Cleopatra

Alexandria after Actium: the fleet is gone, Antony is drinking, and Cleopatra — forty, brilliant, out of options — tests poisons and negotiates with Octavian's envoy while a young sculptor and his brother are destroyed at the edges of it. Ebers found the medical papyrus that bears his name and dug in Egypt for years; his Cleopatra is a working monarch, not a temptress, and the archaeology is exact. Sixty plates of Roman ruins, capricci and the Colosseum by painters including Panini and Pietro da Cortona carry the imperial Roman world that closes over Cleopatra and Antony.