Cleopatra

Why we love it

• •History's most famous queen is remembered almost entirely wrong: not the schemer on the couch, but a scholar who ran one of the richest kingdoms of her world and kept it unconquered for twenty years by making Rome's most powerful men her allies.
• •She grew up in the palace beside the Great Library of Alexandria and used it like a workshop, collecting languages the way other royals collected horses, and she was the first of her Greek dynasty in nearly three hundred years to bother learning Egyptian.
• •Her one famous stunt, reaching Caesar smuggled inside a roll of bedding, was a bet on a single fact: in a city watching every gate for her, nobody was watching for laundry.
• •The eyeliner-and-snake Cleopatra was written by the man who beat her, because a war against a wicked foreign queen was one Rome could cheer. The version on the coins and temple walls she left behind looks nothing like it.

Why it matters

Cleopatra VII (69 to 30 BC) was the last pharaoh of Egypt and the last independent ruler in the ancient Mediterranean's oldest kingdom, and most of what people think they know about her comes from the people who defeated her. She was born into the Ptolemies, a Greek dynasty that had ruled Egypt for nearly three hundred years without one of them learning the Egyptian language; Cleopatra learned it, along with as many as nine tongues, and was educated in the scholarly world of Alexandria and its Great Library. For more than two decades she kept Egypt fed, solvent, and independent while Rome absorbed every neighboring kingdom, governing through administration, commerce, and alliance rather than conquest. After her defeat by Octavian in 30 BC, the victors and the Roman poets who followed built the lasting image of a scheming seductress, an image historians have spent the last century correcting against the coins, inscriptions, and documents of her actual reign. She is one of the clearest cases a child can meet of how history is written by the winners, and of how to read a famous story back to its sources.