Of all the Library's possible fates, the truth is perhaps the most tragic: It was collateral damage in a civil war. The empire split between Cleopatra and her brother Ptolemy XIII.

Alexandria's history began in 332BC when Alexander the Great, travelling along the coastline from Syria, saw the magnificent harbour and determined it would be the site for a city.

But the ghost of Cleopatra wafts like a mist over contemporary Alexandria. Stothard, while exploring hidden corners of the city, considers all the Cleopatras he’s encountered, from Plutarch’s ...

Some attribute the carnage to none other than Julius Caesar before Cleopatra Re-reading Tom Stoppard’s wonderful play Arcadia last week, I stopped at the bit where one of the characters, the ...

One of the few women who ruled ancient Egypt, Cleopatra VII was destined to be the last of her dynasty. But while she's often thought to be a great beauty who seduced Julius Caesar and Mark Antony ...

Julius Caesar arrived in Alexandria days after Pompey's murder. He barricaded himself in the Ptolemies' palace, the home from which Cleopatra had been exiled.

Goddio told me that last week the visibility in the Alexandrian harbor was about 27 inches. Most of these pieces predate Cleopatra VII but give a stunning sense of her Alexandria.

The Alexandria Stothard renders bears little resemblance to the classical portrait of the great city. There is no Lighthouse, no Great Library, not even a Nile crocodile at the mouth of the river ...