Between Flavian Power and Jewish Trauma: The Unemotionality of Josephus’ Triumph Narrative

1 Introduction

The account of the Flavian triumph in Josephus’ Bellum Judaicum 7.123-57 is one of the best surviving sources on the Roman triumph. The level of detail that Josephus provides has been of service to scholars researching the triumphal route, the ceremonial rituals, and other facets of this fascinating Roman festival.¹ But scholars reading the triumph pericope within the context of the BJ find this same level of detail unusual. That Josephus places an emphasis in this passage on enumerating factual, superficial details at the expense of the emotionality of the situation is rather out of character.²

Many scholars have observed that emotions and appeals thereto form a central element of Josephus’ rhetorical project. Indeed, the historical conventions of Josephus’ day called for authors to arouse emotions in their audiences; failure to do so would indicate that a historian’s narration was insufficiently vivid.³ In a similar vein, ancient historians frequently emphasized the emotions of the characters in their histories—and constructed those emotions to fit the circumstances, in the same manner that they constructed speeches and other instances of direct discourse.⁴ Josephus is no exception in this regard either. But the manner in which Josephus does stand out is that he also plays up his own emotions as an author and a historian.⁵

This article engages the triumph narrative in light of that facet of Josephus’ writing. Given the frequency with which Josephus uses his authorial voice to interject his own emotions into the narration, it is surprising that he recounts so dryly what surely must have been a deeply painful moment in his life. This article will examine the triumph narrative in connection with other passages in the BJ in which Josephus more freely admits his emotions, with a particular emphasis on those in which Josephus indicates that the recollection of a moment in history (which, in many cases, he experienced personally) is sufficiently painful that it prevents him from conveying more information than he otherwise might.⁶ On the basis of this investigation, this article will argue that the uncharacteristically dry and withdrawn tone of the triumph pericope suggests that Josephus (qua author) withdrew himself from his own experience. This withdrawal enabled Josephus to strike an unlikely balance between celebrating the Flavians’ success and representing the sadness that the triumph would be expected to engender in a Roman Jew. By declining to make an emotional judgment of his own, Josephus compels his reader to read between the lines and to supply the emotions appropriate to the situation. For a Roman reader, this is joy and celebration. A Jewish reader, however, whom Josephus has conditioned in the previous six books to expect a lament in this sort of moment, would read grief into this pericope. Only through complete emotional withdrawal, it will be argued, could Josephus compose an account that manages to be true to the events, to be true to the perspective that Josephus represents in his role as author of the BJ, and to please Josephus’ Flavian patrons.

This article draws on recent scholarship that deals with the discourse of emotions in ancient Jewish literature, primarily that of Françoise Mirguet and Ari Mermelstein.⁷ Mermelstein demonstrates how emotion and power are intimately intertwined in ancient Jewish literature. Particularly relevant here is his analysis of 4 Maccabees, in which he shows how Antiochus attempts to dictate the emotions of his Jewish subjects as demonstration of his power, but those subjects’ refusal to bend their emotions constitutes a substantial act of resistance.⁸ Mirguet brings this relationship between emotion and power to bear on the lamentations that Josephus expresses in his authorial voice in the BJ. She argues that Josephus’ practice of authorial lamentation “discreetly disrupts emotional, political, and gender norms,” concealing resistance to Roman hegemony under the guise of praise of the Romans.⁹ Since this article uses those authorial lamentations as an avenue for making sense of the unemotional narration of the triumph, Mirguet’s analysis of their political implications helps to highlight the power dynamics at play in the triumph pericope.

When I speak of unemotionality in this article, I refer to the absence of discourse marking an emotional state, or to an explicitly declared refusal to engage in such discourse. In this sense, unemotionality stands in contrast with equanimity, which is an emotional state characterized by calmness. Equanimity plays an important role in the BJ; in particular, Josephus represents equanimity as the hallmark of Vespasian’s and Titus’ military leadership.¹⁰ When a character in the BJ is equanimous, the narrative marks him as experiencing this emotion (at the exclusion of other emotions).¹¹ Equanimity is therefore an emotional state, and thus it is categorically different from unemotionality: the discourse of unemotionality refuses to engage with equanimity in the same manner that it refuses to engage with pity, grief, joy, etc. As such, my analysis of unemotionality excludes equanimity.

This study also requires that a distinction be made between Josephus as the author of the BJ and Josephus as a character in the BJ. Though both are, of course, manifestations of the same individual, they need to be recognized as separate personae who serve distinct purposes in the text.¹² This article will investigate primarily the emotions that Josephus ascribes to himself in his authorial capacity and the extent to which those emotions color the manner in which Josephus narrates the triumph. The emotions of Josephus the character and of other characters in the BJ, as well as the emotions that Josephus intends to provoke in his audience, are generally tangential to this article and will be for the most part elided.¹³

Furthermore, we must keep in mind that the authorial Josephus is himself a constructed character. We should not be led into thinking that when Josephus writes in the first person, we are receiving direct insight into the mind of an actual, historical person. Rather, Josephus constructs a persona of himself-as-author in order to model the attitudes and behaviors that he thought would be appropriate for a Jew who is also a responsible subject of the Roman Empire. Admittedly, it is likely that in many cases the emotions of Josephus’ authorial persona do indeed align with those of Josephus the historical figure. But recovering that historical figure is probably impossible, and in any case, it is not the focus of the present article. Thus, while I will at times call the authorial figure ‘Josephus’ for ease of presentation, it must be remembered that this refers to a constructed image of Josephus and not necessarily to the actual person.¹⁴

2 The Unemotional Triumph

The Roman triumph was a celebration of victory, and the scene that Josephus depicts certainly qualifies as such. First, Titus and Vespasian, dressed in laurel crowns and purple robes, received the army’s acclamation. Then, exchanging the purple robes for those traditional for the triumph, they gave the signal for the procession to begin. In the parade, Josephus reports, came all manner of valuable artifacts and beautiful tapestries, impressive statues of the Roman gods, and parades of exotic animals and well-dressed captives. Architecturally marvelous floats, Josephus tells us, featured depictions of the events of the war, and behind them came a series of ships. Next, separated out from the undifferentiated mass of riches, came the objects spoliated from the Jerusalem Temple, and behind these came images of Victory. After these images came Vespasian riding in a chariot, with Titus behind him on another chariot and Domitian riding a horse behind his brother. When the procession reached the Capitoline, they paused until they received word that the rebel general Simon son of Gioras had been executed, and then they offered prayers and sacrifices before retiring to a celebratory meal. If the spectacular nature of the day’s events is not made apparent from the description, Josephus makes clear in concluding the account of the triumph that it is a celebratory event: “This was the day when the city of Rome held festival, for victory in campaigns against the enemies, for the end of internal troubles, and for the beginning of hopes for a prosperous future.”¹⁵

