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

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.

parenting is an exercise in unintended consequences.

We don't know how Cleopatra spent her days, but we do know how other Hellenistic monarchs spent their days. There has been a great amount of scholarship in the last 30 years about education in the Hellenistic world and women in the Hellenistic world. We now know how an upper-class woman was educated in her day.

For a few thousand years, women had no history. Marriage was our calling, and meekness our virtue. Over the last century, in stuttering succession, we have gained a voice, a vote, a room, a playing field of our own. Decorously or defiantly, we now approach what surely qualifies as the final frontier.

I checked to see if there’d been a really good book published in the last few decades. Then I started with what Cleopatra would have read, asking myself, “What can we know about her education?” It turns out to be a very great deal, and bizarrely, no one had written about that before.

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