The Roman world of the first century ce was a world of tremendous cultural complexity. Rome's empire was an intricate mosaic of languages, religious practices, customs, and ethnic identities, bound together in a common political structure and, particularly among provincial elites, by common intellectual and cultural trajectories, which were always, nonetheless, inflected and transformed by manifestations of localism. Amid all this diversity, the subject peoples of the Roman Empire, whether western or eastern, came to be subjected to ethnographic curiosity, sometimes by Roman authors and sometimes by Greek scholars whose culture was prized and promoted by Roman power. However, not all of the ‘barbarian’ subjects of empire were content passively to be scrutinized. Some of them tried to tell their own, and their own people's, stories in their own words, in Greek-language texts addressed to the wider world, and to make a place for their subaltern perspectives in the dominant scholarly and literary culture of the age. In other words, some of them wrote back.

In the prologue to the Jewish War, Josephus, justifying his decision to write a contemporary history, takes a moment to scorn those who presume to write histories of the remote past (BJ 1.13–14):

In many ways, the Life of Josephus is not an edifying or enjoyable read. It has been accused by some of extreme sloppiness, both of literary composition and of factual accuracy and consistency, and at times even of outright mendacity. It raises questions of taste, too. In the modern world, extremes of self-praise are often seen as crass, at least by those of us who are not real estate moguls who become presidents. While it is true that standards differed in Graeco-Roman antiquity, a cultural context in which trumpeting one's own virtues was not taboo, the Life seems to go beyond contemporary standards, containing tendencies of autopanegyric which would make even Cicero blush. These grounds for distaste, together with the Life's brevity and conventional status as a decidedly minor work, have meant that it has received rather less scholarly attention than the other works of Josephus. Nonetheless, much of the scholarship which it has inspired has been interesting. That research has certainly made it clear that this text, for all its faults and lapses, speaks to far more than just the inflated self-image of one rather conceited man.

The Against Apion is not like the other works of Josephus. Most obviously, it is the only work which is not predominantly narrative. Although many of its themes and preoccupations are historical in nature, it takes the form of a rhetorical treatise, and its central mode is not narrative but argumentation. Indeed, it is argumentative in every sense of the word, by far the most outspoken and intemperate of all the author's extant writings. It was written, as Josephus tells us, in response to hostile commentary about Jews and Judaism which he had encountered in the works of some Gentile (in most cases Greek) writers (C.Ap 1.2, inter alia). Because of the prestige which Greek scholarship enjoyed in the Roman Empire, hostile presentations of Judaism by Greek authors could cause significant issues in terms of broader attitudes towards Judaism at this time, both in Rome itself and throughout the empire. Thus Josephus aims to set the record straight, to combat misinformation about his people which was circulating in influential Greek works, and to present an insider's view of Judaism to a wider audience, in the hope that such a view would replace the often poorly informed notions which prevailed in contemporary Greek scholarship.

If the literary texts which survive from the Roman era are anything to go by, Josephus seems to have been little known among non-Jewish and non-Christian authors in antiquity. There is no clear indication that his younger contemporary Tacitus knew his works. The latter's account of the Jewish Revolt is somewhat confused. For instance, it mixes up the names of Simon bar Gioras and John of Gischala, an error which is unlikely to have been made by someone who had carefully read the Jewish War. Similarly, his account of the exodus draws not from the Antiquities or the Against Apion, but appears to have been informed by precisely the kind of Judeophobic Greek scholarship which Josephus set out to refute in the latter work. Either Tacitus had not read Josephus’ discussions of Moses and the exodus, or he was unpersuaded by them. The same seems true of Josephus’ other great prose contemporary, Pliny the Elder. Josephus does not feature in the massive bibliography which comprises the opening of the Natural History and, although Pliny mentions two subjects of importance to Josephus, Masada and the Essenes, there is no indication that the Jewish War was the source of his information. In terms of later ‘pagan’ classical authors, the record is similarly exiguous. Both Suetonius and Dio mention Josephus, but not as a source or an author: they refer to him as a noble Jewish prisoner who prophesied Vespasian's accession. The philosopher Porphyry mentions the Essenes and cites Josephus as his source, but other than this the Josephan corpus leaves no trace in the later non-Christian classical tradition.