Stacy Schiff

As always, an educated woman was a dangerous woman.

[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.

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

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

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.

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.

Ancient history is oddly short on incorrect omens.

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.