Diana Preston - Cleopatra and Antony - Review

Ancient history suffers from a shortage of fast-paced, easy-to-read popular histories, so Cleopatra and Antony: Power, Love, and Politics in the Ancient World is very welcome. Diana Preston is an excellent writer and researcher, as she demonstrates in this tale of the end of the Roman Republic. Although she researched widely, Preston relies primarily on Suetonius and Plutarch whom she expands upon and interprets.

When I started reading, I though Preston was using Cleopatra as a way of grabbing attention, like a sex symbol, because Julius Caesar seemed far more the focus. I was wrong. Preston was using the dynamic times, the Roman conflicts centered on Clodius, Catiline, and Cicero, to populate a world for the reader. Into this violent, dynamic Rome of the 1st century B.C., Cleopatra and Antony would emerge as power brokers who might have changed everything -- even down to changing the fate of Jesus -- had they not made certain choices.

Preston convincingly interprets Cleopatra and Antony's loss at Actium, and presents a moving scene of Antony's last moments. Another novelty is a photo of a modern bust of Cleopatra representing modern guesses as to what the Egyptian pharaoh actually looked like, replete with a quality that might very well be seductive, but unconventional beauty.

Footnotes are very limited, so it was usually impossible for me to verify what Preston wrote. There are odd errors, like asserting that the first medical treatise was written during the lifetime of Cleopatra. Assuming that someone needed a strong alcoholic beverage at a given moment is a nice literary trick, but highlights the imagination that went into the writing. While it is a given that ancient Latin literature is full of terms of sexual abuse, Preston may have been overly enthusiastic in her use of such quotes translated into 4-letter English.