life must be hypothetically reconstructed, and no reconstruction has yet won widespread acceptance. By contrast, we know what he wrote in defense of Judaism. (b) He seems deliberately to play up his own duplicity and deviousness, for rhetorical effect. (c) Like any political figure, especially an aristocrat involved in a war, not least in the Middle East, Josephus must have had all sorts of genuinely divided loyalties; we cannot assume that he always had a clear direction of any sort. And (d) even