On a stiflingly hot day in August, 30 B.C., the thirty-nine-year-old Queen of Egypt, Cleopatra, took her own life, rather than be paraded in chains through Rome by her conqueror, Octavian, the future emperor Augustus. A few days earlier, her lover of eleven years, Mark Antony, had died in her arms following his own botched suicide attempt. Oceans of mythology have grown up around them, all of which Diana Preston puts to rest in her stirring history of the lives and times of a couple whose names-more than two millennia later-still invoke passion, curiosity, and intrigue. This book sets the romance and tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra's personal lives within the context of their political times. There are many contemporary resonances: the relationship between East and West and the nature of empire, the concealment of personal ambition beneath the watchword of liberty, documents forged, edited or disposed of, special relationships established, constitutional forms and legal niceties invoked when it suited. Indeed their lives and deaths had deep political ramifications, and they offer a revealing perspective on a tipping point in Roman politics and on the consolidation of the Roman Empire. Three hundred years would pass before the east would, with the rise of Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire, once again take a share of political power in the Mediterranean. In an intriguing postscript, Preston speculates on what might have happened had Antony and Cleopatra defeated Octavian at the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C.

THE biography of Mark Antony.

In our universe, Ponce de Leæn is remembered for his fruitless search for the mythical fountain of youth. But, in an alternate universe, his quest found something very different¾and very dangerous. After his return to Spain, bizarre rumors flew about what he had found there, and what had come back with him. Eighty-five years later, Spain sent a fleet of ships against England. The English were confident that they could repel the threat¾but England's fleet was annihilated by weapons shooting beams of fiery light, weapons which seemed to employ the blackest of sorcery, even if they were wielded by odd-looking beings in monk's garb. The Queen herself was forced to flee to the New World on Captain Thomas Winslow's ship, Heron, accompanied by her advisor Dr. Dee, whom some called a sorcerer, and an odd fellow named Shakespeare, hoping there to find the source of Spain's powerful weapons. But they would find far stranger matters there than they had expected, such as a grown woman who had been only an infant a year before, and eerie tales of a gate to another world with beings who were not human . . . At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).

St Antony's College, Oxford, was founded by Antonin Besse and opened its doors in October 1950. Under the inspired leadership of William Deakin, the College became a centre for postgraduate teaching and research in the social sciences. The most deliberately international of all Oxford colleges, it was also the first to admit substantial numbers of women. This book recounts the College's history and describes the changing lifestyle of its students over the last fifty years.

Presents the text of "Antony and Cleopatra, "which dramatizes the ill-fated affair between Mark Antony, one of the triumvirs of the Roman Empire, and Cleopatra, the Queen of Egypt, and includes introductory and textual notes, character lists and studies, a synopsis, teaching tools and suggestions, historical background, and biographical information about Shakespeare

The tragic love affair of Marc Antony and Cleopatra is a staple of popular ancient history, immortalised by Shakespeare and Hollywood and mercilessly parodied in Carry on Cleo. In this dual biography Patricia Southern attempts to rescue both from the stereotypes, portraying their alliance as a mutually advantageous one, and both of them as capable political operators. Southern has a flair for this kind of narrative-history-with-argument, but she has already written extensively on both Antony and Cleopatra as well as Caesar, and for those who have read those earlier books there will be little new here.