Now that we have explored various aspects of the poetics of embedded letters in Josephus and in other Greek authors, we have left to ask, why does Josephus use all of these letters? Such a question is another important element of epistolary poetics, since it can help us to understand Josephus’ literary and cultural aims. This final chapter will attempt to answer this question and will conclude by noting implications of this study for our understanding of Josephus and of the broader field of ancient epistolography.

In general, Josephus followed his sources both directly in parallel episodes and indirectly in style. Recall the analysis of Josephus’ texts about David and Cambyses, and their parallels in Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible, as well as the Letter of Aristeas and Nicolaus. Josephus wrestled with the same questions of reliability that Thucydides and Euripides did before him, repeatedly positing the slipperiness of letters, which will be discussed further below. Josephus reflected a world that could be understood more fully by including the extensive use of letters as historians before him had included. These influential Greek historians included Diodorus, Dionysius, and Polybius, as well as Herodotus and Thucydides, to name a few.

Josephus’ Jewish cultural heritage also exerted some influence, as several of the works discussed above illustrate. This heritage reaches far back into a form of “scribal culture” that produced the Hebrew Bible over many centuries, but draws most directly from Greek translations of that sacred literary tradition. Josephus also changed his sacred source significantly, even though he claims to stick closely to it in the first half of the Antiquitates Judaicae. Thus the Greek epistolary embedding practices that Josephus employed refract the more functional, spare use of letters in Hellenistic Jewish literature seen in Greek {207|208} translations of the Hebrew Bible and in Maccabeean literature. Yet Josephus also refracted Graeco-Roman literary practices, innovatively appealing to his readers at a meta-textual level (recall the Herod narratives) and thoroughly developing characters (recall Cambyses) and plot (recall Gaius and the Temple). Described in the detailed analysis above, the resulting picture in Josephus, wherein he aspires to and builds on the Greek tradition before him, is unique.

Why, then, did Josephus use letters? In part for reasons already discussed at length: because he found them in sources, such as Nicolaus and the Letter of Aristeas, in literary forebears like Diodorus and the Maccabeean books, and in his cultural milieux, represented by documentary letters and such distant authors as Thucydides. His submission of letters to readers on a meta-textual level opened the door for letters to be considered as having some additional function than developing the plot or the characters or internal evidence for a trial. Josephus laid evidence before his readers, in a few cases even inviting them to check background and archives themselves, and allowed them to draw their own conclusions from the information he had marshaled.

A modern way of framing Josephus’ extensive epistolary usage is to focus on incentives. Consider Josephus’ historical position. He had fought in and survived a war with the known world’s suzerain. He had surrendered and curried imperial favor. The center of the Jewish world, the Temple, lay in ruins, as did Jerusalem. And, as evidenced by Josephus’ speaking of this central institution as if it still existed even after it had been destroyed, Judaea’s future remained unclear (Contra Apionem 2.193–198). Thus Josephus had to convince part of his audience, the Roman elite, that Judaea still had some strength. Perhaps Josephus, looking ahead, was surmising that the battle with the Romans may not be over. Perhaps he was attempting to impress readers with his and Judaea’s success at resisting Roman conquest for so long (Bellum Judaicum 1.8). But more importantly, failing the ability to demonstrate a convincing show of military might, Josephus was choosing to portray the Jews as important cultural collaborators, raising awareness of the cost of their destruction. He promoted peace, long a quality of Jewish history, as shown in the numerous epistolary exchanges already described, by demonstrating the Jews’ quality as a partner in cultural exchange. Contra Apionem is the clearest statement of this, but the thread of embedded letters throughout Josephus—with the exception of the court scenes in the Herod narratives save for Josephus’ literary sophistication in handling Herod’s tempestuous court—coalesces to arrive at the same point. As it turned out, Josephus was right to worry; {208|209} unrest between Rome and Judaea, though by no means inevitable, would flare up at least two more times in the next several decades: the uprising under Trajan (113–115) and the Bar Kochba revolt under Hadrian in 132. [1]

