[...]it is now widely agreed that gender in antiquity was viewed, at least from the perspective of the surviving male elite literary sources (an important qualification indeed!), through a single-gender, and not surprisingly androcentric, conceptual framework.6 Virginia Burras 's recent assessment of the current state of scholarship is worth noting in this regard: [...]I have argued that Josephus's invective against John and his rebel cohort should be read within a wider Roman discourse on trasgressive gender, both the tendency in political invective to cast tyrants as effeminate objects of anal penetration, as well as the gendered power structures integral to Roman imperial ideology.