Michael Stanislawski's description of Flavius Josephus's autobiography captures the principal thesis of this elegant reflection on the use of autobiography as a historical source: “I see the Vita not as an ‘autobiography of a very special kind’ but precisely the opposite: as an exemplar of a genre (or series of connected genres) in which an author's life-story is crafted by a highly partial, both conscious and unconscious, selection of which episodes of his or her life to retell, refracted through an ever-changing sense of selfhood” (23). Not one of the seven samples ranks highly in terms of historical accuracy or absence of bias. But as the subtitle conveys, the real value of these autobiographies lies in their ability to reflect the self-fashioning of a literary identity, the tensions of the times (in Josephus's case, the loyal Jew and the virtuous Roman), and the individual's quest for definition in relation to the larger society.