot) faction of Eleazar and John. His narrative breaks of before the end, but it is clear enough in what survives that a temple serving as a fortress had, in his view, lost any claim to the right of asylum. When Josephus portrays the war council, he has all the legionary commanders agree that “the law of war” calls for such a temple’s destruction: “once a fortress, it is no longer a shrine” © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 234 steve mason (B.J. 6.238–240). he Romans had not spared temples in Carthage or Corinth when they destroyed those cities two centuries earlier (146 b.c.e.), and in this case Titus himself appears to have had no qualms whatsoever about the temple’s fall. His joint triumph reportedly depicted “ire enguling holy places” and the strongest of walls and hilltop cities being taken (B.J. 7.144–145). he temple furnishings proudly displayed in that procession were reportedly placed on permanent exhibit in Vespasian’s Temple of Peace (B.J. 7.158–161). And the capture of these most sacred symbols from Jerusalem’s shrine was portrayed in stone on the arch of Titus that remains today, erected under Domitian to mark Titus’ apotheosis.138 he lost arch, honouring Titus in the Circus Maximus, though it did not explicitly mention the temple, memorialized the supremely capable young man’s comprehensive destruction of the city: “he subdued the nation of the Judaeans and destroyed the city of Jerusalem” (urbem Hierusolymam . . . delevit), which no one allegedly had been able to do before (CIL 6.944).139 In a similar vein, the Flavian poet Valerius Flaccus praised Vespasian in the prologue to his Argonautica (12–14): your son [Domitian] tells of the overthrow of Idume, for he is able, and of his brother [Titus] begrimed with the dust of Jerusalem, scattering ire-brand and causing havoc in every turret (spargentemque faces et in omni turre furentem).140 No embarrassment is discernible anywhere here, and in view of the Flavians’ energetic Iudaea capta coin production, there is nothing to suggest that their brutal destruction of Jerusalem ever caused them to lose sleep. In view of the experience of armies at all times—still today, except when troubling leaks and photographs ind media outlets—we may suppose that the Flavians, whose proof of imperium-worthy potency depended so heavily on the Judaean war, had no regrets about “doing what was necessary over there,” in the common parlance. If Tacitus’ Cf. M. Pfanner, Der Titusbogen (Mainz am Rhein: Philipp von Zabern, 1983). Tommaso Leoni is completing a doctoral dissertation (History, York University) on this arch. In the meantime see F. Millar, “Last Year in Jerusalem: Monuments of the Jewish War in Rome,” in Flavius Josephus and Flavian Rome (ed. Edmondson, Mason, and Rives), 101–28. 140 Translation from P. R. Taylor, “Valerius’ Flavian Argonautica,” CQ 44 (1994), 212–35, who argues (213–16) that publication under Vespasian, though the author emphasizes the continuity of his dynasty through his sons with signiicant attention to Domitian, best suits the evidence of the text. 138 139 © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 235 account of the end had survived, it would be no surprise if he had portrayed Titus as keen to destroy the city and its fortress-temple. It has oten been observed that the epitome of Cassius Dio has Titus eager to lead the charge, driving his superstitious troops forward into the temple (65/66.6.2). hat is what a general must do at the moment of assault, maintaining unbroken morale for the ight, and such images of decisive strength it what is known of the Flavian portrait. But such inferences from the inal outcome overlook the tangle of strategic and tactical issues facing commanders on a daily basis. he ancients did not make our common distinction between strategy and tactics, since the commander (stratēgos) was assumed to be on the scene of battle, not a remote planner. Everything that concerned him was called stratēgeia (the general’s sphere) and in particular he was expected to employ stratēgēmata—ruses, deceptions, tactics (Frontinus, Strat. 1 praef. 4).141 But like modern strategic and tactical thinking, all such planning was risk-averse by nature. It tries to achieve its objectives with minimal loss to one’s own resources, troops, and morale while inlicting maximal damage on those of the enemy—especially sapping their morale.142 hese considerations inluence Titus all the way of Josephus’ narrative. Shortly before the council he relects that his initial instinct “to spare foreign sacred sites” has brought only death and injury for his troops, and that is why he orders the temple gates burned (B.J. 6.228). When Josephus gives his reasons in the council for again wanting to avoid the temple’s destruction, they do not include religious or altruistic compunctions but again focus on Roman interests. His ight is with the enemy’s men, not their buildings. Destroying their morale or their physical existence is the key to ending this conlict, whereas if the temple burns the Romans will be the ones harmed the most (Ῥωμ ω ἔ , 6.241)—whether because the empire will lose a great landmark, or because destruction will risk arousing the ire and animosity of Judaeans around the empire and in the Parthian 141 See the handbook of Stratēgēmata compiled by Josephus’ contemporary in Rome, Sex. Iulius Frontinus. he fourth-century handbook by Vegetius, Epitoma rei militaris, gives particular attention to questions of morale. Cf. E. L. Wheeler, Stratagem and the Vocabulary of Military Trickery (Leiden: Brill, 1988). 