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What comes to mind when you hear the name Cleopatra? Is it the love affairs with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony? Is it her dramatic suicide with a poisonous snake? Perhaps it’s simply Elizabeth Taylor? The popular depictions of the last pharaoh of Egypt have tended to focus on these tumultuous and salacious details, intertwined as Egypt was with the emergence of the Roman Empire out of the Republic. But what about Cleopatra the savvy political operator? What about Cleopatra the usurper who wrenched power from her brothers to rule alone? There’s so much more to her that we wanted to explore, as you’ll learn in our lead feature this issue.