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.