The Jewish Historian Flavius Josephus: A Biographical Investigation

either ἐπὶ Κλαυδίου καὶ μέχρι Νέρβα nor follow Νέρωνος with an enumeration of all the
emperors until Nerva, then it appears compelling that the concept ἐπὶ Νέρωνος καὶ μέχρι
Νέρβα is a fixed extent [of time] extracted for a dating period that cannot be understood other
than the extent [of time] ἐπὶ τε Τραϊανοῦ καὶ Ἁδριανοῦ. Therefore an endpoint under Nerva
himself cannot really be inferred 15 from the μέχρι Νέρβα, since this group of words belonging
to ἐπὶ Νέρωνος suggests only the global time period. On the contrary, from a comparison of
the article about Apollonius, in which Suidas follows the word Νέρβα by the information ἐφ’ οὗ
καὶ μετήλλαξεν, with ours which lacks such information, one could even draw the conclusion
that Suidas excludes Epaphroditus’ dying under Nerva. In any case, the information added to
the article about Apollonius proves that Suidas does not intend, in principle, to imbue the
words ἤκμαζεν ἐπὶ Νέρωνος καὶ μέχρι Νέρβα with the meaning that the person in question
lived right until Nerva.
The result of the [above] discussion is that the phrase applied in reference to
Epaphroditus means that he was a contemporary of the period from Nero to Nerva, while
Ptolemy’s floruit belongs to the period from Trajan to Hadrian. But then, of course, the two
men may well have lived for a while at the same time in Rome; for the very approximate
[nature of] the purely literary designations concerning the activities of the two men do not
exclude [the possibility] that the one, who, as we would say, belongs to the second half of the
first century also lived beyond 100, [28] any more than that the other, who according to our
language use belongs to the first third of the second century was active before the year 100
itself.
During his long stay in Rome, Epaphroditus must have acquired great wealth; after all,
he personally owned two houses in the capital. The lessons that he gave must have earned him
considerable money; besides this, he developed a prosperous literary activity, of which we
have received some traces, however we need not examine these in detail.
15 With our fixed expression ἤκμαζεν ἐπὶ Νέρωνος καὶ μέχρι Νέρβα and respectively
διέπρεψεν ἐπὶ Νέρωνος καὶ μέχρι Νέρβα which indicate that the ἀκμὴ falls within this period,
one is not to confuse the manner of expression of, for example, the article about Aristeides
γεγονὼς ἐπί τε Ἀντωνίνου ... καὶ διατείνας μέχρι Κομόδου and, respectively, the section about
Porphyrius γεγονὼς ἐπὶ τῶν χρόνων Αὐρηλιανοῦ καὶ παρατείνας ἕως Διοκλητιανοῦ etc. Here,
by virtue of the διατείνας μέχρι, the end of life is specified in contrast to the ἀκμή.
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