Quotes About Cleopatra

sheers.Garth'sDispensat.2. A reproachful name for a dark complexion. Laura, to his lady, was but a kitchen-wench; Dido a dowdy; Cleopatra a gipsy; Helen and Hero hildings and harlots.Shakespeare'sRomeo and Juliet.3. A

It is no surprise that the only woman in antiquity who could be the subject of a full-length biography is Cleopatra. Yet, unlike Alexander, whom she rivals as the theme of romance and legend, Cleopatra is known to us through overwhelmingly hostile sources. The reward of the 'good' woman in Rome was likely to be praise in stereotyped phrases; in Athens she won oblivion.

She was not a white woman. She was not a Greek... Until the emergence of the doctrine of white superiority, Cleopatra was generally pictured as a distinctly African woman, dark in color.

Yo fui un soldado que durmió en el lecho de Cleopatra la reina. Su blancura y su mirada astral y omnipotente. Eso fue todo. I was a soldier who slept in the bed of Cleopatra, the Queen. Her paleness, her starry and omnipotent gaze. Nothing more.

Caesar tarried in Egypt, Taking in all the spoils, The Lighthouse, the Library, Queen Cleopatra and Her many-perfumed oils.

The horror was, Cleopatra meant something to these modern people of the twentieth century which was altogether wrong. She had become a symbol of licentiousness, when in fact she had possessed a multitude of amazing talents. They had punished her for her one flaw by forgetting everything else…Remembered, but not for what she was. A painted whore lying on a silken couch. - Ramses

I read that the real Cleopatra wasn't even that great-looking. She seduced everyone with how clever she was." "Yeah, right. And you've seen a picture of her?" "They didn't have cameras back then, Squint." "Duh. So how do you know she was ugly?" "Because that's what historians wrote at the time.

There is a certain kind of respect for authenticity today that there wasn't back in the days when they did 'Cleopatra ' where everything looked like a giant motel. People want to have it be authentic in the look, and authentic in the way people behave.

By the time Florence Nightingale got her neurotic hands on Cleopatra, she had been mangled beyond recognition by both history and literature.

I decided I was going to play Cleopatra as someone with a brain. She's kept Egypt, this tiny country, in a balance of power with the almighty Roman empire, and she's done it through force of personality.

Cleopatra descended from a long line of murderers and faithfully upheld the family tradition but was, for her time and place, remarkably well behaved.

It was rare to find a member of the family who did not liquidate a relative or two, Cleopatra VII included.

The Ptolemies were in fact Macedonian Greek, which makes Cleopatra approximately as Egyptian as Elizabeth Taylor. The word 'honey skinned' recurs in descriptions of her relatives and would presumably applied to hers as well, despite the inexactitudes surrounding her mother and paternal grandmother. There was certainly Persian blood in the family, but even an Egyptian mistress is a rarity among the Ptolemies. She was not dark skinned.

There was good reason why Cleopatra's subjects viewed time as a coil of endless repetitions.

For ten generations her family had styled themselves pharaohs. The Ptolemies were in fact Macedonian Greek, which makes Cleopatra approximately as Egyptian as Elizabeth Taylor.

We have ample testimony to her sense of humor; Cleopatra was a wit and a prankster. There is no cause to question how she read Herodotus's further assertion that Egypt was a country in which "the women urinate standing up, the men sitting down.

For all its erudition, Cleopatra's Egypt produced no fine historian.

What was said of an earlier tribune was more true of Antony: "He was a spendthrift of money and chastity—his own and other people's." The brilliant cavalry officer had all of Caesar's charm and none of his self-control. In 44 the conspirators had deemed him too inconsistent to be dangerous. After the Ides Mark Antony was in his glory, entirely the man of the hour—at least until Octavian arrived. Cleopatra

No text more thoroughly penetrated Cleopatra's world. In an age infatuated with history and calibrated in glory, Homer's work was the Bible of the day.

While Egyptian speakers learned Greek, it was rare that anyone ventured in the opposite direction. To the punishing study of Egyptian, however, Cleopatra applied herself. She was allegedly the first and only Ptolemy to bother to learn the language of the 7 million people over whom she ruled.

When Cleopatra was nine or ten, a visiting official had accidentally killed a cat, an animal held sacred in Egypt.* A furious mob assembled, with whom Auletes' representative attempted to reason. While this was a crime for an Egyptian, surely a foreigner merited a special exemption? He could not save the visitor from the bloodthirsty crowd.

It is not difficult to understand why Caesar became history, Cleopatra a legend.

At the same time, the centuries felt closer than they do to us today. Alexander the Great was further from Cleopatra than 1776 is to our century, yet Alexander remained always vividly, urgently present.

Two thousand years of bad press and overheated prose, of film and opera, cannot conceal the fact that Cleopatra was a remarkably capable queen, canny and opportunistic in the extreme, a strategist of the first rank.