O Judeu e a Egípcia : o retrato de Cleópatra em Flávio Josefo

Abstract

Although Cleopatra is not a main character in Josephus' historiography, there are several references to her in it. She is the one Flavius Josephus names the Egyptian. It is in Josephus work that we can find many of the necessary information to reconstruct the last descendant of the history of the Ptolemies from five aspects: 1. Cleopatra and Mark Antony; 2. Cleopatra and Herod, the Great; 3. Cleopatra, Herod and Alexandra; 4. Cleopatra and the offers; 5. Josephus, Cleopatra and Actium. However, simultaneously, we detect a rhetorical use of themes that figure the Queens’s portrait in a negative way, in the image of an enemy of the Jews and so identifying her with Greco-Roman topics of undesirable subjects, such as: femina política, powerful, ambitious, bad hostess, luxurious, treacherous, aphrodisiac, sorceress, unfearful to God, mad, cruel, lying and murderess