摘要：Although he has been known from antiquity as ‘the Jewish historian FlaviusJosephus’, the émigré priest from Jerusalem (37–ca. 100 AD) surprisinglydevoted most of the penultimate volume of his Judaean Archaiologiato the murder of Gaius Caligula and its aftermath (AJ 19.1–273).Scholars have generally considered this a major digression, illustrative of themiscellany thought to characterise that work’s later volumes. Josephus neededtwenty volumes, they have suspected, the number having been made respectableby Dionysius’ Roman Archaiologia. So he could not be too discriminatingabout what he used as fill, after his main biblical source ran out half-waythrough his project. The maestro of Josephus studies for much of the twentiethcentury, Henry St. John Thackeray, described AJ 12–20 as ‘a patch-work,compiled from such miscellaneous materials as were at the author’s disposal’.1Given that Josephus could have had little to add to such disparate material,which he basically copied, the scholar’s main interest must be in the nature ofthe sources rather than in Josephus’ writing.
