Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy SchiffMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Read this book if you love history.
So much to think about and recognize in our own times regarding political science and culture norms and assumptions.
This book quote sums it up,
“as one of Caesar’s murderers had noted, ‘How much more attention people pay to their fears than to their memories!’ It has always been preferable to attribute a woman’s success to her beauty rather than to her brains, to reduce her to the sum of her sex life. Against a powerful enchantress there is no contest. Against a woman who ensnares a man in the coils of her serpentine intelligence – in the ropes of her pearls – there should, at least, be some kind of antidote. Cleopatra unsettles more as a sage than a seductress; it is less threatening to believe her fatally attractive than fatally intelligent.”
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