Cleopatra Quotes

“As always, an educated woman was a dangerous woman.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

“[Cleopatra's] power has been made to derive from her sexuality, for obvious reason; as one of Caesar's murderers had noted, 'How much more attention people pay to their fears than to their memories!' 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.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

“And in the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

“When a woman teams up with a snake a moral storm threatens somewhere.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

“It has always been preferable to attribute a woman's success to her beauty rather to her brains, to reduce her to the sum of her sex life.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

“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.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

“The vanity extended most of all to his library, arguably the real love of Cicero's life. It is difficult to name anything in which he took more pleasure, aside possibly evasion of the sumptuary laws. Cicero liked to believe himself wealthy. He prided himself on his books. He needed no further reason to dislike Cleopatra: intelligent women who had better libraries than he did offended him on three counts.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

“The personal inevitably trumps the political, and the erotic trumps all: We will remember that Cleopatra slept with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony long after we have forgotten what she accomplished in doing so, that she sustained a vast, rich, densely populated empire in its troubled twilight in the name of a proud and cultivated dynasty. She remains on the map for having seduced two of the greatest men of her time, while her crime was to have entered into those same "wily and suspicious" marital partnerships that every man in power enjoyed. She did so in reverse and in her own name; this made her a deviant, socially disruptive, an unnatural woman. To these she added a few other offenses. She made Rome feel uncouth, insecure, and poor, sufficient cause for anxiety without adding sexuality into the mix.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

“As Dio observed later, democracy sounded very well and good, “but its results are seen not to agree at all with its title. Monarchy, on the contrary, has an unpleasant sound, but is a most practical form of government to live under. For it is easier to find a single excellent man than many of them.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

“As incandescent as was her personality, Cleopatra was every bit Caesar's equal as a coolheaded, clear-eyed pragmatist, though what passed on his part as strategy would be remembered on hers as manipulation.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

“Cleopatra moreover came of age in a country that entertained a singular definition of women’s roles. Well before her and centuries before the arrival of the Ptolemies, Egyptian women enjoyed the right to make their own marriages. Over time their liberties had increased, to levels unprecedented in the ancient world. They inherited equally and held property independently. Married women did not submit to their husbands’ control. They enjoyed the right to divorce and to be supported after a divorce. Until the time an ex-wife’s dowry was returned, she was entitled to be lodged in the house of her choice. Her property remained hers; it was not to be squandered by a wastrel husband. The law sided with the wife and children if a husband acted against their interests. Romans marveled that in Egypt female children were not left to die; a Roman was obligated to raise only his first-born daughter. Egyptian women married later than did their neighbors as well, only about half of them by Cleopatra’s age. They loaned money and operated barges. They served as priests in the native temples. They initiated lawsuits and hired flute players. As wives, widows, or divorcées, they owned vineyards, wineries, papyrus marshes, ships, perfume businesses, milling equipment, slaves, homes, camels. As much as one third of Ptolemaic Egypt may have been in female hands.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra

“Ancient history is oddly short on incorrect omens.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

“One loyal friend,” Euripides reminds us, “is worth ten thousand relatives.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra

“Apollodorus came, Caesar saw, Cleopatra conquered,”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra

“No one dances while he is sober. Unless he happens to be a lunatic. -Cicero”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

“To the punishing study of Egyptian, however, Cleopatra applied herself. She was allegedly the first and only Ptolemy to bother to learn the language of the 7 million people over whom she ruled.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra

“Her palace shimered with onyx, garnet, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

“It is notable that when she is not condemned for being too bold and masculine, Cleopatra is taken to task for being unduly frail and feminine.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

“Cleopatra descended from a long line of murderers and faithfully upheld the family tradition but was, for her time and place, remarkably well behaved.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra

“The Ptolemies were in fact Macedonian Greek, which makes Cleopatra approximately as Egyptian as Elizabeth Taylor.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra

“She nonetheless survives as a wanton temptress, not the last time a genuinely powerful woman has been transmuted into a shamelessly seductive one.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

“Yet what difference does it make whether the women rule or the rulers are ruled by women? The result is the same.” —ARISTOTLE”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra

“Politics have long been defined as “the systematic organization of hatreds.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra

“History is written not only by posterity, but for posterity as well.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra

“It was in Alexandria that the circumference of the earth was first measured, the sun fixed at the center of the solar system, the workings of the brain and the pulse illuminated, the foundations of anatomy and physiology established, the definitive editions of Homer produced. It was in Alexandria that Euclid had codified geometry.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra

“We know that Antony pined for Cleopatra months later, though she wound up with all the credit for the affair. As one of her sworn enemies asserted, she did not fall in love with Antony but “brought him to fall in love with her.” In the ancient world too women schemed while men strategized; there was a great gulf, elemental and eternal, between the adventurer and the adventuress. There was one too between virility and promiscuity: Caesar left Cleopatra in Alexandria to sleep with the wife of the king of Mauretania. Antony arrived in Tarsus fresh from an affair with the queen of Cappadocia. The consort of two men of voracious sexual appetite and innumerable sexual conquests, Cleopatra would go down in history as the snare, the delusion, the seductress. Citing her sexual prowess was evidently less discomfiting than acknowledging her intellectual gifts. In the same way it is easier to ascribe her power to magic than to love. We have evidence of neither, but the first can at least be explained; with magic one forfeits rather than loses the game. So Cleopatra has Antony under her thumb, poised to obey her every wish, “not only because of his intimacy with her,” as Josephus has it, “but also because of being under the influence of drugs.” To claim as much is to acknowledge her power, also to insult her intelligence.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra

“Disdain is a natural condition of the mind in exile;”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra

“History existed to be retold, with more panache but not necessarily greater accuracy.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

“Plutarch clearly notes that her beauty “was not in itself so remarkable that none could be compared with her, or that no one could see her without being struck by it”. It was rather the “contact of her presence, if you lived with her, that was irresistible”. Her personality and manner, he insists, were no less than “bewitching”. Time has done better than fail to wither Cleopatra’s case; it has improved upon her allure. She came into her looks only years later. By the third century AD she would be described as “striking”, exquisite in appearance. By the Middle Ages, she was “famous for nothing but her beauty”.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

“How much more attention people pay to their fears than to their memories!”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra