Cleopatras palace shimmered with onyx and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Though her life spanned fewer then forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world. She was married twice, each time to a brother. She waged a brutal civil war against the first and she poisoned the second.Incest and assassination were family specialties. Cleopatra appears to have had sex with only two men.They happen, however to have been Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony, two of the most prominent Romans of the day. Both were married to other women. Cleopatra had a son with Caesar and - after his murder, three more with his prot_g_.Famous long before she was notorious, Cleopatra has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons. Shakespeare and Shaw put words in her mouth. Michelangelo, Tiepolo, and Elizabeth Taylor put a face to her name. Along the way the supple personality has been lost. In a masterly return to the classical sources, Stacy Schiff here boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order a generation before the birth of Christ. Rich in detail, epic in scope, Schiffs is a luminous, deeply original reconstruction of a dazzling life.

Cleopatra: A Life, was published by Little Brown in November 2010, reached Number 3 on the New York Times Bestseller List and garnered extraordinary reviews. The Wall Street Journal's critic wrote, "Stacy Schiff does a rare thing; she gives us a book we'd miss if it didn't exist." Rick Riordan declared Cleopatra "impossible to put down;" The New Yorker termed it "a work of literature;" Michael Korda called it "a masterpiece;" Tina Brown declared it read "almost like a novel in its juicy literary flair;" Maureen Dowd found it "captivating;" Simon Winchester predicted the book would become a classic.