Was Josephus a Roman historian? Until the late 1990s (e.g., Marincola 1997), he rarely appeared in surveys of Roman writers, or Greek ones for that matter. He had the consolation prize, to be sure, of occupying the category 'ancient Jewish historian' alone by acclamation. Some recent studies tend to support the traditional view by finding in Josephus an essentially provincial historian, tainted by the miasma shared by his compatriots after the Great Revolt, possibly embarrassed about his Greek speech, anyway on the outer social margins of the world capital: "in all likelihood extremely lonely and extremely isolated in Rome-at least from the social-political elite" (Cotton and Eck 2005, 52; cf. Price 2005). He writes from a profoundly Judean ethos, scholars have argued, mainly concerning himself with the post-70 concerns of other Judeans throughout the Mediterranean (Rajak 2005). He was thus in the world capital but not of it, there by necessity but spending Saturday nights at home with the doors locked. Now every scholar would concede that at least in certain respects Josephus was a Roman historian. He was a Roman citizen. He lived most of his adult life in Rome. And he wrote all of his known works-thirty volumes survive intact-there (Life 422-429). From this perspective, he was not merely a Roman historian but the most prolific first-century Roman author whose work has endured. The mere fact that he was personally known to the imperial father and son would have meant that he had a better social position than the vast majority of Romans.In this connection, Josephus claims something that would have been hazardous to lie about: that Titus, after he had dispatched 700 Judean captives from Alexandria to Rome for display in the triumph (War 7.118), invited Josephus to travel as his own shipmate (Life 422). Once we remember that the ship in question was not a modern floating hotel, with