The Jewish War: Second half of Book 2

[cahn]

Last week: Lots of discussion of various contemporary Roman emperors and their families: Claudius, Agrippina, Nero, Britannicus. Quinctilius Varus and Arminius make an appearance as well. Also Josephus wants to tell you ALL about the Essenes, and none of us knows why but maybe we will find out sometime in the future?? (ugh, I haven't finished replying to comments yet on this either, sorry! -- hopefully will get to that tomorrow)

This week: The Jewish war starts! It's a mess. We do finally meet our hero Josephus, who is just the most heroic, clever, and brave guy. (Probably devilishly handsome too, although this is admittedly not in the text.)

Next week: where shall we read to in Book 3? ETA: All of book 3 for this week!

Comments

[cenozoicsynapsid]

The Parthians have just fought the Romans in a five-year campaign over Armenia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman%E2%80%93Parthian_War_of_58%E2%80%9363) which ended in a mildly pro-Parthian compromise: they get to make their guy king of Armenia but he has to go to Rome to be crowned by the emperor. The war had been bloody and expensive for both sides. The Romans lost two legions in a humiliating defeat, but the Parthians had gotten lucky (according to Wikipedia, exploiting mis-coordination between two Roman generals--- shades of Tannenberg). So no, this is a bad time to hope the Parthians will start something. The *next* two Jewish wars will apparently see some Persian interventions.

[cahn]

Ah, this is interesting, thank you!