And the Cleopatra. Where do we even start to explore? Arguably the most famous woman who has ever lived.

Now I thought about the answer to this question a lot as I was researching this

exploration and the more and more I read the more and more pronounced the answer to

this question became and the answer to how to begin this story is a

simple statement.

Most of what you know about Cleopatra is wrong.

I'm aware this is a bold statement, but I'll put some weight behind it.

Consider the following.

Most of the information that has made its way into our psyche about Cleopatra

has been from Roman and Greek sources and since she was largely viewed from what I can

see as a woman who threw fuel on the fire of the unrest

that ultimately led to the collapse of the Roman Republic and the rise of the

Roman Empire. These Roman sources for the most part are not kind to her.

Poets from this time referred to her as Egypt's shame and a whore queen and Cicero a man renowned for his way with words

essentially refers to her as a haughty and arrogant bitch to put it bluntly and my apologies for the language but sometimes as

you know an expletive is the only way to get the point across. The Roman sources

are where she gets her reputation for being nothing more than a seductress, a fem-fatal

and a manipulator of the highest degree.

My point in bringing this up is to say that there is a whole other side to Cleopatra that

historians and scholars are just starting to discover in relative time and we are beginning

to form a different picture of Cleopatra as time passes.

But how could this be?

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