{"id":539317,"date":"2010-04-22T04:45:00","date_gmt":"2010-04-22T08:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6760875.post-2262108164954216232"},"modified":"2010-04-22T05:21:28","modified_gmt":"2010-04-22T09:21:28","slug":"book-review-cleopatra","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/539317","title":{"rendered":"Book Review:  Cleopatra"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.forbes.com\/2010\/04\/16\/cleopatra-biography-liz-taylor-opinions-book-reviews-hannah-elliott.html\">Forbes<\/a> (Review by Hannah Elliott)<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-style: italic;\">Cleopatra: A Biography<\/span><br \/>By Duane W. Roller (Oxford University Press, $16.47)<\/p>\n<div style=\"text-align: justify;\"><\/div>\n<blockquote>\n<div style=\"text-align: justify;\">Forget what you think you know about Cleopatra. She wasn&#8217;t a voracious seductress who led men to their doom. She never wore bangs \u00e0 la Liz Taylor circa 1963. And she almost certainly didn&#8217;t die by the bite of an Egyptian snake.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s the premise of Duane W. Roller&#8217;s Cleopatra: A Biography, a bare-bones approach to understanding the last ruler of the 270-year-old Ptolemaic dynasty and the only woman in classical antiquity who ruled with complete autonomy.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re looking for romance-novel details of the Mark Anthony-Cleopatra VII affair, keep looking. Roller, a professor emeritus of Greek and Latin at the Ohio State University, makes it abundantly clear that his goal is to create a portrait of the infamous queen that is based &#8220;solely on information from the ancient world.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>That means forgoing all input from Shakespeare, Massenet and Hollywood. It makes for a somewhat dry read&#8211;navigating through Ptolemaic genealogies, recounts of political posturing with obscure satraps and discussions of ancient Roman land disputes won&#8217;t keep the casual reader engaged.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div class=\"blogger-post-footer\">Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes<img width='1' height='1' src='https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/tracker\/6760875-2262108164954216232?l=egyptology.blogspot.com' alt='' \/><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Forbes (Review by Hannah Elliott) Cleopatra: A BiographyBy Duane W. Roller (Oxford University Press, $16.47) Forget what you think you know about Cleopatra. She wasn&#8217;t a voracious seductress who led men to their doom. She never wore bangs \u00e0 la Liz Taylor circa 1963. And she almost certainly didn&#8217;t die by the bite of an [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6848,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-539317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6848"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=539317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539317\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=539317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=539317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=539317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}