Given the intensely celebratory nature of the triumph, it must surely have been an emotionally charged affair. Rhiannon Ash points out that the aftermath of war naturally brings forth opposing emotions: elation for the conquerors; shame and depression for the conquered. In Roman society, the triumph served to capture a snapshot of the war and of the Roman victory; consequently, we would expect these emotional responses to figure prominently in the experience of the triumphal procession.¹⁶ Yet, as several scholars have observed, Josephus’ triumph narrative betrays none of this emotion. This lack of emotion is particularly stark given that Josephus has engaged in lamentation on numerous occasions elsewhere in the text.¹⁷

In sparing the lamentation, though, Josephus spares no detail. His account speaks, among other things, of the colors of the robes, the intricacy of the tapestries, the scenes depicted in the tableaux, and the specific character of the temple spolia.¹⁸ Indeed, the very tangibility of the description suggests that a failure to pay attention to detail was not really an option for Josephus. He did, after all, owe his freedom and ability to write the War to Flavian manumission (and, if he is to be taken at his word in the Vita, Flavian patronage¹⁹). On these grounds, several scholars have suggested that the Flavians obligated Josephus to represent the triumph in a way that enthusiastically celebrates their victory—or, at a minimum, that he had no desire to invite hatred toward Rome’s Jews by depicting Jewish sorrow on what was supposed to be a celebratory day.²⁰ The details render the magnificence of the day, and by describing the triumph in all its splendor Josephus represents it as a happy celebration without having to declare explicitly—and falsely—that he is happy. The details are necessary because they make the account palatable to the authorities and to the Roman public.²¹

But some scholars have contended that, in appeasing the Flavians, Josephus is guilty of deserting his fellow Jews. Martin Goodman, for example, asserts that “in the light of his heartfelt comments elsewhere in his histories about the disaster which had befallen the Jews, the description of the ceremony is remarkable for its consistently Roman viewpoint.”²² Tessa Rajak agrees, saying that “the writer coolly depicts the symbolic expressions of his country’s ruin. … It is as though the sufferings which they had endured and over which he had expressed his grief, now exist only as tableaux, themes figured in golden tapestries and framed in ivory, contributions to the triumphal pomp.”²³ She later says of the triumph narrative that “here Josephus can for the first time be said to glorify his patrons at the expense of his people.”²⁴

But this “consistently Roman viewpoint” is a consequence of circumstances which require him to foreground such a perspective. It is not necessarily an accurate representation of Josephus’ feelings. These accusations of pro-Romanism or desertion of the Jews fail to take into account the sort of narrative Josephus was writing. He framed his work as a history, and he wrote it for an audience that, at least in part, was present at the triumphal procession.²⁵ As such, Josephus was in no position to fudge the details of the triumph even if he had wanted to—and the simple fact that he gave an accurate account of a Roman ritual is hardly evidence of anti-Judaism. Thus constrained by the factual events of the day, Josephus’ room for maneuverability lay not in the details but in the manner and tone of the retelling.²⁶ It is in this vein that Ash writes that if we follow the line of thinking expressed by Rajak and Goodman, we run “a risk that we will miss Josephus’ suggestive turns of emotive expression in the account of the triumph. Signs of lamentation about the fate of Jerusalem are present, but it should not surprise us if Josephus, living in exile in Rome under direct Flavian patronage, chooses not to parade his disquiet too openly.”²⁷

Indeed, I contend that what we might call Josephus’ ‘quiet disquiet’ is still present in the triumph pericope, visible to anyone who takes the trouble to read between the lines.²⁸ Ash demonstrates that the war as Josephus has represented it stalks silently behind the triumph narrative, forcing readers to filter the triumphal narrative present through the horrific narrative past.²⁹ It must be remembered that while contemporary scholars might treat the triumph narrative as an independent pericope, most readers of the BJ will only have reached this episode after making their way through six-plus books of violence, death, and destruction. Even if, as some scholars have contended, Book 7 is a later composition appended to Books 1-6,³⁰ it seems unlikely that anyone would have been expected to read Book 7 independently of the six books that preceded it. And so, to unpack this ‘quiet disquiet,’ we must look beneath the surface of the triumph pericope for moments that suggest that things are not quite as they seem, moments that call to mind the horrors of Books 1-6—horrors that may have been unknown to the cheering crowds lining the streets of Rome, but which Josephus saw with his own eyes, and with which the reader of the BJ is all too familiar.

3 Hidden Messages

Within the past 20 years or so, there has emerged a significant body of scholarship that highlights subversive and cynical elements of the Josephan corpus.³¹ These scholars locate within Josephus’ works passages that are superficially supportive of Flavian rule but, if examined closely and with an eye attuned to Josephus’ personal background and idiosyncrasies, can be read as undermining of Roman hegemony. In this vein, Steve Mason has argued that the triumph pericope, despite its superficial celebration of Flavian conquest, should be understood to quietly claim that the Flavian narrative of the Jewish War—as told both in the triumphal procession and in monumental architecture—is grounded in an untruthful narration of events.³² While Mason’s particular subject of inquiry—namely, the veracity of Flavian propaganda—is not directly relevant to the discussion at hand, his analysis proves a useful model for approaching the hidden messaging in the triumph pericope. Without rehashing Mason’s argument, let us examine a few moments in Josephus’ triumph narrative that suggest that a reading between the lines is in order.

Following Christopher Frilingos, I locate one such example in Josephus’ description of the parade of captives. This description reads: “Even the mass of captives put on parade were smartly dressed, and the variety of their fine clothing distracted attention from the unsightliness of any physical disfigurement they had suffered.”³³ The spectators at the triumph are thus unable to see the injuries borne by the Jewish captives. As he portrays the grandeur of the spectacle, however, Josephus also subtly reminds the reader of the real harm that Roman arms have perpetrated against Jewish bodies.³⁴

We see a similar phenomenon at work in Josephus’ description of the tableaux that rolled along the streets of Rome. Mary Beard says of these tableaux that “the spectacle is so convincing, the representation so consummate, that it almost ceases to count as representation at all. The whole effect, we are told, is to bring the campaigns before the eyes of the crowd ‘as if they were present themselves’ (ὡς παροῦσι, BJ 7.146). With mimesis like this, who needs reality?”³⁵ Excellent as the mimesis may be, the reality is inescapable for Josephus, who does not experience the campaign as if he were present himself but in actuality was present himself. The reader, too, has been vicariously present at the actual battles. So while a surface reading of this passage may find it to allude only to Roman celebrations of victory, Josephus artfully entangles with that celebration a reminder of the horrors of war and the suffering of the Jews.

