Among modern historians, I found these books to be of particular interest: Jack Lindsay's Cleopatra (Constable amp; Company Ltd., London, 1971), Arthur Weigall's The Life and Times of Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt
(G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York amp; London, 1924), Hans Volkmann's Cleopatra, A Study in Politics and Propaganda (Sagamore Press, New York 1958), Jean-Yves Empereur's Alexandria, Jewel of Egypt (Abrams, New York, 2002), and volume III of T. Rice Holmes's monumental The Roman Republic and the Founder of the Empire (The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1923). I derived great pleasure from Jane Wilson Joyce's translation of Lucan's Pharsalia (Cornell University Press, Ithaca amp; London, 1993). Cleopatra of Egypt, from History to Myth (The British Museum Press, London, 2001), an exhibition catalogue edited by Susan Walker and Peter Higgs, contains a great wealth of images.
My thanks to Penni Kimmel, Rick Solomon, and Rick Lovin for reading the manuscript; to my tireless agent, Alan Nevins; and to my editor at St. Martin's Press, Keith Kahla.
I will close with this observation, which comes from Dio, writing about the volatile situation in Alexandria at the time of Caesar's visit: 'The Egyptians,' he says (again, in Foster's translation), 'are the most excessively religious people on earth and wage wars even against one another on account of their beliefs, since their worship is not a unified system, but different branches of it are diametrically opposed one to another.' The hardheaded, endlessly pragmatic Romans, with their affinity for realpolitik, did not know quite what to make of the otherworldly fanaticisms of the Egyptians. It may give us pause that Dio's observation is as true about the inhabitants of the region today as it was in the time of Cleopatra.
