2004
Volume 58, Issue 2
  • ISSN: 0165-8204
  • E-ISSN: 2667-1573

Abstract

Abstract

The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (37-95 CE or slightly later) is one of the most negative ancient sources about Cleopatra, which made one of her biographers, Grant (2001: 240), state that he is ‘savagely biased against the queen’. Josephus’s reports in his later works go beyond the usual Roman contempt for Cleopatra’s bad influence on Mark Antony, her sexual immorality, her greed and her perverted hunger for power. In both his and his , written after a stay of several decades in Rome, Josephus portrays Cleopatra as a killer queen and in even as the enemy of the Roman people. This contribution focuses on Josephus’s negative portrayal in the but I also argue that there is evidence for a more positive portrait of the queen in Josephus’s earlier work and some of the passages in the .

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