I'm A Sucker For Lost

I Checked To See If There’d Been A Really Good Book Published In The Last Few Decades. Then I Started With What Cleopatra Would Have Read, Asking Myself, “what Can We Know About Her Education?” It Turns Out To Be A Very Great Deal, And Bizarrely, No One Had Written About That Before.

The Vanity Extended Most Of All To His Library, Arguably The Real Love Of Cicero's Life. It Is Difficult To Name Anything In Which He Took More Pleasure, Aside Possibly Evasion Of The Sumptuary Laws. Cicero Liked To Believe Himself Wealthy. He Prided Himself On His Books. He Needed No Further Reason To Dislike Cleopatra: Intelligent Women Who Had Better Libraries Than He Did Offended Him On Three Counts.

For A Few Thousand Years, Women Had No History. Marriage Was Our Calling, And Meekness Our Virtue. Over The Last Century, In Stuttering Succession, We Have Gained A Voice, A Vote, A Room, A Playing Field Of Our Own. Decorously Or Defiantly, We Now Approach What Surely Qualifies As The Final Frontier.

Strangely Enough, Politics May Just Be The One Realm In Which Having Kids Imposes No Penalty On Women. Kids Are Practically A Necessity. For Scientists, Or Supreme Court Justices, Or Chief Executives, Or The Woman Who Wants To Learn To Fly F-l8s Off An Aircraft Carrier, It Works Differently.

Cleopatra Stood At One Of The Most Dangerous Intersections In History; That Of Women And Power. Clever Women, Euripides Had Warned Hundreds Of Years Earlier, Were Dangerous.