I'm John Batchel, visiting with Daisy Dunn, the author of The Missing Fred, a Women's History of the Ancient World.

These Romans all know the Greek stories. They know the Greek drama. The Greeks are very serious.

The Roman theater is nowhere near as serious. Rome likes farce, Rome likes comedy.

Caesar has comic moments, but not recently. Caesar defeats Pompey, and Pompey runs to Egypt,

where his wife tries to have a successful reunion with him. However, Pompey's murdered by a man who thinks he's

under orders to kill Pompey. Caesar mourns it, mourns Pompey's death. And then, because he's walked

into Alexandria, which is the breadbasket of the Mediterranean, he's in a palace and someone brings in a rug. Yes, it's real true.

It's not a theatre piece. It's a rug and it's unwrapped before him. And who emerges from the

rug, Daisy? It is a young Cleopatra. and she's Cleopatra the seventh.

We have to remember there are other Cleopatra's who ruled Egypt before her.

And she's come before Caesar, and this is a great sort of piece of theatre.

She is unwrapped, and she essentially meets with him and is determined to have a conversation with him because the

rule in Egypt is very, very difficult at that moment. In Egypt, it's the customary that you marry

your brother in that position. But Cleopatra and her younger brother, Ptolemy, are basically at war.

And Ptolemy has tried to sort of have driven her out and the will of their father says that

they should jointly rule the country.

But it's basically in total disarray.

So Cleopatra needs to prevail on Caesar and try and get him to help sort out the

situation. Yes. Now, there is reason to believe that Caesar at this point is thinking empire because

the civil war is nearly concluded. I believe Cato, the younger, is still alive. But in any event,

he's in Alexandria. The reason she's in the rug is because

she needed to sneak into the palace without her brother knowing it. An army gathers outside the palace

...