The Jewish Historian Flavius Josephus: A Biographical Investigation

Who in fact can deny that what Ullrich has extracted by means of painstaking
interpretation is a phenomenon that should actually have imposed itself upon us a priori? As a
man in the prime of life, Thucydides, experiences the horrific struggle of his hometown, he
experiences victories and defeats with it, his relationship to Athens is shifted by his own exile
– and are we actually to assume here that he would have continued to drag his conception of
the course of events, which he had entertained during his first recording just at the beginning
of the war, impassively and callously right through to the end? The Thucydidean text can be
understood only from the internal disintegration of the old recordings by means of the new
perceptions that Thucydides had gained. The question of what is perhaps to be ascribed to the
ineptitude of an anonymous [hand] in the editing of the text seems to me to lose some of its
significance in view of this.
Polybius experienced a fate similar to that of Thucydides. In the year 167 he was
deported as a hostage to Rome where he entered into very close contact with Roman nobility
and under its influence he became an admirer of the powerful empire, whose glory he
immediately decided to proclaim. Large portions of the work have survived to our day, which
were recognized to have been recorded before the beginning of the war against Carthage, i.e.
before 150. A few years later, as the world looks on, Polybius experiences the devastation of his
[233] homeland by the Romans. And once again – is it not in principle perfectly self-evident
for every sensitive human being that Polybius became a different [person] under the effect of
such events, of which I single out only the most important? And furthermore, since he became
another [person], that he also arrived at another conception of the historical events and
powers? In the year 1912, when I was summarizing the individual interpretations of my
“Polybius” into a concluding chapter based on this point of view, I truly did not suspect, then,
that a few years later the formidable World War was to display the correctness and the
psychological truth of my Polybius analysis to me within my [own] character, and I ask
everyone who bears a sensitive heart within, I even ask Eduard Meyer himself, who in the year
1913 even heaped scorn and ridicule upon me because I was of the opinion that Polybius was
not born as the pragmatist whom we now encounter [him to be], but rather that [Polybius] has
managed to come to his serene history only by dint of a long life replete with changes and
impressions; I ask Eduard Meyer if he really emerged from this World War devoid of any
impressions for his historical conception?
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