142 See, e.g., B. H. Liddell Hart, Strategy: he Indirect Approach (3d rev. ed.; London: Faber and Faber, 1954); E. Luttwak, Strategy: he Logic of War and Peace (rev. ed.; Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 2001). © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 236 steve mason world, or simply because of the immediate risk to his soldiers in ighting defenders willing to die in its defence (cf. Dio 65/66.6.2). Josephus’ thematic description of Titus’ avoidance of unnecessary risk, in contrast to the death-defying style of the Judaean guerrillas ighting for survival in their homeland, seems a plausible relection of reality. Just as Velleius Paterculus had said of Tiberius that “no opportunity for victory seemed to him timely for which he would have to pay with the sacriice of his soldiers; always, the course that was safest seemed to him also the most glorious” (115.5), so Josephus makes the telling observation that, while each Judaean was risking life and limb (B.J. 5.316): Titus was taking precautions for the security of his soldiers no less than for their success. Saying that the thoughtless charge was an act of desperation, and that the only real valour was accompanied by forethought and not the manufacture of sufering, he directed his troops to show themselves men in ways that posed no risk to themselves. Destroying the Jerusalem temple in close-quarter combat would unavoidably have been a high-risk operation, whereas if it remained it would be “an ornament of their imperium/power” ( μ μ , 6.241), whatever that means exactly. According to Josephus, Titus had earlier tried to spare the whole city in the realization that it would be preserved or destroyed for himself as heir to the throne (5.360: Τ ἀ ). Given that the Romans’ strategic aims should have included the post-war situation they wished to preside over, while their tactical aims would have required minimizing loss, and their soldiers, having sat outside Jerusalem through scorching summer months with little cover, were exhausted and may even have faced a dire water shortage (so Dio 65/66.4.5), it is not diicult to imagine that Titus would have been watching for the least costly path to victory. What that path was could not have been clear to him on a day-today basis, for it depended largely on the Judaean leaders and their willingness to surrender. According to Josephus, Titus half-expected a general surrender at his irst arrival outside the walls (B.J. 5.52–53), and he pulled out every carrot and stick in his suitcase to try to bring this about as time wore on. His measures were not all congenial, and again cannot relect Josephus’ mere lattery of Titus. hey included the cruciixion of badly beaten prisoners outside the walls, permitting the soldiers to invent creative postures as mockery, and cutting of the hands of many captives to prove that they were prisoners— © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 237 all in order to intimidate the besieged and force an early capitulation (5.289, 446–459; cf. 348–356). Just as the repeated droves of refugees, which allegedly included leading aides to the Judaean commanders (6.229), could not have been predicted, so too John of Gischala and Simon bar Giora might—for all Titus knew—have decided to surrender much earlier than they did. Titus could not have had a ixed plan, therefore, impervious to developments on the ground. If a general surrender had come early, and he could then have garrisoned the city with a legion (as he would soon garrison the ruins with the Tenth), it is diicult to believe that he would have gone to the considerable and counterproductive efort of destroying the fortress Antonia or the adjacent temple complex. As for councils and consultations, we should imagine that Titus was constantly consulting his general staf, who were always close by, as we see in the other case that Josephus mentions (above), which resulted in the construction of a circumvallation (B.J. 5.491). It is not surprising that Titus, still only thirty and with relatively little command experience, should seek the counsel of his senior colleagues, who would also play important parts in the Flavian regime. If a meeting such as Josephus describes really happened, it occurred at a speciic moment in a rapidly changing scene, and its purpose was not to declare Titus’ policy to his commanders. Issuing orders did not require a council. Councils were held for the airing of competent opinions from senior commanders so that a sound decision could be taken about what to do next.143 Notice Josephus’ language at the earlier consultation: ater all opinions had been aired and justiied, Titus had irst to persuade his oicers of his reasons and, ater winning their agreement, he directed them to divide up the work among their forces (B.J. 5.502: Τ μ μ μ ἔ ). Similarly, this later consilium is convened “to bring forward for discussion the question of the shrine” (6.238) and all views on the subject are expressed. In this case Titus persuades only three of the commanders, but it is enough. Again, debate and persuasion precede the execution of the newly consolidated plan (B.J. 6.242–243). Even if we had a tape-recording of such a meeting on the temple’s fate, therefore, it would not tell us anything more than this is what Titus and his commanders expressed to each other that aternoon. It 143 See already hucydides 7.60, where the Athenian generals (stratēgoi), nearly trapped at Syracuse, hold a council to confer also with the commanders (taxiarchoi). © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 238 steve mason would not necessarily tell us (a) what they really felt or (b) how long they had held, or would continue to support, the views they expressed in that moment. hese opinions must have been in lux as the siege progressed, or no council would have been necessary. Josephus claims that Titus himself had already given up on sparing the temple as too costly for him and so ordered the ires lit (B.J. 6.228), but hardly a day later ordered the ires extinguished to facilitate a major assault. If three of Titus’ commanders instantly changed their minds upon hearing their general, how can we know that he too had not been changing course in response to developments or that he would not have adjusted course again the next day if events had not overtaken him? Such a meeting of the consilium is not the place to look for policy. Recognizing that Titus could not have known when or how the end would come shows the futility of imagining that we could gain a clear knowledge of his aims by declaring either Josephus’ or Severus’ version of the council-of-war story reliable. Titus’ views and actions might have taken many forms that are no longer recoverable; an uncontrollably large number of scenarios