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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 Jewish antiquities and his Against Apion, written after a stay of several decades in Rome, Josephus portrays Cleopatra as a killer queen and in Apion even as the enemy of the Roman people. This contribution focuses on Josephus’s negative portrayal in the Jewish antiquities but I also argue that there is evidence for a more positive portrait of the queen in Josephus’s earlier work The Jewish war and some of the passages in the Antiquities.