Given this historical position, what was Josephus doing with letters? A helpful explanatory model can be borrowed from microeconomics—that of signaling theory, which presents signals as perceivable indicators of qualities that are not directly observable. [2] Developed in 1973 by Nobel laureate A. Michael Spence, the theory explains how agents in a market behave when information is asymmetrical. [3] The concept is part of the field of information economics and has been applied by biologists to explain signals exchanged by animals and how they relate to the signalers’ qualities. [4] Spence focuses particularly on the job market, in which an individual is attempting to sell his or her labor to a potential employer, the buyer. In general, buyers are willing to pay more for better labor, so a seller desires to communicate his or her potential value to the employer. Because the employer does not know the potential value, or productivity, of the seller, but the seller does know his or her own value, information in the job market is said to be asymmetrical. To close this knowledge gap between the buyer, who desires to know, and the seller, who desires to communicate, the seller can produce a signal to indicate his productivity. One signal that Spence focuses on is education. An advanced or professional degree is a signal that a person is able to enter and successfully exit a difficult regimen of instruction, research, and examination. Thus education is a proxy for qualities that are otherwise not visible, such as self-discipline and intelligence. As such, educational attainment can be useful to a buyer in the labor market (employer) who wants to know whether a seller (job applicant) will be a productive employee. [5] Signals can be costly to acquire, as is the case with education, and costly signals are difficult to send for one not actually in possession of them (i.e. costly signals are difficult to fabricate).

The sophistication this explanation assumes is a function of embedded letters’ intratextual nature: letters in Josephus’ narratives are related to other portions of the text and to the text as a whole. This study has attempted to show, by detailed examples, both that the letters affect the narrative and that the narrative affects the letters. Thus, while {210|211} examining embedded letters for chronologically appropriate greeting formulas has its place as a research question, the argument here has tried to show that there is much to be learned about embedded letters and about their parent-texts in addition to and even apart from such an approach. Trapp perceptively notes the importance of embeddedness in his anthology of Greek and Latin letters. [6] He acknowledges that embedded letters are indeed one way we find ancient epistolary material, but he only includes four such letters in his anthology (nos. 17, 50, 71, and 72)—none of those in Greek—and he comments as follows:

The implication of the interaction of letters with their embedding texts is that embeddedness ought not be ignored at any time. For historians interested in what embedded letters tell us about the world outside of the text, a narrative can give important clues. Did Josephus dig Antiquitates Judaicae 14 and 16 letters out of archives in the receiving cities? He might have. [7] But the narrative, however spare it may be at those points, tells us that Josephus thought his readers would find the material convincing. If we were to find one of the decrees in an excavation, we might be able to tell something of its value by the fact that it was inscribed on a stele. We might be able to tell that it was significant by its proximity to an important area of the site. We might be able to find another like it that would tell us it was not unique. However, by itself, it would tell us little of the reaction to the decree; it would tell us little of its typicality or its value to its intended recipients. But in a narrative, the epistolary decree can be introduced, placed in proximity {212|213} to other narrative elements, illuminated with commentary, and its value can be reflected back through rhetoric that the author must have supposed the audience would have found persuasive. True, it can also be distorted and manipulated. But even then, we would learn something of the audience it was intended to impress, of the way it might be considered impressive, the way the embedded letter may relate to a documentary letter. To take an ideal but telling example, Claudius’ epigraphic speech may be useful as a “control” for Tacitus’ version, but Tacitus’ version tells us something that the inscription alone cannot.

