RT Article
T1 Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities in Competition with Nicolaus of Damascus’s Universal History
JF Journal of ancient Judaism
VO 13
IS 1
SP 52
OP 76
A1 Smith, Tyler
LA English
YR 2022
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1796456438
AB In Jewish Antiquities 14–17, Josephus draws extensively on Nicolaus of Damascus’s Universal History. Josephus and his immediate audience in Rome at the end of the first century would have seen Nicolaus’s work as a direct competitor for telling the history of the Jewish people in the Herodian period. This essay looks at Josephus’s use of conventional historiographical polemic to impugn the motivations of his predecessor and rival. By casting Nicolaus the historical actor as biased, Josephus casts doubt on the reliability of the Universal History. Ultimately, this opens up a new perspective on the Antiquities’s more censorious posture vis-à-vis Herod (relative to the more generous posture in his earlier work, the Jewish War): in a virtual competition with Nicolaus, Josephus seeks to win admiration for his own work as frank and impartial in its assessment of Herod while simultaneously fostering suspicion of Nicolaus’s work as obsequious and partisan.
K1 motivations and reliability in historiography
K1 competitive historiography
K1 Universal History
K1 Nicolaus of Damascus
K1 Jewish Antiquities
K1 Flavius Josephus
DO 10.30965/21967954-bja10017