{"product_id":"9780674053373","title":"Tragedy, Authority, And Trickery","description":"\u003cbr\u003eTo prove his sons’ treachery, Herod embellished a letter. To certify his history of Vespasian’s Judaean campaign, Josephus marshaled epistolary testimony. To alleviate a domestic problem, the Israelite king David sent a missive with a man it marks for death. Arguing for the importance of the first-century historian Josephus to the study of classical and Hellenistic literature, \u003ci\u003eTragedy, Authority, and Trickery\u003c\/i\u003e investigates letters in Josephus’ texts. The author breaks new ground by analyzing classical, Hellenistic, and Jewish texts’ use of letters, comparing those texts to Josephus’ narratives, a virtual archive containing hundreds of letters. An external voice similar to speeches, embedded letters raise questions of authority, drive and color dramatic scenes, and function at textual and meta-textual levels to deceive their readers. Josephus, contextualized in a complex intellectual and cultural milieu, sustains and develops epistolarity in important ways that will be of interest to classicists, historians, theologians, and comparatists.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"The Center for Hellenic Studies","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47048512241904,"sku":"9780674053373","price":24.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780674053373_p0.jpg?v=1763603515","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780674053373","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}