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Here You Have An Incredibly Ambitious, Accomplished Woman Who Comes Up Against Some Of The Same Problems That Women In Power Come Up Against Today. Cleopatra Plays An Oddly Pivotal Role In World History As Well; In Her Lifetime, Alexandria Is The Center Of The Universe, Rome Is Still A Backwater.

-Stacy Schiff

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Here You Have An

Stacy Schiff

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Here You Have An Incredibly Ambitious, Accomplished Woman Who Comes Up Against Some Of The Same Problems That Women In Power Come Up Against Today. Cleopatra Plays An Oddly Pivotal Role In World History As Well; In Her Lifetime, Alexandria Is The Center Of The Universe, Rome Is Still A Backwater.

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For A Few Thousand Years, Women Had No History. Marriage Was Our Calling, And Meekness Our Virtue. Over The Last Century, In Stuttering Succession, We Have Gained A Voice, A Vote, A Room, A Playing Field Of Our Own. Decorously Or Defiantly, We Now Approach What Surely Qualifies As The Final Frontier.

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Here You Have An Incredibly Ambitious, Accomplished Woman Who Comes Up Against Some Of The Same Problems That Women In Power Come Up Against Today. Cleopatra Plays An Oddly Pivotal Role In World History As Well; In Her Lifetime, Alexandria Is The Center Of The Universe, Rome Is Still A Backwater.

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The Vanity Extended Most Of All To His Library, Arguably The Real Love Of Cicero's Life. It Is Difficult To Name Anything In Which He Took More Pleasure, Aside Possibly Evasion Of The Sumptuary Laws. Cicero Liked To Believe Himself Wealthy. He Prided Himself On His Books. He Needed No Further Reason To Dislike Cleopatra: Intelligent Women Who Had Better Libraries Than He Did Offended Him On Three Counts.

No One In The Modern World Controls The Wealth Or Territory That Cleopatra Did.

We Don't Know How Cleopatra Spent Her Days, But We Do Know How Other Hellenistic Monarchs Spent Their Days. There Has Been A Great Amount Of Scholarship In The Last 30 Years About Education In The Hellenistic World And Women In The Hellenistic World. We Now Know How An Upper-class Woman Was Educated In Her Day.

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Strangely Enough, Politics May Just Be The One Realm In Which Having Kids Imposes No Penalty On Women. Kids Are Practically A Necessity. For Scientists, Or Supreme Court Justices, Or Chief Executives, Or The Woman Who Wants To Learn To Fly F-l8s Off An Aircraft Carrier, It Works Differently.

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I Checked To See If There’d Been A Really Good Book Published In The Last Few Decades. Then I Started With What Cleopatra Would Have Read, Asking Myself, “what Can We Know About Her Education?” It Turns Out To Be A Very Great Deal, And Bizarrely, No One Had Written About That Before.

As Always, An Educated Woman Was A Dangerous Woman.

Cleopatra Stood At One Of The Most Dangerous Intersections In History; That Of Women And Power. Clever Women, Euripides Had Warned Hundreds Of Years Earlier, Were Dangerous.

Power Has For So Long Been A Male Construct That It Distorted The Shape Of The First Women Who Tried It On, Only To Find Themselves In A Sort Of Straitjacket.

My Next Book Is On The Salem Witch Trials. As A Small-town Massachusetts Girl, This Makes Me Very Happy. So Does The Reunion With Documents!

Women Enjoyed Rights In Egypt They Would Not Again Enjoy For More Than 2,000 Years. They Owned Ships, Ran Vineyards, Filed Lawsuits, Practiced Medicine. Their Husbands Supported Them After Divorce. Their Power Was Unprecedented.

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A Rich, Multi-dimensional Tour Of Naples, Most Brilliant, Battered, And Bewildering Of Cities, Here Fixed To The Page With Wit And élan. Splendid.

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