Franklin informed his caller that the colonies understood precisely what they were doing, for we know that separated both countries must become weak; but there is this difference, Great Britain will a...
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.
Everything that lifts people above their fellows arouses both emulation and jealousy.
When Cleopatra was nine or ten, a visiting official had accidentally killed a cat, an animal held sacred in Egypt.* A furious mob assembled, with whom Auletes’ representative attempted to reason. Whil...
There was nothing to be gained by making a man feel unkind for having to refuse a favor, or weak in revealing his inability to do so.
The art of speaking, it was later said, depends on much effort, continual study, varied kinds of exercise, long experience, profound wisdom, and unfailing strategic sense.
Resentment is a passion, implanted by nature for the preservation of the individual. Injury is the object which excites it. Injustice, wrong, injury excites the feeling of resentment, as naturally and...
Caesar’s civic reforms were promising, but how and when would he put the Republic back together again? Over years of war it had been turned upside down, the constitution trampled, appointments made on...
And from an early age she enjoyed the best education available in the Hellenistic world, at the hands of the most gifted scholars, in what was incontestably the greatest center of learning in existenc...
The Hellenistic Age begins with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and ends in 30 BC, with the death of Cleopatra. It has been perhaps best defined as a Greek era in which the Greeks played no...
Diadem, Cleopatra took part throughout the trip in religious
A man who spoke no English, who would argue that whole conversations could be sustained in that language with the use of a single word (Goddamn),
With her death Egypt became a Roman province. It would not recover its autonomy until the twentieth century.
Witchcraft tied up loose ends, accounting for the arbitrary, the eerie, and the unneighborly.
Nabokov complained he was afflicted with total recall, an affliction of which he could be miraculously cured by the presence of a biographer.
Like any oppressed people, they defined themselves by what offended them, which
It’s easy. Pretend to know what you don’t, and pretend not to know when you do. Hear what you don’t understand and don’t hear what you do. Promise what you cannot deliver, what you have no intention o...
In her adult life Cleopatra would have met few people she considered her equal. To the Romans she was a stubborn, supreme exception to every rule. She remains largely incomparable: She had plenty of p...
They were inculcated with a firm sense of noblesse oblige, as with a respect for hierarchy; the Slonim girls knew well how to decode a social situation, and what they could rightfully expect from one....
The motto over Chaumont’s door read, Se sta bene non se muove, which a later American tenant translated, overly literally, as If you stand well, stand still.