Discussions of ongoing research with colleagues are crucial for sharpening one’s critical mind.

I benefited many times from gracious comments by Adela Yarbro Collins on various draft studies and am very happy to ex­press my gratitude with a contribution on Josephus in her honor.

Jose­phus’s Jewish Antiquities 15-17 is the main source about women at Herod the Great’s court. Josephus’s information about these women is much more elaborate in comparison to what we find in The Jewish War. The sections about the women at Herod’s court in the Antiquities are dramatic. Togeth­er, they offer an ongoing story about love, sex, adultery, and, more than any thing else, dirty competition between several women factions. Mari- amme and her mother Alexandra formed the core of one of those factions, and Herod’s sister Salome and his mother Cyprus the backbone of another, but there must have been several other women factions at the court. One could easily devote a monograph to the topic of the women at Herod’s court, so I have to be selective in this contribution.^[455] I will limit myself here to the more elaborate source of the Antiquities and will discuss three epi­sodes in the narrative in which the women play an important role (Ant. 15.23-31, 15.57-87 and 15.183-231). In the main part of the paper, I will take a narratological perspective by focusing on how Josephus as narrator depicts these women.^[456] I will try to bring the main narrative threads about the women into the limelight. Only after having done that is it possible to address the question about the events themselves, because it is quite com­plicated to extrapolate from Josephus information about these women that is historically plausible. I will deal with this difficult question in the con- elusion at the end of my contribution. I will start my analysis of the narra­tive with the episode about the portraits of Mariamme and her brother Aristoboulus, which were sent to Mark Antony. Herod’s mother-in-law Alexandra plays a major role in this episode.

A.

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