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

[cahn]

No worries, this was totally me last week and you aren't particularly late! I'm so happy to be getting your comments as you clearly are much more knowledgeable than I am (uh, not that this is at all hard, but anyway) and it's so fun to see you and selenak talk about stuff :D

What happened to Verres? (Not necessarily aimed at you, if you're busy/tired; also aimed at selenak :D )

Agrippa's speech is (besides portraying him sympathetically) an amazing opportunity for Josephus to flatter the Romans. But it is also true; the Jews aren't going to win this.

Ah, yes, he's really laying it on, isn't he? But yeah, also true :/

This sort of intercommunal violence (covering the same territory as the present-day war) is miserable to read about.

:/ I guess I didn't quite realize how much the geography overlaps, so thank you for pointing that out. Ugh :(

It's unsurprising to anyone who has ever had an administrative job that Josephus's attitude seems to be "we would have done a lot better if everyone had presented a united front against the Romans instead of arguing with each other."

He did say that in the preface, and I guess we didn't have to wait too long to see it... heh, my job gets close enough to administrative at times that I laughed ruefully at that.

[(Anonymous)]

Verres saw the writing on the wall during Cicero's prosecution of him in the Senate--- this is one of the situations where the fact that the trial is even taking place is a really bad sign--- and went into exile at Marseille, France. He was perhaps later proscribed (put on a death list and his property marked for confiscation) by Marc Anthony, but this is apparently not entirely certain.

[cahn]

Ah, thank you!! That all makes a lot of sense.