Cleopatra: A Life

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Whitehorne, John. Cleopatras. London: Routledge, 1994.

Will, Edouard. Histoire politique du monde hellenistique. Paris: Seuil, 2003.

Table of Contents

FRONT COVER IMAGE

WELCOME

DEDICATION

MAPS

CHAPTER I

That Egyptian Woman

CHAPTER II

Dead Men Don’t Bite

CHAPTER III

Cleopatra Captures the Old Man by Magic

CHAPTER IV

The Golden Age Never Was the Present Age

CHAPTER V

Man Is by Nature a Political Creature

CHAPTER VI

We Must Often Shift the Sails When We Wish to Arrive in Port

CHAPTER VII

An Object of Gossip for the Whole World

CHAPTER VIII

Illicit Affairs and Bastard Children

CHAPTER IX

The Wickedest Woman in History

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

NOTES

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO BY STACY SCHIFF

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

STACY SCHIFF is the author of Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupery, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize and the Ambassador Book Award. Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. The recipient of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Schiff has contributed to The New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, as well as many other publications. She lives in New York City.

ALSO BY STACY SCHIFF

A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)

Saint-Exupery: A Biography

* Even the fiction writers cannot agree about Caesar and Cleopatra. He loves her (Handel); he loves her not (Shaw); he loves her (Thornton Wilder).

* As they have done since time immemorial. “And the endeavor to ascertain these facts was a laborious task, because those who were eyewitnesses of the several events did not give the same reports about the same things, but reports varying according to their championship of one side or the other, or according to their recollection,” grumbled Thucydides, nearly four hundred years before Cleopatra.

* Ptolemy XIII surveyed the murder from the beach but for his part in it earned a permanent place in Dante’s ninth circle of hell. He keeps company with Cain and Judas.

* They were not alone. By one account, Alexander the Great consulted a famed oracle about his parentage. He had some questions, which is what happens when your mother is said to have mated with a snake. Wisely he left his entourage outside the temple and submitted a bribe in advance: he was, the oracle assured him, the son of Zeus.

* Given the congested genealogy, Ptolemy VIII was Cleopatra’s great-grandfather three times over—and