ABSTRACT
The author presents the results of an investigation into Josephus’s use of πάθος in his War. However, he cautions that War’s πάθη seem not to be simple feelings or emotions but are closely bound up at least with suffering and calamity; the tragic ethos of this work; and its Thucydidean-realist frame in relation to internal and external politics. The author concludes, inter alia, that Josephus’ War is a pragmatic (albeit tragic) work of political realism in its recognition that the powerful will and must rule, that justice doesn’t enter into it, and that fortune changes things constantly. It narrates Jerusalem’s unwanted suffering (πάθος), in the language of Josephus’s forceful emotion (πάθος), because it is a story of how things actually were and are.
