In 2003, Mary Beard commented that if Josephus' works were to be newly discovered today, their significance would be such that we would regard them as texts to die for. But the fact is that although these works have been known to us for centuries they have all but been excluded from the classical canon. The aim of this volume is to read Josephus, and to read Josephus as literature. All its five articles are concerned with cultural identity and with showing that how we read Josephus to a great extent depends from which literary and cultural perspective(s) we read it. They are united in their foregrounding of the literary elements of Josephus' writing (style, rhetoric, image and metaphor) and in their concern to locate Josephus in a literary and cultural context that embraces both the Jewish and the Hellenistic and reaches as far as Rome. For the scholar interested in post-colonial writing, in cultural identity, in the rhetoric of self-fashioning, Josephus is a remarkable gift.

For details of contents go to the special numbers page.