Cleopatra is often portrayed as a woman ruled by emotion rather than reason; a queen hurtling towards inevitable self-destruction. But these tales of seduction, intrigue, and suicide by asp have obfuscated Cleopatra's true political genius. Stripping away our preconceptions, many of them as old as Egypt's Roman conquerors, Egyptologist Joyce Tyldesley offers a magnificent biography of a most extraordinary queen.-- Provided by publisher.

The end of the Roman Republic has inspired a lot of good recent biographies, but did we really need another scholarly life of Cleopatra after Joyce Tyldesley's Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt (2008)? Surprisingly, the answer is yes. While Tyldesley probed deeply into Ptolemy family history and iconography, classicist Roller (Greek & Latin, emeritus, Ohio St. Univ.) focuses on Cleopatra (69-30 B.C.E.) as a ruthless and learned queen in a time when female...

Female rulers are a rare phenomenon-but thousands of years ago in ancient Egypt, women reigned supreme. Regularly, repeatedly, and with impunity, queens like Hatshepsut, Nefertiti, and Cleopatra controlled the totalitarian state as power-brokers and rulers. But throughout human history, women in positions of power were more often used as political pawns in male-dominated societies. Why did ancient Egypt provide women this kind of access to the highest...

"The story of one of history's most decisive and yet little known battles, the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, which brought together Antony and Cleopatra on one side and Octavian, soon to be emperor Augustus, on the other, and whose outcome determined the future of the Roman Empire"--