Similarly, in a few places in the triumph narrative, Josephus inserts subtle reminders to the reader that he is among the people whose defeat is being celebrated. During the procession of the Temple spolia, he writes of the menorah that “fixed to the base was a central column, from which slender branches extended rather like the prongs of a trident, with a lamp-holder welded at the tip of each branch: there were seven of these lamps, reflecting the particular importance of that number to the Jews.”³⁶ In this moment, Frilingos argues, Josephus reminds his audience that he is a Jew, possessing specialized Jewish knowledge (specifically, knowledge he held as a Jerusalemite and Temple insider). While Josephus’ Jewishness is of course central both to his authorship of the Jewish War and to the role that his character plays within the broader story, the inclusion of this particular detail is striking because Josephus otherwise distances himself from the captives on display.³⁷ Another such operation is at work when Josephus states that giant “statues of their gods” were carried in the procession.³⁸ Just as Josephus’ esoteric knowledge of the menorah marked him as an insider to Jewish culture, his description of the Roman deities as θεῶν … παρ᾽ αὐτοῖς (“their gods”) designates him an outsider to Rome. In both of these cases, our author suggests that he is not like the crowds of Romans who have thronged on the sidewalks to watch the triumphal procession. For him—and for the readers he has taken along with him—something is amiss.

4 The Emotional Author

To understand what is weighing on Josephus’ author-persona in this moment and how it affects the narration of the triumph, we should take a step back and redirect our attention to the BJ’s proem. There, Josephus writes the following of his project:

It is certainly not my intention to counter this Roman bias [of rival historians] with an equally tendentious account in favor of my compatriots. I shall record the actions of both sides with strict impartiality, but my comments on the events will owe something to my own situation, and I shall allow personal sympathies the expression of sorrow at the fate that befell my country. … If any critic carps at what I say in condemnation of the warlords and their terrorist network, or in lament for my country’s misfortunes, I would ask him to forget the rules of historical propriety and understand my emotion. Of all the cities in the Roman Empire ours was the one to reach the greatest heights of prosperity and then plummet to the lowest depths of misery. In fact, looking over the whole sweep of history, I would say that the sufferings of the Jews have been greater than those of any other nation—and no foreign power is to blame. Impossible, then, to hold back one’s grief: and if anyone judging my work is too hard-hearted for pity, he is welcome to assign the facts to the historical record, and the emotions to the historian.³⁹

Josephus thus constructs the BJ as on the one hand factual and impartial, and on the other reflective of the emotions that he feels when considering the misfortunes that have befallen Judaea and the Jews. This constitutes a seemingly oxymoronic division between an impartial (and thus accurate) history and its “emotionally driven” author, yet it appears not to bother Josephus that both coexist within the same work.⁴⁰

In fact, not only does Josephus frame the separation of emotional writer and impartial written work as entirely uncontradictory, but he even presents his emotional reactions as evidence of his account’s veracity and trustworthiness. Sarah Christine Teets comments that “it is his personal experience, his autopsy, which generates his historiographical authority and veracity, yet that very experience has engendered tremendous suffering in the author.”⁴¹ Though Teets describes this situation as a “conundrum,”⁴² implying that Josephus’ emotional response belies the veracity of his account, I argue that the presence of emotion actually is intended serve as evidence of the reliability of his autopsy. First of all, the authorial lament has precedents in the Greco-Roman historical tradition, and thus Josephus’ use of it is not as unusual as it might seem to modern readers.⁴³ Furthermore, and more importantly, it is only because he truly experienced the events that he recounts in the BJ that Josephus’ account is to be trusted.⁴⁴ And it is also only because he truly experienced them that he reacts emotionally. It is for these reasons that, even in recognizing that he is in violation of “the rules of historical propriety,” the authorial Josephus frequently introduces his emotions into the narration.

Among the most memorable passages in which authorial emotion intervenes—and among those in which Josephus is most explicit about that intervention—is Josephus’ description of John of Gischala’s desecration of the temple:

When there was nothing left that could be looted from the people, John turned to sacrilege, and began melting down many of the offerings dedicated in the temple and many of the ancillary items needed for worship—bowls, salvers, tables. He did not even spare the wine flagons sent by Augustus and his wife. So while Roman emperors had always honored and embellished the temple, here was the Jew ripping out the gifts which even foreigners had made to it. John told his supporters that they should not be afraid to turn God’s property to use on God’s behalf, and that men fighting in defense of the temple had the right to live off its supplies. So he drained off all the sacred wine and oil which the priests kept in the inner temple court for use in burnt offerings, and distributed it to all of his crowd, who anointed themselves and drank without any frisson of unease. Here I cannot refrain from speaking at the dictate of emotion. I believe that if the Romans had been slow to move against these sinners, either the earth would have opened up and swallowed the city, or it would have been swept away by a flood, or the thunderbolts which destroyed Sodom would have struck again. The city had produced a generation far more godless than those afflicted by such catastrophes in the past: these were people whose madness involved the whole population in their ruin.⁴⁵

John’s commandeering of sanctified objects to support his power grab provokes Josephus’ fury and, Josephus contends, God’s fury as well. Our author represents it as deeply and maddeningly ironic that while foreigners up to and including the emperor Augustus had gone out of their way to glorify and respect the temple, it was desecrated at the hands of Jews claiming to defend God and Judaea. Had God not chosen Titus and the Roman army as the proper instrument with which to punish the revolutionaries, Josephus claims, John would have been hit with a catastrophe of biblical proportions.