Stressing embeddedness raises again the issue of the nature of the embedding text and, specifically, generic expectations. As this study has shown to a limited extent, letters can transcend generic boundaries; they can be found in historiographical narrative, in tragedy, in “autobiography,” or in “biography.” [8] I have not stressed the generic boundaries simply because it has not been necessary. There do not appear to be major differences in how letters look or in what they do in particular settings. Josephus’ use of letters in the Vita (e.g. 62) looks much like it does in the Bellum Judaicum or Antiquitates Judaicae. True, there is a personal element to the use of letters in the Vita—Josephus receives a letter from his father (204); he is the focus of attention in several operations involving epistolary exchanges (e.g. 186, 245, 269, 310)—but he also sends collaborative letters in the Bellum Judaicum when discussing his generalship (3.140, 191). The Vita is most notably different because there are more letters to, from, and about Josephus than anywhere in his strictly “historiographical” writings, though characters use letters as evidence in his other narratives, and in the Vita Josephus as character uses letters in this way (254, 260). (But then again, so does Josephus as author in Books 14 and 16 of the Antiquitates Judaicae.) This personal use in the Vita should not be surprising, given the extent to which it is, of course, natural for him to focus on his own activities in that work.

Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris was an important work for exploring a letter’s spatiotemporal relationship to the rest of a parent-text. That text is tragedy, of course, not history, but the extent to which perceptions of spatial and temporal gaps are similar and allow the emphases of that text and the Gaius episode to contrast blurs generic boundaries. Letters do not appear to have a different status, such as possessing {213|214} more or less reliability in Josephus’ histories than in the Vita, nor do they appear to relate differently to the narrative. There is ample space given in some tragedies to dramatic concerns with letters, but that is also the case in Josephus’ histories, especially in the Herod narratives. Does this make parts of Josephus’ histories like tragedy, or does it make tragedy like history? The answer is both and neither. Both, in the sense that some of Josephus’ narratives can work like tragedy, as has been argued before, [9] and tragedy can read like history in that it can reflect “real life.” [10] Neither, in the sense that the Herod narratives, to take one clear example, are not trying to be something else: they are presented in a historical work as history. The narratives may push boundaries between texts as they are perceived by readers, but Josephus bundles all of the material up in his history. [11] This points back to the tenuousness of generic boundaries that arose above. [12] {214|215}

With a caveat, this conclusion about embedded letters fits well with the characterization of much epistolary communication as inherently dubious and tricky, which was previously based largely on surface features of some of Josephus’ texts. [13] A similar pattern was noted in other authors, though I have here attempted to present a full study of only Josephus’ use of letters. However, the full story requires subtleties that do not appear on the narrative surface, and often show up in the analysis of parallel narratives. This conclusion about the necessity of a nuanced interpretation cuts the other way, though—and here is the caveat: texts like the one concerning Antipater’s trial that appear obviously to fit with the apparently overarching dubiousness of letters do not quite do so. The presentation of more, even seemingly more reliable, epistolary evidence muddies the picture. In the meta-textual, readerly “court” in which the external audience weighs the competing evidence, the matter is far from clear, but Josephus apparently trusts readers’ powers of reason and interest in the truth.

The elusiveness and trickery of letters in Josephus, paralleled in other authors’ works, seems to fit quite well with the perennial problem of how to take Josephus’ self-presentation. [14] How did Josephus want to be portrayed as an author? As Graeco-Roman? Jewish? Josephus has more recently been thought to have considered himself in a multi-faceted way as Jewish, Greek, and Roman, though defining that mix more precisely is fraught with problems. [15] This study of embedded letters will most likely frustrate attempts to set the self-presentation answer too firmly. While he may at times have included an element in the Antiquitates Judaicae that seems Graeco-Roman, such as using a letter to put rulers on speaking terms, the biblical parallel to the Antiquitates {216|217} Judaicae text has a similar letter, and such a convention has its roots, not only in the LXX, but it is also traceable, perhaps only through the LXX, to the MT. Yet Josephus is not content to leave the letter buried in a Hebrew text, which might be overlooked. He can contemporize letters, and does so in two different texts concerned with the same letters, by referring to and inviting his readers to consult an archive in Tyre that still contains the letters from the Hebrew and Tyrian kings. [16] Josephus’ act of “preserving” the archive in his narrative brings the presence of collaboration by means of letters in Jewish texts in line with Graeco-Roman practices and gives his readers a multifaceted sense of his identity, as Roman, Greek, and Jewish.

