This is CBS, I on the World.

I'm John Batchel, speaking with the classicist and author Daisy Dunn.

Her book is The Missing Thread, a women's history of the ancient world.

Cleopatra, Caesar's dead, is another civil war on.

Mark Antony is seen as a man who practiced faithfulness to Caesar's memory.

Brutus, the son of Servilia, lover of Caesar, is seen as a liberator, a man who revolted from the kingship of Caesar.

Remember, the kingship fell into disrepute after Lucretia?

Many centuries before.

So the Romans, we're told, have a built-in antipathy to kingship.

That's why the assassination, that's why Rudis and his colleagues thought they'd be

celebrated and went out to the forum and waited for people to applaud them after they murdered

Caesar. It didn't work out that way. However, during the Civil War, Mark Antony travels to

Egypt and Cleopatra again makes a great entrance, this time on her bards.

There are paintings done in the 19th century about these moments.

Our forebears in Europe and in Daisy Duns, Britain, have celebrated all these scenes in their own way,

almost as if you could say the Romans and the Greeks give us stories and each generation and each epoch since the 2,000 or 2,500 years interprets those stories in different ways.

Right now we're coming to the story of Anthony and Cleopatra.

They had a love affair and it was a doozy.

Daisy, what is the opinion at the time of Anthony spending all that time with Cleopatra?

And who was Fulvia?

Anthony's affair with Cleopatra made him really unpopular with the Roman people.

It was seen to be excessive.

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