Download Cleopatra and Antony: Power, Love, and Politics in the Ancient World AudioBook Free
On the stiflingly hot day in August, 30 B.C., the thirty-nine-year-old Queen of Egypt, Cleopatra, got her own life, rather than be paraded in chains through Rome by her conqueror, Octavian, the future emperor Augustus. A couple of days earlier, her fan of eleven years, Symbol Antony, had perished in her biceps and triceps following his own botched suicide look at. Oceans of mythology have become up around them, which Diana Preston puts to rest in her stirring background of the lives and times of one or two whose titles―more than two millennia later―still invoke love, attention, and intrigue.
This e book sets the love and tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra's personal lives within the framework of their political times. There are plenty of contemporary resonances: the relationship between East and Western world and the type of empire, the concealment of personal ambition beneath the watchword of liberty, documents forged, edited or removed, special relationships set up, constitutional varieties and legal niceties invoked when it appropriate. Indeed their lives and fatalities had deep political ramifications, plus they offer a revealing perspective over a tipping point in Roman politics and on the consolidation of the Roman Empire. 3 hundred years would go before the east would, with the surge of Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire, once again take a share of political ability in the Mediterranean. Within an intriguing postscript, Preston speculates on what might have happened got Antony and Cleopatra defeated Octavian at the Challenge of Actium in 31 B.C.
