Cleopatra’s life through seven pivotal moments, illuminated in live action: from the decisive encounter with Caesar, to that, later, with Antony. Ancient history as it has never been offered: interpretive power and pleasure in storytelling. This book is not (only) a biography of Cleopatra, but the account, through important steps in her life, of a crucial moment in Western history. In the story presented here, it was a woman who conceived the idea of gaining power over the world. A queen who would fight to the end to bring her plan to fulfillment. If she had accomplished it, that plan would have shifted the political and cultural axis of the Roman empire permanently to the East, placing Cleopatra at the center of the new equilibrium, at the head of a system of domination organically linked to the Roman one. In this case the history of Rome would have taken a different direction, and with it, probably, the history of Europe.
The attempt will end in ruinous failure, but the intelligence, ambition and freedom the protagonist had displayed would have been an unspeakable scandal for her time, to be removed and transformed into something less shocking and more familiar, even at the cost of distorting the reality of the facts: nothing more than an excess of seduction, sex and betrayal, where unrestraint is anything but subversive.