Author: Stacy Schiff Publisher: Little, Brown ISBN: 0316121800 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 484
Book Description
The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer brings to life the most intriguing woman in the history of the world: Cleopatra, the last queen of Egypt. Her palace shimmered with onyx, garnets, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator. Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world. She was married twice, each time to a brother. She waged a brutal civil war against the first when both were teenagers. She poisoned the second. Ultimately she dispensed with an ambitious sister as well; incest and assassination were family specialties. Cleopatra appears to have had sex with only two men. They happen, however, to have been Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, among the most prominent Romans of the day. Both were married to other women. Cleopatra had a child with Caesar and -- after his murder -- three more with his protégé. Already she was the wealthiest ruler in the Mediterranean; the relationship with Antony confirmed her status as the most influential woman of the age. The two would together attempt to forge a new empire, in an alliance that spelled their ends. Cleopatra has lodged herself in our imaginations ever since. Famous long before she was notorious, Cleopatra has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons. Shakespeare and Shaw put words in her mouth. Michelangelo, Tiepolo, and Elizabeth Taylor put a face to her name. Along the way, Cleopatra's supple personality and the drama of her circumstances have been lost. In a masterly return to the classical sources, Stacy Schiff here boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order. Rich in detail, epic in scope, Schiff 's is a luminous, deeply original reconstruction of a dazzling life.
Author: The History Hour Publisher: Kolme Korkeudet Oy ISBN: Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 82
Book Description
Cleopatra VII Philopator was the last active ruler of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt, nominally survived as pharaoh by her son Caesarion. She was also a diplomat, naval commander, polyglot, and medical author. As a member of the Ptolemaic dynasty, she was a descendant of its founder, Ptolemy I Soter, a Macedonian Greek general and companion of Alexander the Great. Inside you’ll read about • Rome comes to Egypt • Sibling rivalry • Caesar and Cleopatra • Assassination • Antony and Cleopatra • An Alexandrian idyll • Dusk approaches And much more! Julius Caesar maintained a private affair with Cleopatra that produced a son, Caesarion (Ptolemy XV). When Caesar was assassinated Cleopatra attempted to have Caesarion named as his heir, but this fell instead to Caesar’s grandnephew Octavian. In the Liberators’ civil war Cleopatra sided with the Roman Second Triumvirate formed by Octavian, Mark Antony, and Marcus Aemilius Lepidus. Cleopatra had an affair with Antony that would eventually produce three children: Alexander Helios, Cleopatra Selene II, and Ptolemy Philadelphus. Octavian’s forces invaded Egypt and defeated those of Antony, leading to his suicide. When Cleopatra learned that Octavian planned to bring her to Rome for his triumphal procession, she committed suicide by poisoning, the popular belief being that she was bitten by an asp.
Author: Haydn Middleton Publisher: ISBN: 9780199101870 Category : Cleopatra Languages : en Pages : 36
Book Description
A biography of the Egyptian queen who gained and maintained power over her kingdom through her alliance with Julius Caesar and later Marc Antony.
Author: M.J. Trow Publisher: Hachette UK ISBN: 147210773X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 257
Book Description
A historical journey in pursuit of the history, legend and lore of vampires. Where do they come from? Why do they have so much appeal today? As Twilight hits the book charts and billboards, and True Blood is on TV there are vampires in downtown clubs and never has it been more fashionable to be pale. M J Trow looks at the story of vampires and charts its origins a long way from the shopping mall in the story of the warrior prince, Vlad of Wallachia.
Author: Joyce Tyldesley Publisher: Profile Books ISBN: 1847650449 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 320
Book Description
She was the last ruler of the Macedonian dynasty of Ptolemies who had ruled Egypt for three centuries. Highly educated (she was the only one of the Ptolemies to read and speak ancient Egyptian as well as the court Greek) and very clever (her famous liaisons with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony were as much to do with politics as the heart), she steered her kingdom through impossibly taxing internal problems and railed against greedy Roman imperialism. Stripping away preconceptions as old as her Roman enemies, Joyce Tyldesley uses all her skills as an Egyptologist to give us this magnificent biography.
Author: Lucy Hughes-Hallett Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 9780712666312 Category : Queens Languages : en Pages : 417
Book Description
'Her book has much in common with Antonia Fraser's BOADICEA. . . It comes, I feel, still closer to Marina Warner's MONUMENTS AND MAIDENS in its mood and spirit, in its careful relation of the visual and verbal. It is a book which builds up pictures in the mind. ' Fiona MacCarthy, OBSERVER Even in her own lifetime Cleopatra was the subject of a double fiction, being reinvented in the propeganda of her enemies as a depraved, alien temptress and in her own self-glamorizing ceremonial as a godess, a universal mother and a liberator. In the two thousand years since her death she had been recreated over and over again, each time in a form that fits the prejudices and fantasiesof the age that produced it. 'Lucy Hughes-Hallett throws a searching light on two thousand years of male erotic fantasy. ' Joan Smith NEW STATESMAN 'It is a fascinating and humourous work. . . every Antony should read it. ' TLS
Author: Michael Grant Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson ISBN: 1780221142 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 299
Book Description
Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, was also a scholar, murderer, lover of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony and one of the most remarkable women in history. The distinguished historian and classicist Michael Grant confirms that her reputation as a temptress was well-founded. However, by unravelling the sources behind the tangle of myth, gossip and invention he shows that the popular image of a wayward woman opting for a life of sensuous luxury and neglecting her affairs of state is far from the truth. A brilliant linguist and the first of her Greek-speaking dynasty who learned Egyptian, she was reputed to be the author of treatises on agriculture, make-up and alchemy. Her love affairs were carefully calculated to further her plans to restore her empire to its former greatness and she was a ruthless foe to all who stood in her way. But dead on her golden couch in the palace at Alexandria her life seemed to have ended in failure; her dreams of empire shattered; her lover Mark Antony a suicide himself and she a prisoner of her conqueror Octavian. An unforgettable portrait of an extraordinary queen and her stormy life.
Author: Kristiana Gregory Publisher: Scholastic Inc. ISBN: 9780590819756 Category : Juvenile Fiction Languages : en Pages : 232
Book Description
While her father is in hiding after attempts on his life, 12-year-old Cleopatra records in her diary how she fears for her own safety and hopes to survive to become Queen of Egypt some day.
Author: Stacy Schiff
Author: The History Hour
Author: William Shakespeare
Author: Haydn Middleton
Author: M.J. Trow
Author: Joyce Tyldesley
Author: Lucy Hughes-Hallett
Author: Michael Grant
Author: Jacob Abbott
Author: Kristiana Gregory