The nexus of that archive, the letters in 2 Samuel, 2 Regnorum, and Antiquitates Judaicae 7, gestures toward the notion that letters may be a kind of model topic on which to read Josephus intertextually, since epistolary intratextual texts seem to have been somewhat universal in their employability. As we have seen, embedded letters have their place in Greek literature, as well as in Hellenistic Jewish literature and in the Hebrew Bible. And the Persian use of letters—represented above not only in Greek by Xenophon, Herodotus, Josephus, and 1 Esdras, but also in Hebrew and Aramaic by Ezra—demonstrates quite a different background for letters, one that Herodotus implies is beneath Greek practice. We should note, too, that Josephus aspires to the greatness of Greek literary history and culture, [17] and is quite willing to argue for the longevity of Jewish textuality—he does not directly include letters—as better than the history of Greek textuality, if only rhetorically in his Contra Apionem. Specifically regarding letters, perhaps recalling Herodotus’ point on the Greeks as masters of letters, Josephus, too, figures himself such a master, putting his adversaries on the run with his epistolary brilliances.

Josephus seems to have expected that at least some of his audience would perceive this brilliance. [18] If our understanding of the composition of Josephus’ original audience is based on what they would have been expected to glean from Josephus’ texts—and this is the drift of some recent scholarship on Josephus [19] —employing letters for textual {217|218} effect could help our understanding of Josephus’ audience to some extent, since Josephus appears to have incorporated the fact that Jewish literature, both biblical and extra-biblical, included the use of letters, as he recognizes in Graeco-Roman literature. In this sense, Josephus provides a kind of “common ground,” on which Graeco-Roman, Jewish, and even Persian conventions interact and compete.

But the identity of that some of the audience remains an open question. This study has referred to audience expectations of embedded letters, an idea that in the first chapter linked to generic horizons, that is, what a reader of Josephus’ works may have expected when reading a work of history or autobiography. [20] Remembering a few of Josephus’ texts should clarify the point. Jewish readers, who I argued were part of Josephus’ audience, [21] would have recognized the letters that had been important in the biblical texts with which they were undoubtedly familiar. David’s letter with the order to station Uriah on the front lines of battle, carried by Uriah himself, would no doubt have been recognized by Jewish readers, who could recall the original, biblical story, perhaps in Hebrew. That same episode would have struck some Graeco-Roman (and some Jewish?) readers as a Homeric echo or an anticipation of Bellerophon. The epistolary exchanges around the Cambyses incident would have been recognized as having their provenance in an important time in Jewish history, and Jewish readers who may have been familiar with the Hebrew/Aramaic text would most likely have been interested to see Josephus’ “corrections” from another source, which they may well have known. They probably also noticed the slight changes, the simplification of “tributes” and omission of the “copy,” which they would have found familiar if they were aware of other parts of Josephus’ texts. Likewise, upon mention of Popilius, readers—perhaps Graeco-Roman—may have recalled one of a number of intertexts, remembering through the “trigger” παραγγειλάντων something of the circumstances described by Polybius or the apophthegm, regardless of whether Josephus had recounted the episode earlier. As to letters, then, there appears to have been “something for everyone,” as Josephus refracted Greek practices and signaled Jews’ cultural sophistication and value.

At a more general level for the study of Josephus, I have attempted to demonstrate, as other scholars have done, that Josephus’ narratives repay detailed literary analysis, despite the (sometimes deserved) negativity from some scholars about Josephus’ authorial/stylistic competencies. [22] Furthermore, the sorts of analysis that have been employed in the examination of other Classical and post-Classical authors can be productive with Josephus’ works, especially with the parallel texts, because Josephus participated in a Greek literary tradition by aspiring to and attempting to innovate on its conventions. Indeed, the close readings here have attempted to demonstrate that the potential exists for literary readings of Josephus’ works to be (relatively) as productive for that corpus and the topics it covers as for those of other Classical and post-Classical authors.