ABSTRACT
It was Thucydides who drew the distinction between a history that would be a possession for all time and a lightweight bit of writing to win immediate applause (1.22.4). However, this did not mean that he approved of bad writing, or dull presentation. What he never did do was to offer a formula by which excellent research could be presented to the public in an interesting way. Instead, he created a critical vocabulary of abuse. Josephus imitated Thucydides’s style as best he could in his Jewish War, and found that he was attacked in very Thucydidean terms:
Certain disreputable characters have attacked my history as a prize essay for boys in school, an astonishing and wicked charge… I wrote my history of the war, being a participant in many of the events, and an eyewitness to most of them, I was ignorant of nothing that was either said or done.
(Contra Ap. 1.54–5)