ABSTRACT
Vespasian wrote memoirs, and contemporaries were loyal: so he had the old Roman military merits, in public life nurtured the State, and was watchful, just, energetic, and unpretentious, in private life simple. Pliny the Elder openly admits bias. He had coincided with Titus during the latter’s military tribunate on the Lower Rhine (57-8) and dedicated his Natural Histories to him. He survived Vespasian by two months, but the thirty-one books of his lost Histories may prudently have concluded on a high point, the triumph. Josephus completed the Jewish War late in the reign at earliest. He used the imperial memoirs, and had his work authenticated by Titus – whose gallantry and forbearance it in turn certifies. But Josephus had a greater problem: to reconcile the historian and prophet of Israel, a new Jeremiah, with the celebrant of emperors who had brought her down and destroyed the Temple – worse, to make sense of his transition from fighting like the Maccabees to playing Joseph at the court of a latter-day Pharaoh.1
