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


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Her palace shimered with onyx, garnet, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue.

Stacy Schiff


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Power has for so long been a male construct that it distorted the shape of the first women who tried it on, only to find themselves in a sort of straitjacket.

Stacy Schiff


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[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


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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.

Stacy Schiff


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As always, an educated woman was a dangerous woman.

Stacy Schiff


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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

Tags: politics democracy monarchy



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When a woman teams up with a snake a moral storm threatens somewhere.

Stacy Schiff

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No one dances while he is sober. Unless he happens to be a lunatic. -Cicero

Stacy Schiff


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And in the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.

Stacy Schiff

Tags: history myth accuracy facts-and-ideas



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