could explain what ended up in Josephus’ and Sulpicius’ accounts. We lack the independent evidence that alone would permit us to narrow the range of options. Perhaps he arrived in Judaea determined to destroy the temple, but then thought he might save it, or the reverse. Perhaps he was inluenced more by Tiberius Iulius Alexander at some times, less at others. Perhaps there were personal conlicts or tensions among some of these ofers (there must have been some because there always are). And what of King Agrippa and Berenice? We might suppose that they were committed to the temple’s survival: they reportedly visited Jerusalem oten, where they relished the view of the sacred precincts from their upper city palace across the Tyropoeon Valley.144 Agrippa, who enjoyed the high privilege of appointing high priests, had served as local expert for both Cestius and Vespasian.145 He seems also to have remained Titus’ close associate (B.J. 4.498–500) and perhaps provided soldiers also for the inal campaign (B.J. 5.42). At some point, Berenice notoriously became Titus’ lover (some years later joining him in Rome).146 Although Josephus found no reason to mention the royal pair in this part of his 144 145 146 B.J. 2.2.310–314, 333–34, 405, 426, 595; A.J. 20.189–195. B.J. 2.500–502; 3.29, 443; 4.14–15. Suetonius, Tit. 7.1; Tacitus, Hist. 2.2; Cassius Dio 65/66.15.4, 18.1. © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV what is history? 239 narrative, we must wonder what inluence their counsel exercised on Titus. My point is that any of these things might have happened in reality, and Josephus could still have written his story, which is at the very least shaped, worded, and situated by him for narrative reasons. Whether it also obscures in some signiicant way what Titus said on that occasion, or (more or less) faithfully reports it we cannot know. But in the end it does not matter, because even if we felt the conidence to declare the story a word-perfect transcript, it would tell us little about Titus’ general views or those of his commanders. Part III. Summary and Conclusion I have argued the general proposition that one’s view of history makes an enormous diference to the way in which one goes about it. Part I was devoted to developing a model of history that would accommodate the special problems of Roman-period Judaea and the events of the Great War. Namely, history is fundamentally a process of methodical and open-ended inquiry into the human past, which does not get its validity from its ability to produce conident conclusions. Part II comprises two case studies related to the Judaean-Roman war: Cestius Gallus’ Judaean campaign and Titus’ destruction of the temple. In both cases I sought to explore the diferences between an approach to history that looked irst for reliable narratives or authorities to guide us, on which we only exercised our critical skills, and one that began with the investigator’s own questions, whether or not these had ever been discussed by an ancient writer. I argued that if our goal is to re-imagine the real events of the past in all of their complexity, and the possibilities facing signiicant players, we must push to one side each piece of surviving evidence, including Josephus’ narratives, which could only ever throw a glancing light on the lost reality. In the course of our investigation, however, we will need to interpret and explain that evidence. he more independent evidence we have, the better chance we have of narrowing the range of possibilities. Where we have only one substantial account, as in the two cases we have considered, the number of possible scenarios prevents us from claiming much conidence about what really happened. My conclusion is that explorers face perils, and they alone assume the attendant risks. Historians are intellectual and sometimes physical © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 240 steve mason explorers. Not content with what tradition has laid at our door, all reined and sot and easy to manage, we undertake to explore in a methodical way certain problems of interest to us and our peers concerning the distant past. In doing so, however, we bear the risks. It seems that in the study of Roman Judaea we oten do not see clearly that we are explorers, that everything depends on us. We oten appear to want an air-conditioned ride, provided by poor old Josephus, through the forbidding landscape of Roman Palestine. When the terrain becomes impassible, the light fails, or we need to get out and put some efort into it, we act surprised, blaming our driver whom we have dragooned into service: he failed to provide what we were ater or even suppressed it. We reduce our task to reading Josephus’ accounts and (albeit with the help of archaeology and other sources) rendering a verdict on his reliability. If Josephus could recall his lesh in whatever Roman catacomb houses his bones, and raise himself on the one elbow for just sixty seconds, I expect that he might tell us with a tired smile: Chevrei, zeh lo baaya sheli: his is not my problem. I led a busy life and did my best, and wrote until I could write no more. I came through many dangers and exhausted myself explaining the tragedy of our war with Rome and the beauty of our ancestral laws and constitution. I wrote what I thought was most useful to make my impression, in the style of the time. Now you want to know all sorts of other things about our lives back then? Kol ha-kavod. Lehitraot. [More power to you. Goodbye!] To return to our starting point: historical method cannot change because we have the extraordinarily elaborate accounts of Josephus for irst-century Judaea. We are in the same logical predicament as those who study the Josephusless provinces. Our advantages are that with Josephus we have a greater possibility of inding corroborative evidence for other literary and material evidence and that his narratives prompt many questions that we would not have known to ask if his writings had not survived. We may not be able to answer these questions, but the process of working through them is the essential part of historia. © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV