Quotes from Stacy Schiff

Certainly, I am writing as a 21st-century woman, so I am much more inclined to view her as a three-dimensional woman. I think we keep coming up with this stubborn problem of a woman being judged by her appearance rather than her accomplishments. We are much more inclined to ask: was Cleopatra beautiful?

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.

We're talking about, essentially, the Roman historians, who wrote Cleopatra into the story mostly so that they could talk about the rise of Rome. And that is one of the problems, of course, in recounting her life. She's only ever apparent to us when there is a Roman in the room, or when her story intersects with the rise of Rome.

As always, an educated woman was a dangerous woman.

Cleopatra's] power has been made to derive from her sexuality, for obvious reason; 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.

And in the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.

When a woman teams up with a snake a moral storm threatens somewhere.

It has always been preferable to attribute a woman's success to her beauty rather to her brains, to reduce her to the sum of her sex life.

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 all subscribe to preposterous beliefs; we just don't know yet which ones they are. We too have been known to prefer plot to truth; to deny the evidence before us in favor of the ideas behind us; to do insane things in the name of reason; to take that satisfying step from the righteous to the self-righteous; to drown our private guilts in a public well; to indulge in a little delusion.

Faith aside, witchcraft served an eminently useful purpose. The aggravating, the confounding, the humiliating all dissolved in its cauldron. It made sense of the unfortunate and the eerie, the sick child and the rancid butter along with the killer cat. What else, shrugged one husband, could have caused the black and blue marks on his wife's arm?

As Dio observed later, democracy sounded very well and good, "but its results are seen not to agree at all with its title. Monarchy, on the contrary, has an unpleasant sound, but is a most practical form of government to live under. For it is easier to find a single excellent man than many of them.

As incandescent as was her personality, Cleopatra was every bit Caesar's equal as a coolheaded, clear-eyed pragmatist, though what passed on his part as strategy would be remembered on hers as manipulation.

Ancient history is oddly short on incorrect omens.

No one dances while he is sober. Unless he happens to be a lunatic. -Cicero

One loyal friend," Euripides reminds us, "is worth ten thousand relatives.

We all apologize, or fail to, in our own ways.

Power has for so long been a male construct that it distorted the shape of the first women who tried it on, only to find themselves in a sort of straitjacket.

Women play the villains in fairy tales—what are you saying when you place the very emblem of lowly domestic duty between your legs and ride off, defying the bounds of community and laws of gravity?

Her palace shimered with onyx, garnet, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue.

Things disturb us in the night. Sometimes they are our consciences. Sometimes they are our secrets. Sometimes they are our fears, translated from one idiom to another.

The Ptolemies were in fact Macedonian Greek, which makes Cleopatra approximately as Egyptian as Elizabeth Taylor.

Blind passion was one thing, all-knowing intimacy a rarer commodity.

It used to be that the longest unprotected border in the world was that between the United States and Canada. Today it's the one between fact and fiction. If the two cozy up any closer together The National Enquirer will be out of business.