Stacy Schiff - Cleopatra: A Life (2010)

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

Stacy Schiff

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.

Stacy Schiff

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.

Stacy Schiff

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

Stacy Schiff

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.

Stacy Schiff