Cleopatra

You know my name.

But you do not know me.

Your historians call me seductress, but I was ever in love's thrall.

Your playwrights speak of witchcraft, but my talents came from the gods themselves.

Your poets sing of my blood-lust, but I was always protecting my children.

How wilfully they refuse to concede that a woman could be powerful, strategic, divinely blessed to rule.

Death will silence me no longer.

This is not the story of how I died. But how I lived.