# The Bedroll *A Biography of Cleopatra* — Legendary Biographies No. 193 - **Subject:** Cleopatra VII Philopator - **Written by:** Edward Forrester - **Shelf:** Power & Politics / History - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 201 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 201 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-140-6) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Theo Brackett (ISBN 979-8-90623-239-7) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/193-the-bedroll.html ## About this book August 30 BCE, the royal mausoleum on the eastern harbour of Alexandria. Cleopatra VII Philopator, thirty-nine, the last ruler of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt, dies — by tradition from the bite of an Egyptian cobra she has placed against her chest, by Plutarch's more sceptical reading from a poison smuggled into her chamber in a basket of figs. Octavian, the future Augustus, has taken Alexandria nine days earlier. Mark Antony has died in her arms in the same mausoleum after having stabbed himself with his own sword. The kingdom that her ancestor Ptolemy I Soter had founded in 305 BCE — three centuries less six weeks — ends with her. Edward Forrester's biography opens earlier — in Alexandria, where Cleopatra was born in 70 or 69 BCE, the third child of Ptolemy XII Auletes — and follows the arc through the Mouseion library education and the multi-language facility she alone of her dynasty acquired, the 51 BCE accession with her younger brother-husband Ptolemy XIII, the 48 BCE Pompey killing and the Caesar arrival, the 47 BCE Alexandrian War and the Caesarion birth, the 44 BCE Caesar assassination and the return to Egypt, the 41 BCE Tarsus summit with Antony, the Donations of Alexandria of 34 BCE, the 31 BCE Actium naval defeat, and the August 30 BCE Alexandrian endgame. What emerges is a portrait of the last and most studied of the Ptolemies — and the Schiff-register documentary reconstruction her life has rewarded for two thousand years. ## Contents 1. Alexandria, the Dying Dynasty 2. The Execution of Berenice 3. The Bilingual Queen 4. Co-Rulership with Ptolemy XIII 5. Pompey's Head 6. The Alexandrian War 7. Caesarion 8. Tarsus 9. The Donations of Alexandria 10. The Mouseion and the Alexandrian Legacy 11. Mark Antony 12. The Children of Cleopatra 13. The Wealth of Egypt 14. The Will 15. Actium 16. The Year Between 17. The Two Suicides 18. The Afterlife ## Questions **Who is The Bedroll about?** Cleopatra VII Philopator. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Bedroll — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 2,911 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 60,000 words, 18 chapters, 201 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Edward Forrester is a Princeton-trained historian whose work for The New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement has focused on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — the long arc by which the modern political world was made. His detailed biographies explore how individual leaders and pivotal figures navigated the shifting tides of historical change. His published works include The Opening, The Castro Camera Storefront, The Bedroll, The Burkhan Khaldun, and The Saint Helena Exile. These volumes demonstrate his commitment to archival research and accessible historical storytelling. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey, where he spends his free time restoring antique furniture and hiking.