Ancient history is oddly short on incorrect omens.

Here you have an incredibly ambitious, accomplished woman who comes up against some of the same problems that women in power come up against today. Cleopatra plays an oddly pivotal role in world history as well; in her lifetime, Alexandria is the center of the universe, Rome is still a backwater.

No one sits on the stoop when she's a kid and thinks, 'I want to be a biographer when I grow up,'

I'm a sucker for lost worlds. I was nostalgic even as a child. I was happiest in my hometown library in Adams, Mass., where nothing seemed to change.

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

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.

No one in the modern world controls the wealth or territory that Cleopatra did.