Similar circumstances are at play as Josephus narrates the story of the woman who roasted and ate her baby, an act described as “a deed as horrible [φρικτὸν] to relate as it is incredible to hear.”⁴⁶ Derived from the verb φρίσσω—meaning to bristle or shiver—the adjective φρικτὸν conjures an image of Josephus shuddering as he recalls this terrible atrocity and shaking as he puts his pen to paper.⁴⁷

An emotive response likewise characterizes Josephus’ narration of the incident at Scythopolis. Finding himself and his fellow Scythopolitan Jews betrayed by the non-Jewish neighbors in whom they placed their trust, a man named Simon kills himself and his whole family in full view of both the Scythopolitan Greeks and the Jewish revolutionaries. Of this episode Josephus writes: “So perished a young man whose physical strength and moral courage have claim on our pity, but who suffered the consequences of putting his trust in foreigners.”⁴⁸

John of Gischala evokes rage, the pedophagic incident evokes horror, and Simon of Scythopolis evokes pity. But in all three cases, Josephus’ stated emotional reaction bolsters the historical narrative by increasing its vividness and lending legitimacy to his practice of autopsy.

5 Josephus Steps Back

In conjunction with the above, we should also examine a set of episodes in which the emotions which Josephus ascribes to himself as the author not only accompany the narration and form part of the manner in which it is presented, but also lead him to withhold his pen in some form or fashion. In these moments, the reactions of Josephus’ author-persona are so strong that he briefly steps out of his narrative voice to acknowledge and address them. In so doing, he explicitly states the effect that these emotions have on his narration.

One of the more conspicuous examples of such an emotive outburst comes as Josephus describes the civil war that raged within Jerusalem between three competing factions of Jewish revolutionaries, shortly before Titus besieged the city. Josephus’ lament reads as follows:

Oh, my poor city, what did you ever suffer from the Romans compared to this? They invaded to purge with fire the pollution among your own people. You were no longer God’s place. You could not survive once you had become a cemetery filled with your own dead, and your internecine warfare had turned the sanctuary into a mass grave. Yet even now you could recover, if only you would make atonement to the God who brought you to ruin! But the convention is that historians should suppress their own emotions, and this is not the place for personal expressions of grief. So back to the plain narrative of events, and I continue with an account of the subsequent course of this internal war.⁴⁹

Josephus is filled with grief at the suffering of Jerusalem, inflicted on the city by those who by all rights were supposed to—and, indeed, claimed to—defend it. But at the same time, our author admits that this outpouring of grief may not be becoming of someone in his position. It is true that by invoking and then retracting his grief, Josephus is utilizing a well-established rhetorical move that emphasizes the importance of the events at hand.⁵⁰ However, to recognize this solely as an emphatic marking would be a disservice to Josephus’ authorial capability, since it also interfaces with other passages in the BJ where our author discusses his emotions.⁵¹ His admission here that “the convention is that historians should suppress their own emotions” hearkens back to the proem of the BJ where, as we saw, Josephus acknowledges that “the rules of historical propriety” would call on him to hold back his grief at Jerusalem’s agony. But Josephus would be in no position to discuss this convention and claim to follow it had he not already violated in the first place it by lamenting the “internecine warfare” that plagued Jerusalem. The conventions of historiography thus may keep the authorial Josephus from an overflow of emotion, but they cannot keep him from an expression of emotion in the first place.

We see something similar in the catalogue of revolutionary movements that Josephus relates at the revolutionaries’ last stand, as a summary treatment of all of the revolutionaries that came before. Josephus interrupts the story of Masada to list in order of wrongdoing, from least to greatest, all those who had participated in this “prolific crop of criminality among the Jews”⁵²: first the sicarii,⁵³ then John of Gischala and his followers, then Simon son of Gioras and his men, then the Idumaeans, and finally the Zealots.⁵⁴ All of them, Josephus reports (including, he implies, those currently gathered on Masada) suffered well-deserved torment and punishment on the way to their graves. Nonetheless, Josephus, contends, “one could say that their sufferings were less than those they inflicted—no possible punishment could truly fit their deserts. However, this is not the time for a full and proper expression of grief for the victims of their savagery, and I shall now return to the narrative from which I digressed.”⁵⁵

Again, the sentiment Josephus feels is grief. But unlike in his lament over Jerusalem, he never expresses it directly: he pulls himself back before beginning to lament on behalf of the wrongdoers’ victims. We thus know of Josephus’ grief only because he tells us that he is not going to grieve. Furthermore, this passage differs from the previous one in that Josephus does not tell us why it is not appropriate to grieve in this moment. It could be because it is unbecoming of a historian; it could also be because he is already on a digression and does not want an expression of grief to take him further away from the narrative; or it could be because (similarly to what we will see below) distancing himself from his grief will spare the author-persona the pain of recalling and recounting his fellow Jews’ suffering. There is no way to know for sure which it is. In any case, though, it is clear that Josephus depicts himself as wanting to grieve, but he either cannot or will not.

Another episode of note occurs as Josephus recounts the destruction of the royal palace in Jerusalem. Let us consider the passage in full:

To the south of these towers, and adjoining their inner side, was the King’s palace, which beggars description—it was simply the ultimate in magnificence and every form of luxurious appointment. The entire site was enclosed by a forty-five-foot wall studded at regular intervals with ornamental towers, containing inside huge banqueting halls and guest rooms offering 100 beds. There was an indescribable variety of stone used for the interiors—stones rarely found elsewhere were here collected and applied in abundance; there were ceilings marvelous for the length of their beams and the splendor of their ornamentation; there were innumerable rooms of infinitely various design, but all richly furnished with most of their contents in silver or gold. Outside there was a whole series of interconnecting circular cloisters, each with pillars of different design, and all their open spaces laid to lawn; there were groves of various trees crossed by long walks with deep canals along their edges; throughout the garden there were artificial ponds spouting water through a profusion of decorative bronze fittings; and around the watercourses there were numerous dovecotes for tame pigeons.

