Motherhood Is Always An Act Of Courage.

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

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.

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.

Ancient History Is Oddly Short On Incorrect Omens.

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.