Cleopatra: A Life

* Some have read into her grandiloquence an alignment instead with her Greek heritage. Genuine or not, a revival was unfailingly welcome in a world that measured itself against the past. Hers may have been an expansive, inclusionary gesture; Macedonia had produced not only the Ptolemies but the rival Seleucid dynasty as well. And the once-powerful Seleucids had controlled much of the territory now in Cleopatra’s hands.