But it is impossible to communicate an adequate picture of the palace in words, and in any case recollection is painful, bringing back memories of the destruction caused by the terrorists’ arson. It was not the Romans who burnt the palace. It was the work of the insurgents within the city, who in the early stages of the revolt, as we have already related, started a fire at Antonia which spread to the palace and passed from there to the top stories of the three towers.⁵⁶

After providing a lengthy, detailed, and highly descriptive portrait of the palace, Josephus proceeds to claim that the palace cannot be described. Why? He gives two reasons: First, the marvels of this great building were such that they cannot be captured in words alone. This rhetorical technique—to claim something’s indescribability while simultaneously describing it in great detail—in an effective and widely-used method of emphasis in Greek writing, with a lineage that goes all the way back to Homer.⁵⁷ (It parallels the similar rhetorical move, discussed previously, of proclaiming and then retracting an emotional reaction to an event.) Second, and more importantly in this context, to paint a picture of the palace in its fullest detail would force Josephus’ author-persona to recall memories of the palace, city, and temple as they once stood, memories that pain him by forcing him to acknowledge that these architectural treasures stand no longer. This may seem rather ironic; after all, if the palace truly defied description or was too painful to recollect, why would Josephus have spoken already of the forty-five-foot wall, the ornamental towers, the rooms, the cloisters, the gardens, the fountains, and more? Surely that is a description composed through recollection. But at the same time, it is just that: a superficial description. Nowhere is Josephus found to suggest that the earth ought to swallow those who destroyed the palace, nor does he call for atonement and invoke the restoration that he believes would follow. The description itself resembles the triumph pericope in its emotionless detail: as with the catalogue of revolutionary wrongdoings, the only indication of authorial emotion is the statement that the author will not express his emotion.

Within our examination of this passage, it will be further enlightening to highlight some specific turns of phrase that Josephus uses. Josephus calls the range of stone types used to decorate the interior of the palace ἀδιήγητος, translated by Hammond as “indescribable” and in a broader sense indicating that the thing so labeled cannot be thoroughly explored, investigated, or (as in our case) elucidated. In its present context, the indescribability of the stonework within the palace parallels Josephus’ claim later in the same passage that “it is impossible to communicate an adequate picture of the palace in words.” Though the reasoning behind the specific impossibility may differ in the two cases, the two remain strongly connected by their similarity of message and proximity to one another, and it is not a significant stretch to suggest that the emotional strain Josephus feels when speaking of the lost architectural marvel that is the palace as a whole applies equally to the lost architectural marvel that is the palace’s decorative stonework.

The idea that the ἀδιήγητος nature of the palatial stonework may take its prohibitive character from emotional as well as practical considerations is buttressed by Josephus’ other uses of the term in the BJ. Josephus concludes a moderately long description of the stasis that plagued the cities of Syria at the beginning of the war by writing that “you could see cities full of unburied corpses, bodies of infants thrown on the bodies of old men, women left with not a shred to cover their nakedness, the whole province riddled with unspeakable [ἀδιηγήτων] horrors.”⁵⁸ Hammond’s translation of ἀδιήγητος as “unspeakable” in this passage captures well the emotional connotation of the word. Like the varieties of stone in the royal palace, the horrors visited upon the Syrians cannot be enumerated and elucidated in their entirety. But here, that impossibility derives specifically from the depths of grief and despair into which one would have to sink in order to recall and recount them.

The same applies to the suffering of the people of Jerusalem as they endured starvation during the siege: “Meanwhile in the city the victims of famine were dropping in their thousands, and there was suffering beyond description [ἀδιήγητα].”⁵⁹ Though Josephus does proceed to provide more than a little detail on the city in a state of famine, his use of ἀδιήγητος again captures the idea that these privations are beyond reckoning in a numerical sense and, even more so, in an emotional sense.

These examples indicate that Josephus on not infrequent occasion punctuates a detailed passage with a statement or indication that he will not introduce his emotions directly into this narrative moment, but that he is nonetheless emotionally moved by what he has recalled and written. This narrative tactic allows Josephus to display his emotional response to the thing described—legitimizing his history by reinforcing that it is grounded in autopsy— while simultaneously maintaining a historiographical convention of impartiality and thereby presenting his author-persona as standing at some distance from the text. As we shall see, this emotional standing apart prefigures the unemotionality of the triumph pericope.⁶⁰

6 The Unemotional Triumph—Reprise

Having completed our lengthy excursus on the emotions of Josephus’ author-persona, we now return to the matter with which we began this article: the report of the Flavian triumph. This account, as we have seen, is a lot of things: it is lengthy, it is detailed, it is descriptive. In this it is reminiscent of many of the other passages we have encountered on our tour through Josephus’ authorial emotions, among them the architectural and ornamental marvels of the royal palace, the catalogue of Jewish revolutionary groups, and the horrors of civil war in Syria and starvation in Jerusalem. But what sets the triumph pericope aside from these other episodes is that, when describing the triumph, Josephus is silent on the topic of his emotions. Indeed, the very fact that Josephus has demonstrated a full complement of rhetorical techniques for expressing emotions strongly suggests that the unemotionality of the triumph passage is both deliberate and significant.

In this context it is important to observe that emotions are not politically neutral. Mirguet argues that emotional expressions “convey grievances but can also be a form of protest and resistance under oppression.”⁶¹ The conveyance of grief, horror, etc. thus constitutes a subtle rebellion against the force(s) which caused that grief. In all of the cases under investigation in this article—including the passage of the proem in which he indicates his intention to lament—Josephus is careful to configure the cause of grief not as the Romans but as Jewish wrongdoers, shared enemies of both Josephus (and by extension all right-thinking Jews) and the Romans. In this sense, Josephus’ emotional resistance is not directed against Roman power. It is telling, then, that in the moment of the triumph—a moment in which Rome is the only possible cause of Jewish trauma—the explicit expression of emotion is missing.

It is interesting to note, though, that the category of emotion is not entirely absent from the triumph pericope. Rather, emotion emerges at one key moment: the ritual strangling of Simon son of Gioras. Josephus writes that the news that Simon had been executed was met with “universal applause.”⁶² These exclamations of joy (the Greek εὐφήμησαν more suggests celebratory shouts than the clapping of hands) are our only direct indication in the text that the triumph was indeed a jubilant occasion and not the magnificent but wordless procession that Josephus’ description might otherwise intimate. Importantly, though, these emotions are not those of the authorial Josephus, but rather those of the crowd (potentially including Josephus the character, to the extent that he is part of that crowd). It is in this moment, and this moment alone, that Josephus allows that the triumph was indeed a day of celebration and exultation. Why this moment? Because Simon was an enemy of both the Romans and Josephus. He is one of the Jewish wrongdoers who are subjects of Josephus’ emotional resistance throughout the BJ. Consequently, even as Josephus silently mourns the loss of the temple and the destruction of Jerusalem, he can celebrate that Simon has received his due punishment. The triumph is supposed to be experienced positively, and in this moment and this moment alone, Josephus experiences it as such. So it is here that Josephus allows those experiencing the triumph, including himself, to express joy and exultation.

