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c88fc6d
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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.
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Stacy Schiff |
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041fb7f
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Briefly (Vladimir Nabokov) caught the (Superman) fever too, composing a poem, now lost, on the the Man of Steel's wedding night.
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vladimir-nabokov
russian-literature
superman
superheroes
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Stacy Schiff |
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94674d4
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When you predicted an apocalypse, you needed sooner or later to produce one.
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Stacy Schiff |
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aa5048c
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We most often understand the value of time only when we are in a position of having to regret its loss,
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Stacy Schiff |
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20ecd27
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He had come a long way since his conviction, as a twenty-year-old, that honesty could not be counterfeited.
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Stacy Schiff |
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678debd
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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 predecessors, few successors. With her, the age of empresses essentially came to an end. In two thousand years only one or two other women could be said to have wielded unrestricted authority over so vast a realm. Cleopatra remains nearly alone ..
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Stacy Schiff |
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42e72c7
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We have ample testimony to her sense of humor; Cleopatra was a wit and a prankster. There is no cause to question how she read Herodotus's further assertion that Egypt was a country in which "the women urinate standing up, the men sitting down."
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Stacy Schiff |
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e4203f3
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For all its erudition, Cleopatra's Egypt produced no fine historian.
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Stacy Schiff |
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a34dd69
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She knew neither that she was living in the first century BC nor in the Hellenistic Age, both of them later constructs. (The Hellenistic Age begins with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and ends in 30 BC, with the death of Cleopatra.
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Stacy Schiff |
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9f47d44
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What was said of an earlier tribune was more true of Antony: "He was a spendthrift of money and chastity--his own and other people's." The brilliant cavalry officer had all of Caesar's charm and none of his self-control. In 44 the conspirators had deemed him too inconsistent to be dangerous. After the Ides Mark Antony was in his glory, entirely the man of the hour--at least until Octavian arrived. Cleopatra"
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Stacy Schiff |
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cbe29dd
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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 existence:
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Stacy Schiff |
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cd9e0bc
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Learning was a serious business, involving endless drills, infinite rules, long hours. There was no such thing as a weekend; one studied on all save for festival days, which came with merciful regularity in Alexandria.
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Stacy Schiff |
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9aae82e
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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."
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Stacy Schiff |
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b720d48
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No text more thoroughly penetrated Cleopatra's world. In an age infatuated with history and calibrated in glory, Homer's work was the Bible of the day.
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Stacy Schiff |
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8c516f4
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While Egyptian speakers learned Greek, it was rare that anyone ventured in the opposite direction. 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.
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Stacy Schiff |
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d310804
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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. While this was a crime for an Egyptian, surely a foreigner merited a special exemption? He could not save the visitor from the bloodthirsty crowd.
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Stacy Schiff |
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af1dcc9
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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.
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Stacy Schiff |
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f32d563
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The best that can be said of the Alexandrian War is that Caesar acquitted himself brilliantly in a situation in which he stupidly found himself.
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Stacy Schiff |
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d1eb4be
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So it was that when a fiery wisp of a girl presented herself before an adroit, much older man of the world, credit for the seduction fell to her.
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Stacy Schiff |
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ce18eb7
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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 whim and against the law. Caesar took few steps toward restoring traditional rights and regulations. Meanwhile his powers expanded. He took charge of most elections and decided most court cases. He spent a great deal of time settling scores, r..
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Stacy Schiff |
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53d7bb0
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But the standouts in the generations immediately preceding Cleopatra's were--for vision, ambition, intellect--universally female.
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Stacy Schiff |
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b6fb22c
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everything that lifts people above their fellows arouses both emulation and jealousy.
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Stacy Schiff |
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beac8f2
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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 of delivering. Make a great secret of hiding what isn't there. Plead you're busy as you spend your time sharpening pencils. Speak profoundly to cover up your emptiness, encourage spies, reward traitors, tamper with seals, intercept letters, hide..
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Stacy Schiff |
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b0e7b0a
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Who can adequately express his astonishment at the changes of fortune, and the mysterious vicissitudes in human affairs?
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Stacy Schiff |
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c050c53
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Aikhenvald saw Vera as a fearless guide to Vladimir on "the poetic path." She was on every count his champion. The wife of another emigre writer phrased it differently: "Everyone in the Russian community knew who and what you meant when you said 'Verochka.' It meant a boxer who went into the fight and hit and hit."
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wingman
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Stacy Schiff |
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0819cf8
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What is optimism? Alas, it is the mania for pretending that all is right, when in fact everything is wrong. --Voltaire, Candide
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Stacy Schiff |
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a6f2ae1
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A few months since the idea of witches riding through the air upon a broomstick, and that of philosophers upon a bag of smoke, would have appeared equally impossible and ridiculous,
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Stacy Schiff |
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0a65828
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Like any oppressed people, they defined themselves by what offended them, which
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Stacy Schiff |
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319317b
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For talk is evil: It is light to raise up quite easily, but it is difficult to bear, and hard to put down. No talk is ever entirely gotten rid of, once many people talk it up: It too is some god." --HESIOD"
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Stacy Schiff |
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71c1cd2
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If something foreign arrives at Paris, they either think they invented it, or that it has always been there. --Horace Walpole
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Stacy Schiff |
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affd2ef
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At a time of shuddering devastation, they stepped in as the dragon-slayers.
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Stacy Schiff |
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4b4b906
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diadem, Cleopatra took part throughout the trip in religious
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Stacy Schiff |
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b94623b
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There was good reason why Cleopatra's subjects viewed time as a coil of endless repetitions.
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Stacy Schiff |
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028d405
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Dimitri had driven his mother back to Montreux from the Lausanne hospital at dusk on July 2, in his blue Ferrari, on the last day of his father's life. Vera had sat silently for a few minutes and then uttered the one desperate line Dimitri ever heard escape her lips, "Let's rent an airplane and crash."
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mourning
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Stacy Schiff |
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6fc0e98
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A good-sized Ptolemaic vessel could carry three hundred tons of wheat down the river. At least two such ships made the trip daily--with wheat, barley, lentils--to feed Alexandria alone.
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Stacy Schiff |
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de7ebb6
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You could not really bargain away your soul before it was established that you had one.
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Stacy Schiff |
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a43ecf4
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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. In part these seemed to be survival tactics for living in an uncertain time.
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Stacy Schiff |
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979633b
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She nonetheless survives as a wanton temptress, not the last time a genuinely powerful woman has been transmuted into a shamelessly seductive one.
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history
women
women-empowerment
egypt
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Stacy Schiff |
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7dc5db0
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Nabokov complained he was afflicted with total recall, an affliction of which he could be miraculously cured by the presence of a biographer.
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Stacy Schiff |
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70e9c35
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published, Beverly minister John Hale had produced
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Stacy Schiff |
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f18b887
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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.
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Stacy Schiff |
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8930c4f
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Apollodorus came, Caesar saw, Cleopatra conquered.
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cleopatra
egypt
julius-caesar
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Stacy Schiff |
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f2ff2ad
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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 role.)
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Stacy Schiff |
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4f54ada
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In this world," he reminded a French friend, "it is not faith that saves us, but defiance."
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Stacy Schiff |