Cleopatra

by Stacy Schiff

Surely something curious is afoot when the greatest Elizabethan poet cribs from a straight-backed biographer.

(As Euripides observed in a Hellenistic favorite among his plays, “There seems to be some pleasure for women in sick talk of one another.”)

He publicly acknowledged what many men who have faced a woman across a tennis net have since noted: in such a contest, there is greater pride to be lost than glory to be gained.

Plutarch’s counsel on rebuke: better in time of calamity to opt for sympathy over blame, for “at such a time there is no use for a friend’s frankness or for words charged with grave and stinging reproof.”

Caesar’s murderers had noted, “How much more attention people pay to their fears than to their memories!”