The execution of Simon stands in stark contrast to the parade of tableaux. We previously quoted Mary Beard, who, noting the close resemblance that Josephus asserts between the depictions in the tableaux and the events as they actually happened, rhetorically asks, “With mimesis like this, who needs reality?”⁶³ Josephus’ description of the tableaux—“the consummate artistry of these reproductions portrayed the events to those who did not witness them as vividly as if they had been there in person”⁶⁴—places the triumphal procession’s audience right in the heart of the action; it permits them to experience the war nearly firsthand.⁶⁵ Unlike “those who did not witness,” however, Josephus was at the battles himself; he personally saw the horrors and tragedies that the tableaux purport to depict. He did experience the war firsthand. But witnessing these horrors has not simply left him with knowledge of the events; it has also left him—and the audience he brought with him through Books 1-6—with emotional scars. These diagrams, in their (supposedly) accurate representations, must have been deeply triggering. Thanks, then, to these excellent mimeseis, Josephus finds himself in a position in which he must distance himself from reality, lest his sorrow overwhelm him and prevent him from continuing the narrative, or, worse yet, cause him to inject grief into what is supposed to be a celebratory occasion.

This observation does, however, prompt an important question: Why does it only happen here? In other words, if the events of the Jewish War were so traumatic for Josephus, why does his author-persona only distance himself from the triumph pericope, and not from the entire narrative? The answer, I argue, lies in the unique character of the event of the triumph. Warfare, after all, is supposed to be traumatic. Josephus is thus free to grieve in discussions of warfare, and such expressions of grief pass muster with the Flavians. Indeed, it is in both Josephus’ and the Flavians’ interests that he attest to the trauma that the Zealots and other Jewish wrongdoers inflicted on the innocent Jewish majority, and these expressions of grief serve this purpose quite effectively. In a triumphal procession, though, there is not supposed to be any trauma (save, perhaps, for that experienced by the captives marching in chains). Here, a comparison to the revulsion expressed at Caesar’s African triumph in 46 BCE may be enlightening. Appian writes: “In spite of their fear, the people lamented their own disasters, especially when they saw Lucius Scipio, the commander in chief, stabbing himself in the chest and throwing himself into the sea, and Petreius taking his own life at dinner, and Cato tearing himself apart like a wild animal.”⁶⁶ As these images were displayed, the Roman people sympathized with the deceased Romans so depicted, and the celebratory effect of the triumph was neutered. In the case of Vespasian and Titus’ triumph, the general Roman populace would have had no reason to feel sympathy for fallen Jews; even the Jews of Rome seem not to have been particularly aligned with the Judaean rebels. But Josephus himself, and the readership that he has aligned to his own cause, may be compared to the Romans mourning the deaths of Scipio and Cato. And in the same way that these laments dampened the otherwise celebratory nature of Caesar’s triumphs, Josephus knew full well that to lament on the occasion of the Flavian triumph would be unacceptably rebellious against Flavian power.⁶⁷

There is one more factor worth discussing here, one that brings the triumph into closer contact with the passages discussed previously where emotions are made explicit. That factor is the theme of indescribability. Although our key word ἀδιήγητος is not to be found in the triumph pericope, Josephus insinuates the same significance by writing of the “wealth of spectacle” on display in the triumph, and its “magnificence,” that “it is impossible to give an adequate description.”⁶⁸ As in many of our prior cases, the surface meaning of this impossibility is that the wealth and magnificence are so vast as to defy enumeration in words; only the visual can do them justice.⁶⁹ But once again, a second implication bubbles just beneath the surface: it is impossible for Josephus in particular to describe the splendor of the spectacle because of the knowledge that all this opulence and luxury results from the violence inflicted upon his people and his city by their Roman conquerors.

As we have previously noted, this trope of indescribability is well-used in ancient literature. Ash contends that the old cliché has new meaning in this context: because of his specific standing as a member of the community whose defeat is being celebrated—and because “the very men who engineered that defeat” are among his primary audience—Josephus’ inability to find the right words is not merely a rhetorical ploy.⁷⁰ Ash is very much correct to point out the “the very men who engineered [Judaea’s] defeat” are among Josephus’ audience in the BJ. The words that would accurately capture the emotions of Josephus’ author-persona would have represented an unacceptable expression of emotional resistance against the Flavians, who expected the triumph to be represented as a day of universal celebration. Words that would have gratified the Flavians, meanwhile, would have stood at quite some remove from the emotions that Josephus wished to model for the Jewish element of his readership, whom he wished to persuade to accept Flavian rule. Josephus finds himself stuck in the middle. By stepping back, he commits neither faux pas.

What this suggests is that the scholarly reading by which Goodman characterizes the triumph pericope as having a “consistently Roman viewpoint” is not necessarily wrong. Precisely by not making his own feelings explicit and thus compelling his readership to read between the lines, Josephus invites his readers to bring their own presuppositions to bear on the pericope. For those Jewish and Jewish-sympathetic members of his audience who have accompanied Josephus through his outpourings of grief in the first six books, reading between the lines means applying those laments to the present scene as well.⁷¹ But a Roman readership expects the narrative of the triumph to be a moment of celebration, and Josephus’ account leaves room for this attitude too. Thus, when scholars like Goodman and Rajak characterize the triumph as thoroughly pro-Roman, they are not misreading the pericope; rather, they are reading it precisely as Josephus intended his Roman audience to.

However, the pro-Roman reading is not the only intended reading, and it is in this light that I contend that we must understand the absence of emotion in the triumph pericope as a demonstration of Josephus’ ‘quiet disquiet’: it constitutes an intentional withdrawal on the part of Josephus’ author-persona that spares him from an otherwise inescapable conundrum. Stuck with an impossible choice between false joy and forbidden lament, Josephus’ author-persona withdrew himself and his emotions from the narrative. What he left behind is a dry and detailed accounting that presents a skeleton of the event, lacking the vivacity that characterizes so much of his writing.

It is easy to imagine Josephus having written at the conclusion of the triumph episode that “this is not the time for a full and proper expression of grief,” as he says of the victims of the Jewish revolutionaries, or even that “in any case recollection is painful” like he writes when describing the destruction of the royal palace. But to do so would be to betray grief, pain, and sorrow at a moment when all loyal subjects of the Flavians, including Josephus himself, are expected to celebrate. So as we imagine him writing in his first draft that his recollection of the event pains him, we must further imagine him crossing it out, creating the superficially emotionless triumph pericope that we have today.

