The writing was a bit rough at times - with too much reliance on "no doubt" and other phrases that ironically show doubt - I felt like a got a fairly good picture of Cleopatra from this biography. The writing also spends WAY too much space describing feasts. ( )

It seemed like a couple of bios on Cleopatra came out around the same time and I had never thought much about reading one even as much as I like biographies. I ran across an article that talked about her and it got my interest so I picked out this particular book. The article that mentioned she was probably a polymath and this prompted me in wanting to know more about her.

The book was OK and certainly covered the specifics surrounding the historical events but not as much about her personality and persona, as much as I was looking for in any event. This could be that not as much is known about her as we might like. I obviously had much to learn because I thought she was Egyptian and I found she was really more of Macedonian origin. No question she was certainly highly intelligent and capable, in a world where lives of even the powerful could be snuffed out in an instant. Egypt comes across to me as an advanced society for this time as women like Cleopatra could rise to positions of power and respect, something that took many centuries for our own culture to come to grips with.

I found it interesting that the author pointed out her much fabled death by asp was probably myth like much in history and religious origin. Her speculation was that Cleopatra was fairly advanced on poisons and chemistry of the time to know what and how to apply want she needed to escape nefarious plans of Octavian. Not a snake bite that fits in more conveniently with the romance of legend, ( )