<p>To 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, <i>Tragedy, Authority, and Trickery</i> 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.</p>