7 Conclusion

Throughout the Jewish War, the authorial Josephus does not hesitate to present his emotions to the reader. He is frank in the proem that his emotions will form part of the narration, arguing that it is an appropriate rhetorical strategy for this text even as it contravenes established historical practice. He proceeds to follow through on precisely what he has described, “speaking at the dictate of emotion”⁷² on many occasions which have been examined in this article and on many more which have not. Among those occasions are a small but sizeable number in which Josephus explicitly states that he will not express his emotional response to the events at hand. This clever rhetorical move allows Josephus to claim to follow historiographical custom by producing a narrative of events that is filled with description but not laden with lamentation, while at the same time unmistakably communicating his emotions to the reader.

These episodes of authorial emotionality provide a productive lens through which to refract the triumph pericope at BJ 7.123-57. The passage has been widely recognized as atypically unemotional, and some scholars have consequently contended that this evinces pro-Roman bias or even treason against his fellow Jews. But a comparison of this passage to others in which Josephus explicitly denies that he will allow his emotions to influence his writing reveals the ‘quiet disquiet’ underlying the pericope. Josephus (as he presents himself) was emotionally pained by the event of the triumph and is emotionally pained by its recollection. But even to allude to his grief at this moment—to say nothing of an explicit lament—would contravene the expectations of his Flavian patrons and of the Roman readers in his audience, who required that the triumph be recalled as a day of celebration and exultation. Indeed, such emotional expressions could easily be read as subversive against Flavian authority, and thus they would be deemed entirely unacceptable. In consequence, Josephus distances himself from his own experience of the event, producing for his readers a simple—albeit detailed—list of the events of the day.

In the proem of the BJ, immediately after the passage on his emotions, Josephus makes an attempt to legitimize his volume as the authoritative history of the war by contending that the best historians are those who viewed firsthand the events chronicled in their accounts.⁷³ Honora Howell Chapman comments with regard to this brief passage that Josephus “aligns himself with the ancient historians who wrote the history of their own times, and he observes that their presence at the events as they occurred made their narratives ‘vivid’ (ἐναργῆ).”⁷⁴ For much of his text, Josephus is up to this self-imposed challenge; his accounts of many of the events of the war are undeniably ἐναργῆ. But the triumph pericope is hardly “vivid”; it may be better described as one-dimensional. It is surely not ἐναργῆ.

But if, as Josephus contends, autopsy leads to ἐνάργεια, then it logically follows that a passage lacking in ἐνάργεια is not the result of autopsy. This is not to suggest that Josephus must have been physically absent from the triumph; after all, he provides plenty of vivid narrations of events that took place within the walls of Jerusalem while he was on the outside with the besieging Roman army, and it is well within the custom of ancient history to count as autopsy descriptions composed from third-person eyewitness accounts. Rather, it is in an emotional sense that Josephus has withdrawn the auto- from autopsy. By removing his full self from the occasion, Josephus’ author-persona presents a palatable version of events while nonetheless subtly suggesting the pain that would have accompanied recollecting and recounting the triumph in all its vibrant but dispiriting richness.

Notes

1. See, e.g., Beard, “Triumph of Flavius Josephus.” See also the considerable scholarship regarding the reliefs of this triumphal procession on the Arch of Titus, most recently Fine, ed., Arch of Titus.⬑

2. On this scholarship, see n. 13, below.⬑

3. See Damon, “Emotions,” 181-7; Teets, “Trauma of Autopsy,” 267; Marincola, “Pity and Fear,” 285-315.⬑

4. On the emotions of characters in ancient histories, see Damon, “Emotions,” 178-81; for connections between the emotions of the characters and the emotions aroused in the audience, see Levene, “Pity, Fear,” 128-49. On the historian’s construction of direct discourse, see the famous comment at Thucydides 1.12.1-5. On the influence of Thucydides and other Greek historians on Josephus, see Sterling, Historiography and Self-Definition, 226-310 as well as the substantial bibliography cited at Swoboda, “Tragic Elements,” 259 n. 14.⬑

5. See Damon, “Emotions,” 188-92. Damon refers specifically to Josephus on 188.⬑

6. On the linguistic connections between emotions and pain/suffering in the BJ, see Mason, “When Suffering Meets Passion,” 204-5.⬑

7. Mirguet, “Emotional Responses”; Mirguet, Early History of Compassion; Mirguet, “Josephus’s Lamentations”; Mermelstein, Power and Emotion.⬑

8. Mermelstein, Power and Emotion, 23-61.⬑

9. Mirguet, “Josephus’s Lamentations,” 527.⬑

10. Weitzman, “Warring against Terror,” 235-6.⬑

11. E.g., BJ 4.42-5; 5.121-3.⬑

12. Contrast Steve Mason’s analysis of the triumph, which combines the author-persona and character-persona into a single Josephus figure. This move keeps the emphasis of the triumph pericope off of Josephus and on the differences between the war itself as depicted in the triumph and as described elsewhere in the BJ (as is the focus of Mason’s argument), but it also leads Mason to gloss over the differences between Josephus’ (non)depiction of his own reactions to the triumph and his vivid depictions of his reactions to other events. Mason, “Josephus’ Portrait,” 150.⬑

13. Contrast Mirguet, “Josephus’ Lamentations.” Mirguet reads the lamentations of Josephus’ author-persona together with those of the characters in the BJ (including Josephus qua character) in order to build out a description of the embodied, emotional, and gendered significances of lamentation in this text.⬑

14. On Josephus’ author-character, see van Henten, “Josephus as Narrator,” 121-50.⬑

15. Summary of BJ 7.123-57; quotation from 7.157, trans. Martin Hammond. All BJ quotations are from the Hammond translation unless otherwise indicated.⬑

16. Ash, “Fractured Vision,” 144.⬑

17. Chapman, “Spectacle,” 310; Frilingos, “More Than Meets the Eye,” 59. Contrast Mason, who takes the absence of emotion as typical of Josephus’ narrative style—though he himself admits that it is typical of Books 1-3 but not 4-6. Mason, “Josephus’ Portrait,” 152. As the differentiator between Books 1-3 and 4-6 in terms of emotionality is the presence of traumatic events in the latter books, we should expect the triumph narrative to match the style of 4-6. Consequently, we should not be so hasty to dismiss the unemotionality of the triumph pericope. On the role of lamentation in the BJ, see Cohen, “Josephus, Jeremiah, and Polybius,” 366-8; Mirguet, “Josephus’s Lamentations.” On the biblical roots of Josephan lamentation, see Teets, “Trauma of Autopsy,” 269-73.⬑

