Quotes About Cleopatra

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.

To restore Cleopatra is as much to salvage the few facts as to peel away the encrusted myth and the hoary propaganda.

You have to scuba dive in the Alexandrian harbor if you want to see what remains of the lighthouse of Cleopatra's day, and the water in the Alexandrian harbor is not really something you want to come into contact with.

often women aren't allowed to be characters in history, they have to be stereotypes. Cleopatra was a poet and a philosopher, she was incredibly good at maths; she wasn't that much of a looker. But when we think of her, we think: big breasted seductress bathing in milk. Often, even when women have made their mark and they are remembered by history, we are offered a fantasy version of their lives.

In that moment of revealing, one historian will write of Cleopatra, "her desire grew greater than it had been before.

Cleopatra identified herself as an avatar of love goddess Aphrodite.

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.

I had always been moved by the story and love of Antony and Cleopatra. Their love moved and changed the world. While their love ended in tragedy, their love endured the march of time. Their passion lit the world on fire.

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.

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.

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

It is notable that when she is not condemned for being too bold and masculine, Cleopatra is taken to task for being unduly frail and feminine.

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.

She came to the Cleopatra and her attention was immediately drawn to the side-by-side Tigris and Euphrates Towers. Her

In 'Plutarch,' her voice begins to come out; there are actual 2,000-year-old quotes from Cleopatra, and they are sly and saucy.

Vanity is illustrated in the cause and effect of love, as in the case of Cleopatra.

They say there's been no woman her equal since Cleopatra," said Philostratus. "Ah, Cleopatra!" said Galen. "Always the standard against whom any strong female is compared." "And not always as a compliment," noted Gaius, "since Cleopatra was the enemy of Rome, and came to a bad end.

I went out to the desert where Cleopatra camped out with her mercenary army. It's a desolate outpost. Nothing has changed since her day. You realize how far she had to travel. Not only is it a good 150 miles against the current, you can't take a ship.

He had been in Citra's embrace, the two of them cloaked in the robes of founding scythes Prometheus and Cleopatra, as Endura sank beneath the Atlantic. But those robes did not stay on for long.

Cleopatra was on a political mission to save her country and her power, but what we remember about her are these two famed seductions, which are a matter of politics, not a matter of love.

I wouldn't dare to speculate as to Cleopatra's falling in love. Her relationships are too convenient for that.

The language is always powerful in Shakespeare, but with 'Antony and Cleopatra,' the speeches are so big and muscular and rich - exhausting to speak, actually.