Schiff introduces Cleopatra VII, both as a historical personage who “lost a kingdom once, regained it, nearly lost it again, amassed an empire, lost it all” (1) and also as a historical figure whose name and image have been put to many uses, such as “an asteroid, a video game, a cliché, a cigarette, a slot machine, a strip club” (1). Though perceptions of Cleopatra have proliferated after her death, Schiff concedes that our actual conception of the Egyptian queen is “blurry” (1), as only coin portraits exist of her from her time, and because although she was the richest and most powerful woman in the Mediterranean, she was on the wrong side of history. Her relationships with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, both eventually vanquished, left her at the mercy of hostile Latin historians, while her death, which allowed Rome’s first emperor, Octavian, to take power, marks the end of a 300-year dynasty in Egypt as well as the end of a world historical era, the Hellenistic age.

Schiff then turns to the direct historical records of Cleopatra, primarily the histories of Plutarch, Appian, Dio, and Josephus—Roman and Jewish historians who took a moralistic and culturally censorious approach to the Egyptian queen.