18. On the question of whether or not Josephus’ evocative description of the spectacle of the triumph is accurate—especially as compared to the reliefs on the Arch of Titus—see Rocca, “Josephus and the Arch of Titus.”⬑

19. Vit. 422-3.⬑

20. Rajak, Josephus, 217; Ash, “Fractured Vision,” 144; Chapman, “Spectacle,” 310.⬑

21. On palatability to the authorities in Josephus’ writing, see Barclay, “Empire Writes Back,” 320-1.⬑

22. Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem, 452.⬑

23. Rajak, Josephus, 218-9.⬑

24. Rajak, Josephus, 219.⬑

25. The central role that the triumph plays in his audience’s memory of the war also rules out the possibility that Josephus could have excluded the triumph entirely from his account.⬑

26. See Mason, “Josephus’ Portrait,” 171; Frilingos, “More Than Meets the Eye,” 61-2.⬑

27. Ash, “Fractured Vision,” 150.⬑

28. On the mechanisms of reading between the lines in Greek and Roman literature, see Mason, “Figured Speech,” 249-51.⬑

29. Ash, “Fractured Vision,” 154.⬑

30. Schwartz, “Composition and Publication,” 373-86.⬑

31. For a brief overview of such scholarship, see Frilingos, “More Than Meets the Eye,” 55.⬑

32. Mason, “Josephus’ Portrait,” 125-75.⬑

33. BJ 7.138.⬑

34. Frilingos, “More Than Meets the Eye,” 52.⬑

35. Beard, “Triumph,” 551. Italics original.⬑

36. BJ 7.148-9.⬑

37. Frilingos, “More Than Meets the Eye,” 59.⬑

38. BJ 7.136.⬑

39. BJ 1.9-12.⬑

40. Ash, “Fractured Vision,” 149. On ancient historians’ reflexive awareness of the dangers inherent in the authorial expression of emotion, see Damon, “Emotions,” 191-2.⬑

41. Teets, “Trauma of Autopsy,” 266-7.⬑

42. Teets, “Trauma of Autopsy,” 266.⬑

43. Consider, for instance, Polybius’ and Diodorus Siculus’ laments for the destruction of Corinth. Polybius 38.16; Diodorus 32.26. See Marincola, Authority and Tradition, 168-9. For a further analysis of connections between Polybius’ and Josephus’ laments, see Mirguet, “Josephus’ Lamentations,” 530-3.⬑

44. Cynthia Damon suggests that the presence of authorial emotion could also be seen as an indicator of the author’s intellect, although this argument refers primarily to the use of emotional discourse to pass judgment on the characters in the history. Damon, “Emotions,” 191.⬑

45. BJ 5.562-6. Italics mine.⬑

46. BJ 6.200.⬑

47. On the emotional implications of this particular episode, see the discussion at Mirguet, Early History of Compassion, 145-9.⬑

48. BJ 2.476.⬑

49. BJ 5.19-20. Italics mine.⬑

50. Marincola, Authority and Tradition, 168-9. Marincola’s primary concern in this passage is to argue that the invocation-retraction technique demonstrates the impartiality of the historian. While the claim of impartiality may be the basis for the historical convention that generally forbids emotive expressions, I argue that this move’s primary purpose is precisely to mark an event as emotionally charged within a genre that generally does not accommodate such markings.⬑

51. For a brief discussion contextualizing the restraint of authorial emotion in Josephus within his Roman context, see Mirguet, “Josephus’s Lamentations,” 534-6.⬑

52. BJ 7.259.⬑

53. On the identity of the sicarii and Josephus’ condemnation of this group, see Brighton, Sicarii, especially 96-105.⬑

54. BJ 7.262-70.⬑

55. BJ 7.273-4. Italics mine.⬑

56. BJ 5.176-83. Italics mine.⬑

57. Ash, “Fractured Vision,” 151-2.⬑

58. BJ 2.465.⬑

59. BJ 6.193.⬑

60. Technically, the catalogue of revolutionary wrongdoings cannot be said to “prefigure” the triumph scene because it comes later in the narrative. Nonetheless, it is emblematic of a pattern that informs the reading of the triumph pericope.⬑

61. Mirguet, “Josephus’ Lamentations,” 544; see also the discussion at 544-8.⬑

62. BJ 7.155. See also Chapman, “Spectacle,” 311.⬑

63. Beard, “Triumph,” 551.⬑

64. BJ 7.146.⬑

65. This is the case despite the fact that, as Mason has demonstrated, the images that Josephus describes in the tableaux do not match the events of the war as he has narrated them. Even as (per Mason) Josephus subtly repudiates the Flavian version of events, he nonetheless represents the triumphal procession as an immersive experience for those witnessing it, including his author-persona. Mason, “Josephus’ Portrait,” 163-6.⬑

66. Appian, Civil Wars 2.420. I have adapted this translation slightly from McGing (LCL).⬑

67. This point may potentially be compared profitably with Mirguet, “Josephus’s Lamentations,” 548-50, where Mirguet discusses several episodes in the BJ in which characters that might be expected to lament are explicitly described as not having lamented. The absence of lamentation in these moments, Mirguet argues, strips these characters of their dignity and is politically neutering. The absence of a lamentation in the triumph pericope could perhaps be similarly read as an act of political passivity on the part of Josephus’ author-persona. See also the subsequent discussion at Mirguet, “Josephus’ Lamentations,” 550-4, in which she contrasts these non-lamentations with Josephus’ statement of intention to lament in the proem.⬑

68. BJ 7.132.⬑

69. The Greek word here rendered as “impossible” (ἀμήχανον) is not the same as the one used in the description of the palace at 5.182 (there it was οὔθ … δυνατὸν). However, the terms are synonymous, and the fact that both phrases refer to the ἄξιος nature of the description that cannot be produced does suggest a connection between the two passages in which they are embedded.⬑

70. Ash, “Fractured Vision,” 152.⬑

71. On Josephus and his audience, see Mason, “Audience and Meaning,” 70-100.⬑

72. BJ 5.556.⬑

73. BJ 1.13-14. See also BJ 1.6.⬑

74. Chapman, “Spectacle,” 291.⬑

Bibliography