Who's the Toughest of them All? Jews, Spartans and Roman Torturers in Josephus' Against Apion

Josephus, the Judean general, Roman captive and Flavian protégé, devoted the last twenty-five years of his life, as a privileged resident in Rome, to the redescription of Jewish identity and to the strategic placement of his cultural tradition on the controverted map of the late first-century empire. After writing his delicately poised account of the Judean War, and the large-scale ‘autoethnography’ known as the Jewish Antiquities, his final and most intricate literary endeavour is his apologetic work, Against Apion. Here Jewishness is constructed and positioned in carefully nuanced dialectic with images of ‘Egyptian’, ‘Chaldean’, ‘Greek’ and (to some degree) ‘Roman’ cultural tradition. The rhetorical flamboyance of this piece and its predominantly polemical tone give Josephus considerable licence to manipulate the tropes that suit his argumentative needs. His eye-catching exordium and the opening vilification of ‘Greek’ historiography (1.1-56) start this treatise with a familiar antithesis between Eastern antiquity and the comparative youth and fickleness of the Greeks. But as the discourse develops we find Josephus deploying his considerable knowledge of the Greek literary and historical tradition to place his Jewish tradition both outside and inside ‘Greekness’, indeed also above (superior to) and behind (historically earlier than) what may be variously labelled ‘Greek’. What gives this manipulation of Greek historical and literary tropes particular interest is not only that Josephus writes explicitly as a Jew, and in defence of his own Jewish tradition, but that he does so in Rome, aware of how ‘Greekness’ may be variously bought and sold in the Roman market-place, ‘displayed or excoriated for its decadence’. It is within this triangulation of Jewish, Greek and Roman—the last always implicit if not explicit in Josephus' text—that the subject of Sparta becomes a particularly interesting topic of discussion.