Motherhood Is Always An Act Of Courage.

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.

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.

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.

Ancient History Is Oddly Short On Incorrect Omens.

An Interesting Thing About Book Groups, It Seems To Me, Is That There Is No Correlation Between A Brilliant Book And A Brilliant Discussion. The First Seems Sometimes Even To Undermine The Second.